Pedagogical Dilemmas in Content-Focused Coaching Conversations

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 9:00 am
  In Roundtable Session: Coaching, Teacher Knowledge, and Pedagogy in Mathematics Education (Table 10)

Abstract

We explored the pedagogical dilemmas of content-focused coaches, who face the dual obligations of eliciting and advancing teacher thinking while simultaneously producing tangible outcomes that reflect learning and instrumental obligations. We studied ten planning conversations and looked for phases within the conversations that were predominantly instrumental or learning focused. We found three patterns: in one pattern the conversations were primarily instrumental; in a second pattern, the conversations had an instrumental phase, a learning phase, and then an instrumental phase; in a third pattern, the conversations blended both learning and instrumental goals. The coaches uniformly upheld their obligations of creating usable lesson artifacts and most managed to find opportunities to push teachers to explain connections or to explain key connections themselves.

Authors

• Jeffrey M. Choppin, University of Rochester

• Julie M. Amador, University of Idaho

• Cynthia D. Carson, University of Rochester

• Ryan Gillespie, University of Idaho