Lynsey K. Gibbons

Focusing on Teacher Learning Opportunities to Identify Potentially Productive Coaching Activities

Instructional improvement initiatives in many districts include instructional coaching as a primary form of job-embedded support for teachers. However, the coaching literature provides little guidance about what activities coaches should engage in with teachers to improve instruction. When researchers do propose activities, they rarely justify why those activities might support teacher learning. Drawing on the preservice and inservice teacher education literatures, we present a conceptual analysis of learning activities that have the potential to support mathematics and science teachers to improve practice. We argue that our analysis can inform research on mathematics and science coaching, coaching policies, and the design of professional learning for coaches.

Investigating How to Support Principals as Instructional Leaders in Mathematics

We present a framework for considering principals’ knowledge and actions to support high-quality instruction in a specific content area (mathematics). Using design research, we engaged principals in professional development and assessed principals’ ability to identify aspects of high-quality mathematical tasks and instruction through pre–post task sort analyses and classroom video analyses. Significant differences occurred in principals’ identification of high-quality mathematics tasks and instruction, students’ thinking, and teachers’ actions. Subsequent data identified changes in principals’ feedback to mathematics teachers; however, this change was not sustained in following years. We hypothesize necessary conditions for supporting principals as instructional leaders in specific content areas.

Content-Focused Coaching: Five Key Practices.

Many districts are using content-focused coaching as a strategy to provide job-embedded support to teachers. However, the current coaching literature provides little guidance on what coaches need to know and be able to do to engage teachers in activities that will support their development of ambitious instructional practices. Furthermore, little is known about how and why effective coaches choose to design particular types of activities with certain teachers. In this article, we report an exploratory case study that examined a mathematics coach who consistently engaged teachers in coaching activities that had the potential to support their development when she worked with them one-on-one in their classrooms. In presenting an analysis of the coach’s design of coaching activities, we describe five aspects of her planning practice and delineate the knowledge implicated in those practices. The findings clarify goals for coaches’ professional learning, and therefore have implications for school and district coaching policies.

Coaching through Focusing on Student Thinking

Why is it so crucial that coaches and teachers concentrate their interactions on students’ mathematical reasoning?