Instructional coaching through dialogic interaction

Language and Education

ISSN: 0950-0782 (Print) 1747-7581 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlae20

Instructional coaching through dialogic interaction: helping a teacher to become agentive in her practice Mari Haneda, Annela Teemant & Brandon Sherman To cite this article: Mari Haneda, Annela Teemant & Brandon Sherman (2016): Instructional coaching through dialogic interaction: helping a teacher to become agentive in her practice, Language and Education To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2016.1230127

Published online: 13 Sep 2016.

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Date: 13 September 2016, At: 17:31

LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2016.1230127

Instructional coaching through dialogic interaction: helping a teacher to become agentive in her practice Mari Hanedaa, Annela Teemantb and Brandon Shermanc a World Languages Education & Applied Linguistics, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA; bIndiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, School of Education, Indianapolis, IN, USA; cWoosong Information College, Health and Welfare, Daejeon, Korea

ABSTRACT

ARTICLE HISTORY

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.

Received 21 August 2016 Accepted 25 August 2016 KEYWORDS

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

Introduction Dialogue plays a critical role in human learning and development (Vygotsky 1978, 1997). Starting from infancy and continuing into adulthood, individuals engage in the life-span process of becoming active, competent participants in one or more communities through ‘socially and culturally organized interactions that conjoin less and more experienced persons in the structuring of knowledge, emotion, and social action’ (Ochs 2000, 230). In the context of K-12 education, a substantive body of research has shown the centrality of talk in students’ learning and the critical role played by the teacher, who is responsible for providing productive opportunities for students to engage in spoken and written discourse around curricular topics (e.g. Alexander 2008a, 2008b; Barnes 1976; Bruner 1985; Cazden 2001; Littleton and Howe 2010; Mercer and Hodgkinson 2008;

CONTACT Mari Haneda

[email protected]

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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Nystrand et al. 1997; Resnick, Asterhan, and Clarke 2015; Wegerif 2010; Wilkinson, Soter, and Murphy 2010). As life-long learners, teachers also need to continue their growth as professionals through inquiries into their own teaching or through systematic forms of professional development (PD). In this paper, we investigate the instructional coaching interactions between a kindergarten teacher and an expert coach using the analytic lens of dialogic teaching and learning, which is a little explored topic of research in dialogic pedagogy and instructional coaching. The interactional data analyzed are taken from a mixed methods study (e.g. Teemant, Leland, and Berghoff 2014) conducted in the context of a PD project, of which a key constituent is longitudinal instructional coaching. Involving elementary school teachers who worked with multilingual, multicultural, and economically disadvantaged students in a Midwestern metropolis of the USA, the PD was designed to support them in enacting critical sociocultural teaching practices that have been found to be of particular benefit to English Learners (ELs). Through the examination of a series of coaching sessions involving one kindergarten teacher, our aim is to show how the coach cultivated a dialogic space in which the teacher was invited to challenge, explore, appropriate, and eventually enact Critical Stance as a pedagogical principle in her teaching.

Relevant literature In this section, we provide the theoretical and practical foundations for the research questions guiding this study, drawing on work on dialogic pedagogy and critical sociocultural perspectives on instructional coaching. Dialogic learning and teaching Over the past few decades, particularly in English-speaking countries, there has been a body of research on dialogic learning and teaching that has examined how classroom discourse is organized in K-12 settings, primarily through the examination of classroom interactional patterns (Howe and Abedin 2013). One of the promising outcomes of this work has been proposals for pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning that situate classroom dialogue at their core (e.g. Alexander 2008a, 2008b; Littleton and Mercer 2013; Nystrand et al. 1997; Tharp et al. 2000; Wells 1999). Notwithstanding the slightly different emphases in these proposals, a broad consensus appears to be developing as to the features that characterize successful dialogic pedagogy. These features include jointly undertaken inquiry, open exchange of ideas, engagement with multiple voices and perspectives, co-construction of knowledge, and respectful classroom relations in a democratic classroom community. In developing their models of dialogic pedagogy, these scholars have been strongly influenced by sociocultural theory, since they recognize that teaching and learning are fundamentally sociocultural in nature. As Vygotsky’s (1978) theory of the social origin of human mental functioning makes clear, it is through social interaction that one becomes socialized into and appropriates one’s culture’s ways of thinking and acting. Teaching and learning through dialogic interaction has been variously conceptualized. For example, Alexander (2008b, 109) points to the importance of considering educational practices in terms of developing a pedagogical repertoire, as opposed to adhering to the

