Typology of Suggestions Found in Content-Focused Coaching

• In Event: Understanding the Complexities of Mathematics Coaching: What Multiple Theoretical and Analytical Frameworks Reveal

Abstract

Coaching has emerged as an important means to support teachers (West & Staub, 2003); however, the research literature is still coming to grips with the intricacies of coaching. Coaching entails dialogic interactions that include instances when the coach makes a bid to influence the design and enactment of the lesson. These bids, which we characterize as suggestions, may pertain to every aspect of a lesson, including – in content-focused coaching – the goals of the lesson, the activities of the lesson, and how teachers’ instructional practices advance the goals of the lesson. Exploring the range of suggestions is important to understanding the intricacies of content-focused coaching. To that end, we propose to report on a typology developed from an empirical analysis of coaches’ suggestions. Our research questions were: (1) What are the types of suggestions provided by coaches?; and (2) How can those suggestions be categorized into a typology with clear and meaningful dimensions?

We analyzed 23 coaching cycles across nine coach-teacher dyads (four coaches and nine teachers). The 23 coaching cycles took place within a larger, fully online, professional development project created for middle school mathematics teachers working in rural areas (Author, 2019; Author, 2015; Author, 2020). The intent of each coaching cycle was for the coach and teacher to co-create a lesson with well-defined goals and high-quality tasks that elicited rich forms of student thinking. We first identified suggestions in the planning transcripts in a larger analytic process. Through an iterative process, the project team came to consensus on low-inference paraphrases for each of the 793 suggestions. Each low-inference paraphrase identified the action suggested by the coach while attending to as much of the context of the suggestion as was reasonable.

To develop the typology, we inductively identified patterns in the suggestions; we then matched those patterns to concepts essential to the project design. This allowed us to develop a set of categories – or types – of suggestions that had validity with respect to the data and to the literature on which we based the project design. We identified three overarching types of suggestions: (a) designing lesson activities (b) eliciting and pressing student thinking, and (c) making student thinking public. Each of these broad types in turn had five to 10 sub-types. For example, four sub-types (of 10) in the designing lesson type included: emphasizing a resource, enhancing task accessibility, narrowing task requirements, and organizing participation structure.

The typology articulates a comprehensive range of suggestions and thus offers insights into the intricacies of coaching; additionally, it can serve as a resource for others interested in studying coaching interactions. The results provide insights into emphasis across types of suggestions (e.g., the primary type of suggestions for most coaches fell in the designing lesson activities type) and between coaches (coaches differed by distribution of suggestions across types). This study contributes to the emerging body of research literature on coaching by focusing on a specific aspect of coaching in ways that provide insights into broader coaching dynamics.

Authors

• Julie M. Amador, University of Idaho
  Presenting Author

• Jeffrey M. Choppin, University of Rochester
  Non-Presenting Author