Finding Agency Through Coaching During Student/Teacher Co-Planning

• In Event: Dispatches From the Field: Five Models of Collaborations for Teacher Agency and Social Justice

Abstract

In academia, student voice traditionally has been neglected (Cook-Sather, 2006; Leat & Reid, 2012; Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2015; Rodriguez & Brown, 2009). This action research aimed to privilege student voice during the creation and reflection of teachers’ co-generated lessons in geometry and macroeconomics. I examined how two White teachers and I, as the White instructional coach, experienced collaboration with students of color during one coaching cycle.

To address the hierarchical structures present in public schools systems in which traditional pedagogies strive to deposit knowledge into students’ brains (Aliakbari & Faraji, 2011; Freire, 1970), the work in this study rested upon the empirical framework of critical pedagogy and the conceptual framework of culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009).

For this study, I used one cycle of action research. First, the students, teachers, and I met prior to the planning phase to participate in two sessions of relationship building. Next, we met to collaborate on a lesson. During this collaboration, I worked with both teachers and each teacher worked with one student to develop a lesson in their respective classes. Afterwards, the students and I observed the teachers teach the lessons they had co-created. Finally, the students, teachers, and I reflected on the co-generated lesson.

Through the use of audio recordings of collaborative sessions and reflections, exit interviews, and artifact collection, this presentation explores the way teachers and myself put the theory of culturally responsive teaching into practice and the challenges that existed when incorporating student voice into lesson planning and reflection. Uncovered in these data were the complexities of vulnerability of all participants, the need for an explicit focus on race and culture, and pedagogical perpetuation of the status quo in education.

Complexities of Vulnerability. All participants in the study demonstrated instances of vulnerability from the coach opening up to her participants, to the teachers opening up to students’ feedback on their lessons, and to students navigating a shift in hierarchical relationships with teachers.

Explicit Focus on Race and Culture. During the study, teachers did not trust the student input offered for their lessons and/or they interpreted students’ behaviors as deficit. Therefore, it became evident that I had not centralized issues of race and culture which may have helped to mitigate some implicit biases and microaggressions. Moving forward in our coaching work, I will take an anti-racist approach which begins with introspective work on identity and privilege and how Whiteness appears in our practice.

Pedagogical Perpetuation of the Status Quo. This study found that students’ pedagogical values inherently disrupted traditional, hegemonic classroom practices such as lecturing and sedentary, teacher-centered classrooms, and instead celebrated instances of freedom and autonomy.

Few studies incorporate the use of student voice in culturally responsive instructional coaching. Therefore, there is an urgency to move towards an anti-racist coaching approach, supported by culturally responsive pedagogies, which allows teachers to examine their Whiteness and critically problematize their practice to acknowledge racism and the ideology of white supremacy in order to be open to student voice in the classroom.

Author

• Jacqueline Stone, Montclair State University