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idea of universally applicable best practices (also see Lefstein and Snell 2014). Viewed from this perspective, no particular interactional pattern or instructional genre is inherently good or bad. Rather, as scholars such as Flecha (2011) and Wells and Arauz (2006) argue, of most importance is the ‘dialogic stance’ that underlies the dialogue and guides the teacher’s orientation toward the students and the ways in which they participate in classroom learning activities. In this context, it is likely to be what students perceive to be the teacher’s intended meaning (i.e. illocutionary force) to which they respond rather than the syntactic form of the utterance itself. It is on the basis of the prevailing dialogic relations in the classroom, developed and nurtured over time, that the meaning of any particular utterance or exchange should/can be understood (Mercer 2005). However, such dialogic relationships are inevitably complicated by ‘asymmetries of power and privilege’ (McLaren 2007, 69) and, as Weiner (2007) suggests, by culture, emotion, politics, context, and psychological orientations as well. Our working definition of ‘dialogue’ is derived from the work of Burbules and Bruce (2001). Following their lead, we consider pedagogical dialogue to be ‘a relation characterized by an ongoing discursive involvement of participants, constituted in a relation of reciprocity and reflexivity’ (1112). In other words, at the core of pedagogical dialogue is the participants’ relationship of mutual involvement, which requires participants to make active efforts to develop shared understandings – inter-subjectivity – by engaging in interpreting, questioning, answering, commenting on, and rethinking an issue or problem of immediate concern. Additionally, such dialogical engagement is characterized by a ‘capacity for reflexivity, including comment on the discursive dynamic itself’ (1113). In order to conceptualize dialogue at the macro-level, we also draw on Burbules’ (1993) two-dimensional typology of dialogue. For this study, Burbules’ typology is useful in distinguishing between the different orientations adopted by both coach and teacher in their ongoing instructional coaching conversations. One dimension involves the desired epistemic end point, either converging toward a single answer or allowing for multiple answers (‘convergent-divergent’). The other dimension involves the participants’ stance towards each other and their basic orientation towards what she or he says (‘inclusive-critical’). This results in four types of dialogue: inquiry (inclusive-convergent), conversation (inclusive-divergent), instruction (critical-convergent), and debate (critical-divergent). Critical sociocultural perspectives on instructional coaching A number of scholars have developed dialogically oriented approaches to teaching that have been shown to be highly effective in increasing academic achievement among marginalized multilingual and multicultural student populations in the USA (e.g. Doherty et al. 2003; Saunders and Goldenberg 1999; Teemant and Hausman 2013). Dialogically oriented approaches to teacher PD are also emerging. For example, instructional coaching is a widely used PD strategy in K-12 settings in the USA, which, according to Knight (2009), is designed to mediate individual teacher development by employing dialogue, reflective inquiry, and collaboration over an extended period of time (American Institute for Research 2005). The K-12 PD project (Teemant, Leland, and Berghoff 2014), from which the current data are taken, adopts one such dialogically oriented approach to both classroom teaching and the longitudinal, one-on-one instructional coaching of teachers. In this approach, six

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key principles of learning underpin what is called the ‘Six Standards for Effective Pedagogy’ (Six Standards).1 Five of the principles, drawn from sociocultural theory (e.g. Tharp et al. 2000; Vygotsky 1978, 1997), emphasize Joint Productive Activity, Language and Literacy Development, Contextualization, Challenging Activities, and Instructional Conversation. These principles constitute the sociocultural theoretical foundation for understanding learning and human development, in which learning is conceptualized as inherently social, teaching as offering appropriate assistance to facilitate students’ learning, and knowledge as co-constructed and culturally formed. To this foundation is added the sixth principle of Critical Stance. It derives from critical pedagogy, which recognizes that learning and teaching in schools occur in socio-politically charged environments laden with attendant social inequities (e.g. Freire 1994; Leistyna 2009; Lewison, Flint, and Van Sluys 2002). While Critical Stance introduces critical thinking, it goes beyond it with the ultimate aim of naming, reflecting upon, and taking action to remedy societal inequities encountered in students’ lives and communities. A distinctive feature of Six Standards pedagogy is its emphasis on small group activity centers – a teacher center and multiple independent student centers. Small group configurations, especially Instructional Conversations, create the necessary conditions for teachers to regularly assess, assist, and advance students’ learning within their zones of proximal development (ZPD) (Vygotsky 1997). Teachers are encouraged to design learning activities that incorporate at least three of the Six Standards. The Six Standards Instructional Coaching model (Teemant and Tyra 2014), like other models, relies on the coach and teacher engaging in a three-stage process: pre-conference, observation, and post-conference. However, the Six Standards instructional coaching is unique in several critical ways. Explicitly juxtaposing critical sociocultural theory (Freire 1994; Vygotsky 1978) with concrete pedagogical practices, this model emphasizes the teachers’ appropriation and enactment of key pedagogical principles of learning (i.e. the Six Standards) in a locally appropriate manner rather than focusing on coaching behaviors and use of time (e.g. Bean et al. 2010; Neuman and Wright 2010) or seeking to ‘direct’ teachers to acquire discrete, context-independent, micro-level teaching strategies (Deussen et al. 2007). The coaching conversations are intended to be collaborative, contextualized, cognitively challenging, and focused on addressing instructional inequities. Furthermore, the enactment of the Six Standards coaching process encourages teachers to take ownership of their own practices. The model is also flexible as it is neither disciplinenor grade-level specific. To this end, the coach engages with the teacher in authentic inquiry around the teacher’s beliefs and practices in light of their experience in and outside the classroom. Research questions While the efficacy of the Six Standards pedagogy and its instructional coaching model has been well established through quantitative analysis (e.g. Teemant and Hausman 2013), what has been largely left unexplored is what it is that transpires in actual coaching interaction that makes this coaching model effective. To this end, this paper explores the coaching interactions between a coach and one kindergarten teacher as they attempted to co-develop their understanding of what is involved in adopting Critical Stance as a teaching practice. We examine how Lisa, the teacher, while initially having considerable


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difficulty in seeing the relevance of this practice for her kindergarteners, eventually appropriated it through her ongoing interactions with her coach and also with her students. The research questions guiding this study are as follows: RQ 1. How did an experienced coach support a kindergarten teacher in developing understanding of Critical Stance as a pedagogical practice over the course of a series of the coaching interactions? RQ 2. In what ways were the coaching interactions dialogic?

