- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 1950329
- First Name Kathy
- Last Name Sun
- Registration Faculty/Administrator/Other
- Discipline Mathematics
- Role Co-PI
- Presenters
Kathy Sun
Need
There is often a disconnect between what pre-service teachers (PSTs) are learning in their university teacher preparation programs and what they are experiencing and witnessing at their placement sites in their mentor teacher’s classrooms (e.g., Biggers et al., 2019; Morrison & Marshall, 2003; Weasmer & Wood, 2003 ). In many cases, while university teacher preparation programs emphasize the importance of implementing equity-based mathematics teaching strategies (e.g., providing all students access to rigorous mathematics, building upon students’ funds of knowledge and leveraging students’ and families out of school experiences; Anhalt et al., 2018; Gonzalez et al., 2009), many of these strategies may not be adopted in PSTs’ placement sites. The purpose of our work is to bring greater alignment between university teacher preparation programs and the field placement experiences of student teachers. Given the potential of triads consisting of university faculty, student teachers (Noyce Fellows), and mentor teachers to support professional learning (Lloyd et al., 2020), in this poster we will present on our work designing coaching triads as a means to build greater alignment between teacher preparation programs and the field placement sites.
Research Questions
The study examines in-the-moment coaching triads consisting of a pre-service Noyce Fellow student teacher, their university coach, and their mentor teacher. This study seeks to understand the interactions that take place during the in-the-moment coaching triads and how such interactions develop alignment between the triad participants. More specifically, the research questions that guide this study are: (1) What are the types of coaching interactions that occur during the triad in-the-moment coaching sessions? (2) What are the focuses of coaching interactions? (3) How do in-the-moment coaching triads build alignment between teacher preparation programs and field placements?
Approach
To address our research questions, we examined our in-the-moment approach to instructional coaching – an approach that is modeled after Lampert and colleagues’ (2013, 2010) rehearsal work supporting pre-service teachers’ enactment of ambitious mathematics instruction. In this model, the instructional coach (in our case the university faculty member) works alongside the teacher and, as the name implies, provides coaching as teaching is happening. The university coach, student teacher (in our case the Noyce Fellows), and/or mentor teacher might pause the lesson to confer about student thinking and decide on a course of action, such as asking a question based on something a student said or did. More specifically, our coaching model begins with two coaching sessions where the mentor teacher receives the coaching while facilitating a Number Talk (Humphreys & Parker, 2015), which is a bounded activity that we believe captures many equitable teaching strategies such as building on and honoring student thinking. For the remaining six coaching sessions, the student teacher is being coached.Using qualitative analysis of transcripts of coaching sessions, we first identified coaching episodes in which there was interaction between at least two of the three triad participants. We then used emergent and a priori codes to code coaching interactions (e.g., conferring (Munson, 2018), time out (Gibbons et al., 2017), interjection) and focus of coaching session (e.g., eliciting student thinking, classroom management). To understand alignment between triad participants, we examined the nature of the coaching episodes, including understanding who initiated the coaching episode and the content of what was discussed during the episode.
Outcomes
We will share three key findings related to each of the research questions. First, we identified two key interactions that occurred during our coaching sessions: conferring, when the university coach confers with the mentor teacher and/or the student teacher and interjection, when the university coach or mentor teacher interjects while the student teacher is instructing. Second, findings revealed a range of focal areas of coaching interactions such as classroom management, eliciting student thinking, deciding next problem. Lastly, findings also highlight instances of conferring when the mentor teacher and university coach are discussing the student teacher’s instruction, and facilitate discussion around how these dyad moments of conferring build greater alignment between university preparation programs and mentor teachers. Findings also revealed that over time mentor teachers began to interject more, and over time their interjections became more aligned with when the university coach would have also interjected.
Broader Impacts
The study has implications for university mathematics teacher educators and instructional coaches, as this work informs our understanding of approaches to coaching that can build better alignment between teacher preparation programs and field placements. This study also provides a framework for in-the-moment coaching that can be modified and adapted by other institutions or professional development programs to support alignment. Furthermore, while our current work focuses on university teacher preparation programs, the structures and interactions of our in the moment coaching model can extend to professional development (PD) programs that are seeking alignment between PD strategies and actual classroom instruction. Lastly, our findings suggest that in-the-moment coaching triads supported mentor teacher leadership development.
