Hala Ghousseini

Keeping It Complex: Using Rehearsals to Support Novice Teacher Learning of Ambitious Teaching

We analyze a particular pedagogy for learning to interact productively with students and subject matter, which we call “rehearsal.” Our goal is to specify a way in which teacher educators (TEs) and novice teachers (NTs) can interact around teaching that is both embedded in practice and amenable to analysis. We address two main research questions: (a) What do TEs and NTs do together during the kind of rehearsals we have developed to prepare novices for the complex, interactive work of teaching? and (b) Where, in what they do, are there opportunities for NTs to learn to enact the principles, practices, and knowledge entailed in ambitious teaching? We detail what happens in rehearsals using quantitative and qualitative methods. We begin with the results of our quantitative analyses to characterize how typical rehearsals were structured and what was worked on. We then show how NTs and TEs worked together to enable novices to study principled practice through qualitative analyses of a particularly salient aspect of ambitious teaching, namely, eliciting and responding to students’ performance.

Using Designed Instructional Activities to Enable Novices to Manage Ambitious Mathematics Teaching

If teacher education is to prepare novices to engage successfully in the complex work of ambitious instruction, it must somehow prepare them to teach within the continuity of the challenging moment-by-moment interactions with students and content over time. With Leinhardt, we would argue that teaching novices to do routines that structure teacher–student–content relationships over time to accomplish ambitious goals could both maintain and reduce the complexity of what they need to learn to do to carry out this work successfully. These routines would embody the regular “participation structures” that specify what teachers and students do with one another and with the mathematical content. But teaching routines are not practiced by ambitious teachers in a vacuum and they cannot be learned by novices in a vacuum. In Lampert’s classroom, the use of exchange routines occurred inside of instructional activities with particular mathematical learning goals like successive approximation of the quotient in a long division problem, charting and graphing functions, and drawing arrays to represent multi-digit multiplications. To imagine how instructional activities using exchange routines could be designed as tools for mathematics teacher education, we have drawn on two models from outside of mathematics education. One is a teacher education program for language teachers in Rome and the other is a program that prepares elementary school teachers at the University of Chicago. Both programs use instructional activities built around routines as the focus of a practice-oriented approach to teacher preparation.

Surgical coaching for individual performance improvement.

T he technical skill of individual surgeons is an important determinant of surgical outcomes, at least for bariatric surgery. In a recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine, Birkmeyer and colleagues1 provide evidence that there is wide variation in technical skill among practicing surgeons and that this variation correlates with outcome. The authors conclude that new approaches to improving individual performance are needed and one-on-one coaching has potential to fill this role. The concept of coaching for performance improvement has been recently described in a variety of health care settings, but it is not well developed and experience is limited.2,3 Surgical coaching has the potential to address limitations in our current approach to continuing medical education, which does not incorporate the critical concepts of adult learning theory. Adults learn best as active participants in learning that builds on individual needs, is tailored to past experiences, and has direct applicability to their daily activities.4 Adult learners should participate in the identification of their own goals and have the opportunity to practice what is learned through self-reflection coupled with constructive feedback. The importance of self-reflection is emphasized by K. Anders Ericsson, who advocates for deliberate practice. Ericsson examines this concept for physicians, suggesting that most clinical practice does not include the critical aspects of deliberate practice, namely, the identification of areas for improvement by reflection on performance, followed by intentional adjustments in approach and evaluation of the resultant impact.5 This deficiency leads many practitioners to plateau in a state of proficiency. In contrast, professionals in other disciplines use coaches to facilitate deliberate practice and continued performance improvement, even among the most elite experts. To further develop the concept of surgical coaching, we examined features of coaching in other disciplines through literature review and observation and interviews of prominent coaches. In what follows, we outline main themes and provide a conceptual framework to synthesize the critical elements.