Method Teacher, coach, school context, and professional development2 Lisa, a White middle-class female, had had 19 years of experience teaching in primary grades in a large urban school district in the US Midwest. At the time of data collection, Lisa was teaching a kindergarten class with many ‘emergent bilinguals’ (Garcıa and Kleifegen 2010). The school population was 75% Hispanic, 16% African American, together with small numbers of White, Asian, and multiracial students; 95% were on free/reduced lunch. Initial observations at the school revealed that the predominant mode of teaching was that of teacher-directed whole-class instruction, which entailed much teacher talk, few student verbal contributions, and substantial individual seatwork. Lisa reported that, because of the pressure to follow the district’s prescriptive curriculum, teaching had become increasingly routinized for her. The PD in which Lisa participated consisted of a 30-hour summer intensive workshop on critical sociocultural teaching practices (i.e. the Six Standards) and seven cycles of individualized instructional coaching, spread over the following academic year. Each coaching cycle includes a 30-minute preconference, a 45-minute classroom observation, and a 30-minute post conference. The preconference focuses on the teacher’s lesson plan, considering the degree to which the Six Standards will be used to support student learning. During the observation, the coach gathers evidence of student learning and engagement, and of the nature of the occurring interaction patterns. Following the observation, the coach and the teacher hold a post conference to discuss the observed lesson and set goals for the next cycle of coaching. These coaching conversations are conducted individually, allowing the coach to work within the teacher’s ZPD. The coach, Sabrina, also a White middle-class female, was an English–Spanish bilingual primary school teacher in California for nine years. In 2000, Sabrina decided to resign from her teaching position to pursue a doctorate in education. During her doctoral study, she became involved in a PD project, which persuaded her to pursue a career as an instructional coach. Since 2004 she has been an instructional coach for various grantfunded PD projects in multiple locations within the USA and overseas. In recent years, in addition to coaching in-service teachers, she has become a trainer of coaches. Sabrina considers that the role of an instructional coach is to help teachers grow as professionals in a way that respects local school practices, teachers’ experiences, their dispositions, and their willingness to take risks.

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Data sources and analytical procedures The primary data analyzed consisted of seven cycles of video-recorded coaching conversations over one year (6.7 hours in total), the coach’s observational notes, and two audiorecordings of Lisa’s Instructional Conversations (ICs) with her kindergarten students (50 minutes). Other data sources consulted included initial (26 minutes) and exit (28 minutes) interviews with Lisa. Our analyses involved a series of steps: (1) repeated viewing of all the video-recorded coaching sessions; (2) use of Studiocode software to identify segments involving the adoption of Critical Stance as a teaching practice; (3) a close qualitative analysis of the compiled Critical Stance-related video segments and transcripts as well as the transcripts of the two teacher ICs; (4) charting the teacher’s emerging understanding of Critical Stance, and (5) cross-referencing findings with other sources of data. For the second step above, video segments concerned with adopting a Critical Stance were extracted at the level of ‘episode,’ defined as a relatively self-contained stretch of talk (e.g. teacher reporting what happened in a previous lesson; the coach and the teacher negotiating the goal of a coaching session). An episode consists of one or more ‘sequences,’ with sequence defined as all the moves required to fulfill the expectations set up by the initiating move in the ‘nuclear exchange’ around which the sequence is organized. A ‘nuclear exchange’ is defined as ‘the minimal unit of interaction,’ consisting of an initiating move and a responding move with a possible follow-up move. A sequence may also contain one or more ‘dependent exchanges,’ which qualify the nuclear exchange in some manner. A sequence may thus be defined as a nuclear exchange and all the exchanges that are bound to it. This analysis of the constituency relationship between units of spoken discourse was adopted from Wells’s coding scheme (Wells and Arauz 2006). In the third step, taking sequence as the basic unit of analysis, we paid particular attention to the types of dialogue involved (Burbules 1993) and to the ideational aspect of the dialogue. The ideational aspect, which is concerned with ‘developing understanding and learning’ (Lefstein 2010, 175), was selected for analysis because of its close alignment with our research questions. We focused on the key features of the ideational aspect proposed by Lefstein (2010, 177–179) that we considered to be most relevant to the coaching data. These included: (a) Cumulative, defined as interlocutors’ building on each other’s ideas over time (Alexander 2008b); (b) Problematizing, defined as identifying and investigating open questions and points of contention3; and (c) Meaningful, defined as attempting to reach a shared understanding of each other’s ideas. The last two concepts, taken from Gadamer’s (1998) work, highlight engagement in dialogue that starts from differences, as these potentially provide opportunities for creating either new understanding or further inquiry through critical discussion. Our interpretation of the term meaningful involves establishing shared perceptions or inter-subjectivity and co-construction of new meanings. In carrying out the analysis, the third author wrote a detailed analytical memo for each sequence, which involved documentation of what was discussed, the functions selected for each move (Wells and Arauz 2006), the types of dialogue (Burbules 1993) employed, the occurrence of any of the three selected dialogic features described above, and his interpretations of what transpired in each sequence. These memos were discussed with the first author and revised until consensus was reached about the interpretation of each sequence.


