Coaching for Historical Inquiry

• In Event: Innovations in Coaching and Mentoring: Investigating the Practices of Instructional Coaches and Teacher Mentors

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives

Instructional coaching holds great potential as a lever for instructional change (Kraft et al. 2018). Yet, history/social studies teachers rarely receive subject-specific instructional coaching (Crocco & Livingston, 2017). We examine data from a design-based implementation study in which a district’s lead history teachers co-designed and piloted an innovative coaching program where they served as coaches for their colleagues. We ask which coaching practices appeared instrumental in supporting instructional change related to document-based historical inquiry.

Inquiry instruction places considerable demands on teachers. Teachers must have deep familiarity with the subject matter, facility with organizing classroom discourse, and attention to the knowledge students bring to the endeavor (Cohen, 2011; Cuban, 2016). Research on inquiry instruction in math classrooms indicates that these three domains are interrelated: when teachers attend to students’ incoming knowledge by framing tasks that open the subject matter to investigation, students have higher quality concluding discussions (Jackson, et al, 2013).

Data and Methods

Participating teachers (N=13) were paired with coaches (N=7) for a year-long coaching program consisting of 3 coaching cycles. Each cycle targeted a core practice of document-based history instruction (establishing background knowledge, supporting historical reading, and facilitating historical discussions) and consisted of a teacher-coach planning session, 2 teacher-recorded videos of the practice, and coach feedback. Teachers also recorded baseline and final videos of their enactment of a full document-based history lesson.

We first scored baseline and final videos using the Science Discourse Instrument (SDI), which captures teacher facilitation moves and student discourse that maps onto document-based argumentation in history classrooms (Fishman et al., 2017; Osborne et al., 2019). We conducted paired t-tests to assess teacher growth on SDI’s 6 dimensions and found that, overall, classroom discourse improved significantly on 4 of 6 dimensions: ASK, PRESS, LINK, and EXPLAIN. We then identified 2 teachers who grew the most across domains (HI), and 2 who grew the least (LO) and engaged in qualitative analysis of the coaching they received across cycles.

Findings

Preliminary analysis suggested three influential methods that HI coaches used to help teachers anticipate instruction. HI coaches were more likely than LO coaches to contextualize teacher moves within discussions of content, building subject matter and pedagogical knowledge simultaneously. They were also more likely to emphasize withholding information from students in the earlier segments of the lesson, to increase the likelihood that they emerge in the final discussion. Third, in planning conversations, HI coaches consistently took on the role of imagined students to gauge whether instruction would sufficiently motivate inquiry.

Significance

This study takes a crucial first step in articulating the subject matter and pedagogical knowledge required to support ambitious instruction in history/social studies. The findings largely did not map onto the distinction between directive and responsive coaching that dominates the coaching literature (Costa & Garmston, 1994; Veenman & Denessen, 2001), and suggests that the interrelation of inquiry, content, and pedagogy may demand a unique set of coaching tools.

Authors

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

• Lightning Jay, Binghamton University - SUNY