Collective Sense-Making Through Side-by-Side Coaching: Examining In-the-Moment Discursive Reasoning Opportunities for Teachers and Coaches

• In Event: 21.051 - Mathematics Coaching for Sense-Making: Shifting the Lens to Teachers in the Coaching Relationship

Abstract

Mathematics coaches can engage teachers in a variety of activities to promote their learning (Author, 2017a). However, how these activities function interactionally to support teacher learning is the subject of ongoing investigation (Coburn & Russell, 2008). This paper explores an innovative and effective model of coaching support, side-by-side coaching, which embeds coaching within teaching and seamlessly combines multiple coaching activities (Author, 2018b). We conceptualize teacher learning as pedagogical reasoning, which can be done collaboratively (Author, 2005, 2007) through collective sensemaking. We argue that side-by-side coaching supports teacher learning in part because the teacher and coach jointly make sense of pedagogy, mathematics, and student thinking. We present two types of collective sensemaking in which a teacher and a coach engaged during side-by-side coaching in the classroom and show how they discursively co-constructed sense in each type.
Methods
Three elementary teachers participated in a larger study of side-by-side coaching focused on learning to respond to students during inquiry-based mathematics (Author, 2018b). Data consisted of video recordings of coach-teacher interactions during side-by-side coaching. This analysis examined the data qualitatively to identify emergent types of collective sensemaking (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014). Interactions were classified based on the way the coach-teacher dyad reasoned about information gathered during teaching immediately prior to the interaction.
Findings
Two types of collective sensemaking were found through analysis: pursuing a shared question and testing differing theories.
Pursuing a shared question occurred when the coach and teacher both expressed a question, which neither could satisfactorily answer with the available data. The coach and teacher engaged in a process of (1) building consensus about the question, (2) identifying the necessary data and agreeing on its absence, (3) generating possible instructional next steps (to gather data), and (4) agreeing on which next step to pursue. This often occurred when attempting to interpret student thinking during discourse.

Testing differing theories occurred when the teacher and coach had different interpretations of classroom events and worked together to resolve this interpretive tension. Within side-by-side coaching, the coach and teacher engaged in this process in a visible and distributed way by (1) verbalizing potential interpretations of student thinking, (2) recognizing both interpretations were valid, (3) generating and selecting instructional next steps to test these interpretations, (4) gathering additional data and agreeing on a shared interpretation.
Significance
Cobb and Jackson (2011) found that few studies offer analyses of how coaches can work effectively with individual teachers to promote learning. These findings show that collective sensemaking about pedagogy, mathematics, and student thinking can occur in the moment of teaching and provide a needed example of interactions involved in effective one-on-one coaching. Side-by-side coaching privileged sensemaking in which interpretation is foregrounded and immediate action is necessary, hallmarks of high-depth PD (Author, 2017b). Expert teachers and teacher learners use similar forms of sensemaking individually (Author, 2016a; 2016b). Therefore, side-by-side coaching can allow other teachers an opportunity to engage in this sensemaking collectively, where it is modeled by the coach, visible, and shared.

Authors

• Jen Munson, Northwestern University

• Elizabeth B. Dyer, WestEd