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Findings In this study, the nature and implications of Critical Stance posed a genuine question for both the coach and the coached teacher. Critical Stance had been only recently introduced to the PD project, so the coach was also learning about it herself while she engaged in coaching. The official definition of Critical Stance is ‘teaching to transform inequities,’ and it is judged to be enacted when the ‘teacher consciously engages learners in interrogating conventional wisdom and practices, reflecting upon ramifications, and seeking actively to transform inequities within their scope of influence in the classroom and larger community’ (Teemant, Leland, and Berghoff 2014, 140). For any teacher who intends to try to implement it, this construct needs to be unpacked, contextualized, and appropriated. This is a daunting task for both teacher and coach. In this section, through the analysis of relevant instructional coaching interactions, we examine (a) how Sabrina, the coach, supported Lisa in developing understanding of Critical Stance as a pedagogical practice over their instructional coaching interactions and (b) in what ways the coaching interactions were dialogic. As previously explained, dialogicality is analyzed in relation to Burbules’ (1993) dialogue types and the three dialogic features selected for analysis (cumulative, problematizing, and meaningful). We present Lisa’s developmental trajectory in three phases. The first phase shows Lisa’s first engagement with Critical Stance prior to using it in her teaching. The second concerns her first pedagogical enactment of Critical Stance during ICs with her students, which was preceded and followed by a coaching conversation with Sabrina. The third phase, the seventh coaching cycle, demonstrates the progress that Lisa is continuing to make in her enactment of the principle. Phase 1 The first phase starts with the post conference of the third coaching cycle and ends with the post conference of the fifth coaching cycle. Within this phase, Lisa moves from making a first tentative connection to Critical Stance, to voicing her misgivings about its applicability to kindergarten students, and finally to an increasing understanding, evidenced in her consideration of its hypothetical application in her teaching. The coach predominantly uses ‘dialogue as inquiry’ throughout this phase, drawing on ‘meaningful’ and ‘cumulative’ dialogic features. Emerging connection Critical Stance is first presented to Lisa during the post conference of the third of seven coaching cycles. Sabrina first frames it in her own words as an idea that is ‘… just something to think about because it’s a new idea but… how do we empower children or students to see how they can make change in their own realm?’ After introducing it as ‘an interesting idea’, she reads aloud the official definition: ‘Engages learners in interrogating conventional wisdom and practices… and reflecting on other occasions of such practices and actively seeking to transform inequities within their scope of influence within the classroom and larger community.’ The coach’s conversational wording of the principle, which precedes the official text, mediates Lisa’s encounter with it by foregrounding particular elements, such as the empowerment of children to act in their own realm, over other

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elements that concern interrogation of practices and transformation of inequities. By framing Critical Stance as ‘interesting’ and ‘something to think about,’ Sabrina invites Lisa to engage with it in a way that is meaningful to her. Taking up this suggestion, Lisa connects Critical Stance to a facet of the school’s culture that associates particular student behaviors with being bucket fillers (positive) or bucket dippers (negative); based on children’s literature (McCloud 2006), bucket filling and dipping are used in the school as metaphors for understanding the positive or negative effects of one’s actions and words on the well-being of others. Through the metaphors of bucket filling and dipping, Lisa contextualizes Critical Stance in a locally contingent manner. At this point, Sabrina, Lisa, and the official text have all presented articulations of Critical Stance, setting the stage for an understanding to be constructed over the coming sessions. Problematizing In the preconference of the fourth coaching cycle, Sabrina returns to the subject of Critical Stance. This time, she places a document containing the official definition in front of Lisa and asks her to read it. Lisa’s immediate response is to express skepticism. Referring to a required basal reader, she asks, ‘How would you do that in Hide, Clyde?’ (a children’s book about a chameleon named Clyde who has trouble blending into his jungle environment). Without Sabrina’s scaffolding, Lisa has difficulty seeing the principle’s applicability to her classroom reality. Lisa’s reading of the official definition does not seem to help her advance her own understanding of it. In response to Lisa’s doubt about the appropriateness of trying to introduce Critical Stance to her kindergartners, the coach builds on, rather than challenges, her position. In so doing, she subtly moves the conversation back to dialogue as inquiry by suggesting a more focused, achievable goal: ‘I want you to start thinking about Critical Stance in their [students’] scope of influence – what can they control?’ Following this foregrounding, Sabrina then offers ideas about linking Hide, Clyde to environmental issues, emphasizing student agency and scope of influence and providing an example of Critical Stance enacted by one of the ESL teachers in Lisa’s school: Her classroom is being used by some other classes in the afternoon and things were taken apart and not put back, so her kids took a critical stance and said these are the ramifications of their behavior, so they wrote a letter to the 4th grade or 5th grade, I can’t remember, but saying you’re messing up our classroom, here’s why we don’t like it. So they took a stance in how to transform inequities.

Here, the coach connects Critical Stance to the idea of students’ taking a stance on an inequitable situation imposed on them by other students and acting to remedy it. While understanding the point put forward by the coach through this example, Lisa’s frame of reference still remains rooted in environmentalism and what she is doing in her classes: We are doing Earth Science and after this week, we talk about ways that we’re supposed to be helping save the earth and all that, and what harms the earth and what we can do… it (Critical Stance) fits in perfect with that.

Sabrina affirms the validity of Lisa’s idea, but follows up, probing into Lisa’s understanding of Critical Stance (see Appendix 1 for Transcription Conventions):


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Excerpt 1 1

Sabrina

2

Lisa

3

Sabrina

4

Lisa

So, what (.) do you typic – what do you typically talk with them about, in terms of harm the ear: th?, do you ever take a stance on things and have them do something… . where they. Um, (.) as far as make posters and stuff like that I mean we (.) we’ve done that. I’ve got like an ABC of recycling which they illustrate and we get in the hallway and different things but (.) um (.) probably just getting them to see., I mean we have our blue, blue tubs to recycle in our room, but I haven’t made a big deal about it, you know just recycling paper and stuff so we make a bigger deal about that. Okay. So it’s taking what seems like a very abstract idea, down to the kindergarten level, and how do they (.) they can have a lot of power in their own realm (.) but often we’re not giving them because we say well they’re too young, they’re too little , but, they’re a pretty powerful little force. Mm hmm. Oh yeah.

