Connecting Theory and Practice Through Coaching Cycles: In-Service Professional Development for Teachers of English Language Learners

• In Event: 29.053 - CANCELLED: Preparing Linguistically Responsive Teachers Across the Professional Continuum

Abstract

Purpose
This paper focuses on how to provide sustained, relevant in-service learning experiences for mainstream teachers of ELLs by 1) describing the “collaborative coaching cycle,” an innovative professional development model situated in teaching practice, and 2) investigating its influence on teachers’ learning and teaching practices.

Perspectives
The collaborative coaching cycle model of professional development for inservice disciplinary teachers of ELLs focuses on the central learning tasks of the in-service phase of teaching—deepening content/pedagogical knowledge, refining teaching practices, and developing the ability to self-sustain learning (Feiman-Nemser, 2001)—while integrating essential understandings from sociocultural perspectives on second language acquisition (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Walqui & van Lier, 2010) with a situated perspective of teacher learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Lave & Wenger, 1991). The cycles, which are loosely based on the “lesson study” format (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999), provide recursive, scaffolded, social opportunities to deliberately connect theory to the daily activities of teaching (Darling-Hammond, et al., 2009) as groups of discipline-specific teachers collaboratively plan, enact, and modify lessons.

Methods and Data Sources
Participants included three veteran middle school mathematics teachers in a large northeastern school district. The study was designed as a qualitative (Merriam, 2009), nested case study (Yin, 2014), with one case focusing on the learning processes of the teacher collective (e.g., the three mathematics teachers) and the second examining the influence of the collective learning on the individual teaching practices of one participant. This design allows the investigation of learning processes from a sociocultural perspective, which holds that learning is a process of social meaning-making, followed by individual transformation (Vygotsky, 1978). Data sources for case one included collaboratively constructed lesson plans, teacher reflections from the coaching cycle, and a coaching record written by the professional developer. Data sources from case two encompassed five observations of teaching, artifacts of teaching practice, and two semi-structured interviews.

Results
Although analysis is ongoing, initial findings from the first case demonstrate that the cycles allowed teachers to collectively contextualize previously-learned concepts to actual classroom tasks, such as creating a “think-pair-share” prompt that would generate student talk, which deepened their understanding. Within the second case, a connection between practice and change emerged—once the teacher successfully enacted linguistically responsive teaching methods in her classroom and observed the development of her students, she reported a change in her beliefs. Further, as she became more committed to a sociocultural perspective of teaching ELLs, she began to take a leadership role in her school setting.

Scholarly Significance
Despite the dramatically increasing number of ELLs in mainstream classrooms, teachers receive little or no professional development to teach these students (de Jong & Harper, 2009; Gandára, Maxwell-Jolly, & Driscoll, 2005), and the experiences they do receive typically approximate the normative “workshop” model that does not account for how teachers learn (Borko, 2004) or connect productively to their day-to-day work (Lieberman & Mace, 2008). This paper speaks to these gaps, as well as provides research to inform professional development efforts to develop linguistically responsive skills and dispositions (Villegas & Lucas, 2011).

Authors

• Kathryn Jill Strom, California State University - East Bay

• Aida Walqui, WestEd

• Leslie Hamburger, WestEd