Getting Inside Rehearsals Insights From Teacher Educators to Support Work on Complex Practice

In recent years, work in practice-based teacher education has focused on identifying and elaborating how teacher educators (TEs) use pedagogies of enactment to learn in and from practice. However, research on these pedagogies is still in its early development. Building on prior analyses, this article elaborates a particular pedagogy of enactment, rehearsal, developed through a collaboration of elementary mathematics TEs across three institutions. Rehearsals are embedded within learning cycles that provide repeated opportunities for novice teachers (NTs) to investigate, reflect on, and enact teaching through coached feedback. This article shares a set of insights gained from 5 years of developing, studying, and learning how to support NTs’ enactment in rehearsal. The insights we share in this article contribute to building a knowledge base for pedagogies of teacher education.

Strategies for Building Peer Surgical Coaching Relationships

Importance Peer surgical coaching is a promising approach for continuing professional development. However, scant guidance is available for surgeons seeking to develop peer-coaching skills. Executive coaching research suggests that effective coaches first establish a positive relationship with their coachees by aligning role and process expectations, establishing rapport, and cultivating mutual trust. Objective To identify the strategies used by peer surgical coaches to develop effective peer-coaching relationships with their coachees. Design, Setting, and Participants Drawing on executive coaching literature, a 3-part framework was developed to examine the strategies peer surgical coaches (n = 8) used to initially cultivate a relationship with their coachees (n = 11). Eleven introductory 1-hour meetings between coaching pairs participating in a statewide surgical coaching program were audiorecorded, transcribed, and coded on the basis of 3 relationship-building components. Once coded, thematic analysis was used to organize coded strategies into thematic categories and subcategories. Data were collected from October 10, 2014, to March 20, 2015. Data analysis took place from May 26, 2015, to July 20, 2016. Main Outcomes and Measures Strategies and potentially counterproductive activities for building peer-coaching relationships in the surgical context to inform the future training of surgical coaches. Results Coaches used concrete strategies to align role and process expectations about the coaching process, to establish rapport, and to cultivate mutual trust with their coachees during introductory meetings. Potential coaching pitfalls are identified that could interfere with each of the 3 relationship-building components. Conclusions and Relevance Peer-nominated surgical coaches were provided with training on abstract concepts that underlie effective coaching practices in other fields. By identifying the strategies used by peer surgical coaches to operationalize these concepts, empirically based strategies to inform other surgical coaching programs are provided.

Core Practices and Problems of Practice in Learning to Lead Classroom Discussions

Given the current interest in organizing teacher education around core instructional practices that help preservice teachers enact ambitious aspects of teaching like leading classroom discussions, this article investigates an example from the experience of a preservice teacher as she works on orienting students to each other’s ideas. Resulting problems of practice are examined, along with the factors that contribute to their emergence in real time. The study also brings attention to the complexity of this work and the ways in which novice teachers’ knowledge, development as learners, and available resources in the contexts of their work contribute to how they approach and manage these problems.

Investigating the Potential of Guided Practice with an Enactment Tool for Supporting Adaptive Performance.

Recently, attention has focused on identifying core instructional practices that could leverage novice teachers’ development of professional knowledge and skill. To help novices learn to implement these practices, there is also increasing interest in developing enactment tools that could translate abstract conceptual tasks into more concrete steps. Less attention, however, has been paid to understanding how novices might learn to use these tools adaptively in the context of practice. We address this issue by integrating a set of theoretical considerations that together serve as a model for investigating how novices could learn within a community of practice to use a specified elicitation sequence adaptively, guided by more experienced members in that community. In our results, we provide thematic categories for the problems that arose as novices used the sequence of questions and demonstrate how these problems afforded the teacher educator opportunities to connect novices’ work to a set of professional commitments that could guide their adaptive practice. In particular, we highlight how these opportunities arose in the midst of modifying the question sequence and investigating the consequences of its enactment. Although our analysis focuses on a particular question sequence, we see our results as relevant to the development of other forms of enactment tools for use in adaptive practice across a range of professional domains.