In turn 1, Sabrina asks whether Lisa has created opportunities for her students to take a stance on the issue of protecting the earth. Lisa, in turn 2, explains that she has had her students create an ABC Recycling book and recycle in the classroom, but has not explicitly discussed the issue itself. In turn 3, after affirming what Lisa has said with ‘Okay,’ Sabrina stresses kindergarteners’ agency for strategic action within their lived worlds, if only adults would allow them to be agentive. Here, by using an inclusive ‘we,’ she mitigates the challenge implied by the central message of the utterance. As will be shown, from the preconference in cycle four onward, Lisa’s discussion of Critical Stance tends to be in environmental terms, suggesting that this moment was pivotal in her sense-making process. Hypothetical integration The post conference of the fifth coaching cycle marks a turning point for Lisa. Having previously expressed uncertainty about Critical Stance, she now seems to have found a hypothetical way to incorporate it into her teaching. In discussing a previous lesson, Lisa adds that, ‘The next level would have been, “What can we do to take care of these animals?”’ Lisa then makes a connection to The Lorax, a book with an environmental conservationist message being used by her students in other lessons (The titular Lorax, who speaks for the trees, warns the Once-ler, the builder, of the consequences of cutting down the truffula trees; nevertheless he destroys all of them.) Here, Lisa shows her developing awareness of making an explicit connection between the book’s central message and the students’ immediate lived world – the consequences for animals when their environments are destroyed. While this represents progress regarding Lisa’s thinking about introducing Critical Stance into her teaching, her ideas are still rooted in environmentalism/conservationism. Having expressed this hypothetical integration, Lisa is poised to begin incorporating the principle of Critical Stance into her teaching, acting on her understanding of it at this point. Sabrina also explicitly recognizes the shift that Lisa is making in her teaching from adhering to prescriptive curriculum to introducing materials that she considers more beneficial for her students. She then asks Lisa whether she is aware of the shift herself. Lisa gives an elaborated response, discussing how differently the same groups of kindergarteners engage in Lisa’s science lessons and her colleague’s social studies lessons (a colleague with whom Lisa team teaches): She does social studies and I do science. We’re (Lisa and her students are) doing the Lorax this week … my kids (those who are in Lisa’s science class) are like, all over it (fully engaged),

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shouting out about what’s happening with those trees and what’s happening with those bears, and what’s going to happen. And her class is just sitting there. I’m like, is it just because they’re not understanding or is it because…they haven’t had to think through stuff. Is it the language?

At this point, while appreciating high student engagement, Lisa is hard pressed to articulate what has promoted that engagement. Phase 2 First enactment During the preconference for the sixth cycle, Lisa reveals that she has integrated Critical Stance into her lessons for the first time. During an Instructional Conversation (IC) on the topic of penguins, Lisa had incorporated discussion of endangered penguins and the destruction of their habitats. She jokingly remarks to the coach, ‘You’d be so proud of me (laughs), we’re even talking about endangered penguins.’ The coach confirms Lisa’s assessment of the IC as an enactment of Critical Stance. This is followed by a discussion of how Critical Stance was applied and how it can be applied in the next class, which will entail conducting the penguin IC again with a different group of students. At this point in the discussion, no reference has been made to the official definition, in contrast to its occurrence in coaching cycle four. The environmental frame with which Lisa seems to be operating is a natural fit for the curricular materials. However, there is little discussion of how broader definitions of Critical Stance could relate to the context at hand. Rather, Sabrina focuses on supporting Lisa in her progress. Discussion hinges less on abstract questions about what Critical Stance is, and more on its practical application within lessons. For example, Lisa reports that in the aforementioned IC the children are ‘moving into the fact that there are endangered penguins and why they’re endangered.’ Sabrina focuses on questions of vocabulary and comprehension rather than questions of how endangered penguins relate to Critical Stance. This discussion precedes a recorded IC, in which the same topic is explored with a new group of children. Lisa’s instructional conversation on penguins Sabrina records Lisa’s IC during the observation phase of the sixth coaching cycle, providing the opportunity for them to subsequently examine how Lisa had enacted Critical Stance with her kindergarteners. In this IC, Lisa leads a conversation among six children. The IC is conducted as part of a larger lesson on penguins, drawing from required curricular material. Lisa begins the IC by eliciting the qualities and properties of penguins, reviewing concepts from a previous discussion. After about 10 minutes, Lisa initiates her focus on Critical Stance by introducing the topic of ‘endangered’ penguins as a vocabulary item. She then connects this to penguin habitats, illustrated by photographs. She attempts to establish a causal connection between the destruction of habitats and the endangerment of the penguins. This includes drawing a parallel to The Lorax, with which the children are already familiar. Lisa connects the destruction of habitats, and thus the endangerment of penguins, to human actions such as overfishing and deforestation. Eventually, Lisa invites her students to make suggestions for action: ‘What can we do to help these poor penguins? What can we do?’ The discussion focuses on what actions the students can take at the local level to impact the larger problem of penguin endangerment.


