Instructional coaching through dialogic interaction: helping a teacher to become agentive in her practice

ABSTRACT

We investigate the instructional coaching interactions between a kindergarten teacher and an experienced coach using the analytic lens of dialogic teaching. The data were collected in the context of a US professional development project that supports urban elementary school teachers in enacting critical sociocultural teaching practices. We illustrate how the coach assisted one teacher in developing an understanding of ‘Critical Stance’ as a pedagogical principle in her kindergarten class that included many English Learners. Analysis of the coaching sessions shows that, to this end, the coach predominantly used ‘dialogue as inquiry,’ establishing a non-hierarchical relationship within which she and the teacher were able to co-construct a practical understanding of Critical Stance as a teaching practice. We argue that it is through the strategic use of dialogue as inquiry that the coach cultivated a dialogic space in which the teacher was invited to challenge, explore, appropriate, and eventually enact Critical Stance in her teaching. The analysis further indicates that the experience of dialogic interaction in the coaching sessions led the teacher to appropriate a ‘dialogic stance’ and space in her classroom with her kindergartners.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogic teaching
• instructional coaching
• teacher development
• English Learners
• critical sociocultural theory

Acknowledgement

We should like to thank two reviewers and Serena Tyra for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Six Standards’ originates from and extends the work of the Center for Research for Education, Diversity, and Equity (CREDE)'s Standards for Effective Pedagogy. The original CREDE model is built around five sociocultural standards (i.e. principles) of learning, to which Six Standards adds a critical pedagogical principle called Critical Stance.

2. Pseudonyms are used for the teacher and the coach.

3. This is our terminology in lieu of Lefstein's critical, in order to avoid confusion that the term ‘critical’ might create because of our analytical focus being on interactions centering on Critical Stance.

Additional information

Funding

The research, from which the data were taken for the current paper, was supported by the US Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition. National Professional Development [grant number T195N070233]. The reported analysis and the writing of this paper were supported by the College of Education Research Initiation Grant from Pennsylvania State University.