Relationship of Coach-Teacher Planning Sessions to Quality of Mathematics Lessons

• In Event: The Promise and Pitfalls of Mathematics Coaching: New Evidence Regarding Coaching Practices and Their Impact

Abstract

Prior research suggests that teachers’ talk about their practice varies significantly, ranging from talk about surface structures or procedures (such as materials, classroom organization or specific activities) to talk that addresses how students learn, the nature of mathematics, or what constitutes effective instruction (AUTHORS, 2008). Research also suggests that the nature of teacher-coach interactions is related to the quality of their lessons (AUTHORS, 2012). At the same time, mathematics educators have begun to focus on the importance of lesson planning as a vehicle for the improvement of mathematics teaching (Smith et al, 2008; NCTM, 2014). Drawing on these separate threads of research, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the quality of talk in coach-teacher planning sessions and teachers’ capacity to maintain the cognitive demand of the instructional task in the follow-up lesson.

Methods
As part of a larger, IES-funded project, we documented the activities of 32 coaches who participated in a network aimed at building teachers’ capacity to orchestrate high-level tasks in their classrooms. Here, we draw on two data sources: (1) approximately 400 transcripts of coach-teacher planning sessions (5 per coach as coaches worked with 90 different partner teachers over two years); and (2) 400 videoes of the subsequent lesson. Transcripts were coded along a number of dimensions that were then integrated into a composite construct that reflected the extent to which teachers and coaches were having deep and specific conversations about mathematics content, pedagogy and student thinking. Seasoned coders of mathematical tasks coded the cognitive demand level of the videos at each of three phases (materials, set up and enactment). We then created a maintenance of cognitive demand score from the task-as-written to task-as-setup (subscore from 1 to 4) and from task-as-setup to task-as-enacted (subscore from 1 to 4), and then summed them creating a scale from 2 to 8 (see AUTHORS, 2010).

Our analysis of transcripts from years 1 and 2 planning sessions suggests that coaches improved their enactment of deep and specific conversations over time (ES=.65) and that teachers exhibited significant growth in their maintenance of cognitive demand over a two-year time span (ES=.73). Notably, this effect size estimate is conservative considering the fact that some partner teachers were at a ceiling on our measure for their initial observation. Finally, these gains in teaching were found to be related to the rigor of the coach-teacher planning discussions. Specifically, growth in maintenance of cognitive demand for teachers with planning discussion rigor scores at the 75th percentile was much greater than for teachers whose planning discussion rigor scores were at the 25th percentile.

Significance
This study contributes much-needed specificity to research on how one-on-one coaching helps to improve the teaching of mathematics. We believe that our findings on depth and specificity are also relevant in other coaching events such as the post-observation conferences and even group settings, such as professional learning community meetings.

Authors

• Mary Kay Stein, University of Pittsburgh

• Jennifer L. Russell, University of Pittsburgh

• Richard James Correnti, University of Pittsburgh

• Victoria Bill