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The solution, proposed by Lisa, is for the students to spread awareness of the problem. The discussion turns to the message that should be spread, amounting to a review of the causal connections between human action, habitat destruction, and penguin endangerment. The students then create posters to spread awareness, each focusing on one of these connections (e.g. don’t put oil in the water, don’t cut down trees). Lisa facilitated this discussion through a combination of open-ended and closed questions, as shown in the following excerpts. In Excerpt 2, Lisa is showing the photographs of oil-coated penguin being washed by rescue workers and the beach cleanup, and the class proceeds to discuss the importance of keeping the beach litter-free and unsoiled: Excerpt 2 1

Lisa

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Student 1 Lisa Student 2 Student 3 Lisa Student 3 Student 4 Lisa Student 4 Student 2 Lisa Student 1 Lisa Student 4 Lisa Multiple students

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Lisa

They’re taking care of the penguins (.) and they’re cleaning them up because there was a spill? And here they’ve taken him and they’ve washed him up and they gave him a little sweater to keep him warm. And here they’re cleaning up the beach, why is it important to keep the beach clear. Because, because Why do we need to keep our beaches clean. Garbage. Garbage. Gar:bage. And why is it good to clean up the garbage. BecauseBecause those penguins. Ok, and what else. Just penguins? That gets hurt by garbage? [No.] [Yes.] What else gets hurt by garbage? If the penguins eat the, they will di::e. Well, if they ate some of the garbage they would die. That’s sad. That’s sad. What if they got trapped in the garbage. Will they die? [Yes] [Yeah] Ye:ah. So we have to keep our beaches clean cuz remember not all penguins live in the cold, some live on the beach, so if they get a hold of some trash on the beach, they could die, right?

After a brief discussion about how to protect baby penguins, the conversation continues: Excerpt 3 19

Lisa

20 21 22

Students Student 1 Lisa

23 24 25

Student 1 Students Lisa

… What happens if we throw trash out all over our playground. Is that good for our animals here in Indiana? No! Bucket dipp:er. Yeah, being a bucket dipper, you’re right. All right, what’s going to happen to our fish if we throw oil in our water. No, but penguin go di:e. Die. OK.

Some questions are posed with the intention of exploring the students’ ideas (turns 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 22), while others (closed questions, turns 16, 18, 19) are used to make or confirm a point efficiently. Given that the children are not always able to fully express their ideas in English, their answers often require extensive scaffolding from Lisa. This support generally comes in the form of either Lisa’s rephrasing and posing the same question (turns 1, 3, 6; turns 9, 12) or closed questions, such as ‘So what should our sign say: Do not cut

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down all the trees?’ In this IC, Lisa’s earlier concerns about the viability of enacting Critical Stance become clearer as the challenges of encouraging active verbal participation among kindergarteners, many of whom are emergent bilinguals. This leads Lisa to draw on dialogue as instruction in conjunction with dialogue as inquiry and dialogue as conversation, which is markedly different from what happens in the teacher-coach conversations.

Follow-up of classroom observation During the post conference following this observation, Lisa and Sabrina discuss the penguin IC and Lisa’s future integration of Critical Stance. The coach frames Lisa’s integration of the principle as successful: ‘You did Critical Stance in a big way this time’ and she adds (in a tone indicating irony) that it was ‘Hard, difficult, over the top. I don’t know how you dared do it.’ Sabrina is reframing the task of incorporating Critical Stance – which Lisa once held to be exceedingly difficult – as surmountable, replicable, and well within Lisa’s abilities. Nevertheless, Lisa still has doubts about its broad applicability. Having discussed her success in incorporating Critical Stance into the penguin IC, Lisa returns to the doubt she expressed earlier: ‘I think it – I mean this story – obviously was easy to come up with something. Now, The Little Engine That Could, Critical Stance… (trails off, tone and gesture suggesting doubt).’ Lisa’s remark suggests that, while her environmental interpretation of Critical Stance enables her to apply it to a unit on penguins, her understanding of the principle is not sufficiently broad to allow her to apply it to a wider range of topics. While Lisa’s problematization is treated as a valid viewpoint, Sabrina nonetheless provides space to jointly explore the underlying reason why the penguin unit has been successful, thereby moving the conversation back to dialogue as inquiry. Sabrina reframes Lisa’s success in the penguin IC as deriving from the children’s authentic connection with the material rather than the content of the material itself. She then discusses Critical Stance in broader terms, using her own words rather than those of the official definition: ‘That’s what is so exciting to me about this. It’s now you’re thinking about it differently. These children have influence. They have scope. They have voice. There is power of their collectivity.’ Despite her successful enactment of Critical Stance within the environmental frame, Lisa recognizes that her understanding will need to continue to evolve in order for her to fully incorporate it into the teaching of academic content. The following excerpt gives a glimpse of the way in which dialogue as inquiry was used in this post conference, allowing Lisa to reflect further on the concept of ‘authentic connection.’ In turn 1, Sabrina thinks aloud about how the students have been extraordinarily engaged in the penguin unit, as compared with the fantasy units that had also ignited their interests, thereby inviting Lisa to speculate about the reason. After a short pause, in turn 2 Lisa comments on how her lesson regarding the oil spill and its negative effects on the environment has engaged her kindergarteners in deep thinking about a chain of consequences, from oil spill, the death of fish, and to no food sources for penguins. In turn 4, Lisa ties it with ‘authentic connection,’ identifying the importance of her kindergarteners’ making a real life link with what they are learning in the class.


