Search results

This article presents a case study of Kelly, a third-grade teacher enrolled in a literacy leadership course within a Master of Reading program. In this course, practicing teachers completed an assignment in which they implemented a literacy coaching cycle with a colleague, video-recorded their interaction, and conducted critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the interaction. The authors explore how engaging in CDA influenced Kelly's enactment of professional identities as she prepared to be a literacy leader.

Data presented in this article are taken from a larger study of four white, middle-class teachers enrolled in the course. Data sources included the students' final paper and semistructured interviews. The researchers used qualitative coding methods to analyze all data sources, identify prominent themes, and select Kelly as a focal participant for further analysis.

Findings indicate that Kelly's confidence as a literacy leader grew after participating in the coaching cycle and conducting CDA. Through CDA, Kelly explored how prominent discourses of teaching and learning, particularly those relating to novice and expert status, influenced Kelly in-the-moment coaching interactions.

Previous literacy coaching research suggests that literacy coaches need professional learning opportunities that support a deep understanding of coaching stances and discursive moves to effectively support teachers. The current study suggests that CDA may be one promising method for engaging literacy coaches in such work because it allows coaches to gain understandings about how discourses of teaching and learning function within coaching interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of the coaching element that was included in an existing graduate literacy course and to describe the responses of experienced and less‐experienced teachers as they began to add collaborative peer coaching to their teaching identities.

Data collected included teachers’ coaching logs and written reflections on the coaching experience, and field notes taken by a professor. Data were analysed qualitatively through open coding. Initially, the authors read data individually and coded them by what they perceived to be the teachers’ coaching moves. Separately, they developed lists of codes and then reviewed coding lists to work through idiosyncratic data, collapse codes, align their language.

The authors identified three overarching and multi‐faceted moves that the coaching teachers made as they worked with partner teachers. They found that the teachers: used restraint; focused on partner teacher's needs; and provided opportunities for classroom observations and demonstrations.

Due to budget cuts, district coaching initiatives are being down‐sized. With fewer literacy coaches available, the authors believe that classroom teachers would benefit from learning about how to support each another as peer coaches.

Teachers’ coaching moves, along with the curricular conversations engendered by them, created a culture of learning based on reflection and dialogue between coaching and partner teachers.

Very few studies have been conducted on peer coaching or have addressed the process by which teachers enrolled in graduate programs learned how to engage in collaborative peer coaching.

Few would argue with the proposition that socially, economically and politically, the United States is in a period of turbulence and uncertainty. We are navigating the rapids, and white water is all around us. In the daily struggle to keep the boat afloat and on course, we have little inclination and less time to look ahead. Perhaps we fear that the future holds more of the same, that our present troubles constitute a new normalcy to which we must inure ourselves. In a remarkable turnaround from traditional American optimism, there is now a pronounced feeling abroad in the land that the present is worse than the past, and that the future will be still worse than the present.