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Excerpt 4 1

Sabrina

2

Lisa

3 4

Sabrina Lisa

5

Sabrina

Because it was- it was a very different – (.) there were a lot of facts that they knew, they – There was a lot of opinions. They bought in very differently than fantasy, reality. Not that they don’t al-, they’re always engaged, but this was different. … we had talked about it before but, you know they- we talked about well, what if the oil was in the water, or what if the fish died. Well what if. Well what if. Then they had to come up with the fact that if the fish died, the penguins wouldn’t have anything to eat, and then they, you know, they had to keep thinking a step further. SoSo there was a lot of um (.) consequences and (.) if this happens that will happen. And then we brought it back home. We don’t have penguins here, but what would happen if we put oil in our water here. What would happen. Well what would happen. I just kept asking what would happen. We have birds here. What would happen. So (2) it became personal. Okay. Became personal.

Here, it is clear that, instead of providing an immediate answer, the coach probes and positions the teacher in an agentive role, pushing her to articulate what aspects of the penguin unit might have contributed to her kindergartners’ high engagement. Lisa’s responses show her learning over time (‘cumulative’ – comparison of two lessons), and her gradual uptake of Sabrina’s suggestions point to the merging of both interlocutors’ ideas (‘meaningful’). With her success in engaging her students in exploring the environmental consequences of the oil spill for penguins, Lisa has begun to see the feasibility of enacting Critical Stance even with kindergarteners. Phase 3: coda In the third phase, the coach again utilizes dialogue as inquiry and the two afore-mentioned dialogical features, cumulative and meaningful. This phase is part of the ongoing story of Lisa’s engagement with the principle of Critical Stance. Her development includes instances of both struggle and success, but it does not point to a conclusion. Lisa’s understanding of Critical Stance, mediated both by her coach and her students, will continue to evolve. During her final and seventh coaching session for the school year, Lisa continues to struggle with the challenge of incorporating Critical Stance into lessons that do not have an overt environmental focus. This challenge is also an opportunity, with Sabrina’s dialogically mediated assistance, for Lisa to expand her conceptualization of Critical Stance. The discussion begins in the preconference. The topic of Lisa’s lessons during this coaching cycle was to be transportation. While it would be possible for Lisa to address the topic of transportation in terms of environmental impacts, Sabrina tries to prompt a focus on the human element: What would happen if we didn’t have things to transport us? What would happen if there was no way to get the food from the farmer to our store? So, let’s think of the big idea of transportation. They’ve already got that it moves stuff around. Thinking about why this is important for us.

Lisa follows up on this suggestion and conducts an IC on the topic of transportation, integrating Critical Stance into the discussion with her students. Following the observation, Lisa and Sabrina discuss the IC during their post conference. They observe that the kindergartners were able to make an important connection between the penguin lessons and the topic of transportation that neither of the adults has made:

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Excerpt 5 1 2

Sabrina Lisa

3

Sabrina

But that’s a real connection, isn’t it. It is because they can see that when the penguins lost their habitat, they couldn’t get their food or their habitat was destroyed or whatever. And now, if we didn’t have trucks to bring us (.) the food from the farm or the factory, where it’s canned, you know, we couldn’t have food. We’d have to make our own food. Do we ever think of ourselves as in a habitat. ((…)) I’ve never thought of it that way, the way the kids have made that connection.

In turn 1, Sabrina comments on the connection made by the students, inviting Lisa to elaborate on it, which she does in turn 2. In turn 3, the coach remarks how the connection made by students is extending their thinking. That is, the students are able to draw inferences about their own dependence on infrastructure – transportation – for survival by connecting losing access to transportation to the penguins’ loss of habitat. Thus, by engaging in ongoing and inter-connected dialogue over five coaching cycles (three to seven), Lisa and the coach gradually develop an evolving interpretation of Critical Stance as a teaching practice that can even be successful with kindergarteners.

Discussion In this section, we revisit the findings from the perspective of dialogue and dialogic teaching. In the coaching data analyzed, two of the four types of dialogue proposed by Burbules (1993) – dialogue as inquiry (inclusive-convergent) and dialogue as conversation (inclusive-divergent) – are strategically used on different occasions in the coaching conversations. Throughout, dialogue as inquiry dominates, coupled with the supplementary use of dialogue as conversation for purposes such as building rapport. Even when Lisa questions the appropriateness of trying to introduce Critical Stance to her kindergartners, Sabrina does not resort either to dialogue as instruction or to dialogue as debate. Rather, she accepts Lisa’s assessment as valid, but persists in suggesting alternative pathways through which to engage with Critical Stance, thereby bringing the conversation back to inquiry. Eventually, the teacher-coach pair co-develops a locally contextualized interpretation of this principle. What also becomes apparent in the current analysis is that, while largely prompted by Sabrina, Lisa begins to achieve an understanding of Critical Stance as a teaching practice by retelling and reflecting on recent and past classroom events in interaction with the coach. Over time, Lisa’s verbal contributions to the joint inquiry also indicate increasing insight into her practice. It is worth noting that Lisa’s appropriation of Critical Stance occurs in small steps. Initially, Lisa has difficulty in articulating what has led to her students’ high engagement in, and proactive verbal contributions to, the Lorax unit. However, she indicates her growing understanding when she later recognizes that she might have taken the class discussion further by asking her students to speculate about the consequences of cutting down trees. Next, in the penguin unit that follows, she begins to try out the introduction of Critical Stance in the safe environment of an Instructional Conversation (IC) with a small group of students. In so doing, she learns that her five-year-old emergent bilinguals can not only critically assess the environmental ramifications of an oil spill – an issue beyond the boundary of their own community – but can also take a stance and act on it through concrete


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local actions. Then, in the transportation unit, she recognizes, to her surprise, that her kindergarteners are quite capable of making connections between their previous learning and the consequences for their lives of not having the use of transportation, thereby making a sophisticated inference about a causal chain. There seems to be a parallel between the coaching sessions and Lisa’s changing classroom practices. In the former, Sabrina encourages Lisa to voice her opinions and take ownership of her learning, and in the latter, Lisa shifts her practice from teacher-fronted whole-class instruction to frequent use of student centers in combination with ICs, through which she encourages her students to express their own viewpoints and to take ownership of their learning. In sum, while initially unsure about whether her emergent bilingual kindergarteners could engage in IC, Lisa comes to regard the use of IC and of student centers that have clear learning outcomes in view as an important aspect of her teaching: The language development [that is observed to occur in student centers and ICs] is huge. And the thinking, getting them to think on their own and making them… use their language and relate things to their world is huge… . I never knew how important that was for them to be able to use their language and actually think outside their little selves. (Lisa, exit interview)

What seems to transfer from the coaching sessions to Lisa’s teaching is valuing the emergence of multiple perspectives and allowing for multiple voices to be heard. Nurturing ‘multivoicedness’ (Bakhtin 1981) leads to the creation of new meaning, insight, and understanding through the negotiation of tensions among different voices and perspectives. In this sense, Lisa has made her classroom interaction with her students increasingly dialogic by appropriating what she has experienced during the instructional coaching sessions. However, it is important to note that, in neither the coach-teacher nor the teacher-student relationships do the two participants have the same roles, responsibilities, or goals. In the case of instructional coaching, the coach is responsible for facilitating teacher learning, while the teacher’s goal is improving her classroom practice with the assistance of the coach. In the classroom, the teacher is an organizer and facilitator of students’ learning, whereas the student’s goal is to learn. Thus, the overall aim of both instructional coaching and classroom teaching is that of facilitating learning. Nevertheless, the ways in which this facilitation of learning unfolds in the moment-by-moment coaching interaction can vary considerably according to the coach’s beliefs about the purpose of coaching, which, in turn, influences the particular dialogue types and dialogic features that are chosen. In the present case, through the use of both open-ended questions and statements (e.g. reframing what Lisa said; suggesting alternative ways of thinking), the coach engages Lisa in a joint inquiry, inviting her to elaborate on her ideas. Instead of helping the teacher to acquire discrete skill sets, as it occurs in some other types of instructional coaching, what is emphasized in critical sociocultural instructional coaching is the empowerment of teachers by positioning them as agents who interpret key pedagogical principles and enact them in a locally contingent manner. In the instructional coaching sessions, dialogue as inquiry dominates while dialogue as instruction is occasionally used to facilitate inquiry (e.g. the coach raising a particular issue to the level of the teacher’s meta-awareness). This tendency can also be said of the teacher’s use of dialogue as instruction during ICs. Having experienced many instances of

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dialogue as inquiry in the coaching sessions, Lisa seems to come to adopt a ‘dialogic stance’ (Flecha 2011; Wells and Arauz 2006) in her teaching. In her ICs, she encourages her students to voice their opinions and engage in ‘exploratory talk’ (Barnes 1976). However, she enacts her dialogic stance differently from the coach. While inquiry is her overarching intention, she breaks down the information into smaller chunks (e.g. with the use of yes–no questions) and frequently utilizes dialogue as instruction. The recourse to closed questions, in this case, may be interpreted as necessary linguistic scaffolding for emergent bilingual kindergartners. In teacher-coach interaction, what makes joint exploration and the expression of multiple viewpoints possible is the creation of a safe dialogic space. In this space the teacher is positioned as a social agent and as the ‘primary knower’ (Berry 1981) with respect to her students and her classroom practices; the teacher is also invited to express her views, including doubts and concerns, and to co-develop understanding of what the coach and the teacher consider to be important pedagogical issues. In this same space, the coach models how to engage a conversational partner in ‘exploratory talk’ (Barnes 1976) and how to make authentic connection between the topic under discussion and the teacher’s lived world. This can be seen in our data when the coach draws attention to Lisa’s successes in her teaching of the penguin and transportation units, in which she judges that the students’ ability to make authentic connections between their classroom learning and their social worlds has been enabled by the dialogical space that Lisa has gradually established in her classroom.

Conclusion The findings of the current analysis point to the crucial role that an instructional coach can play in creating a dialogic space in which the teacher feels safe in expressing her views and in struggling with incorporating Critical Stance as a pedagogical principle. In the case examined here, the coach offers her assistance in a contingently responsive manner at a pace with which the teacher feels comfortable and in a manner that is well grounded in her local situation, enabling learning in her ZPD. Assisted by the coach, the teacher also has some success in creating a dialogic space in her classroom in which her kindergartners enthusiastically express their viewpoints when considering environmentally consequential issues. This emergent shift in the teacher’s practice around Critical Stance is observed particularly in her enactment of ICs, in which she positions young students as capable agents who can think and express their own ideas. This paper explored only one particular issue arising in the practice of critical sociocultural instructional coachingand involved only one teacher and one coach. Nonetheless, it effectively exemplifies the interactional skills required in this kind of instructional coaching and points to its potential for empowering teachers to take ownership of their own teaching even in a restricted instructional environment. However, additional research is needed to understand more fully how this model of instructional coaching can mediate teacher learning, particularly by conducting cross-case analyses of a larger number of teachers and coaches. Furthermore, it is critical to investigate possible differences in the ways in which such coaching is appropriated by teachers who have had differing career trajectories, work with different student populations, and teach in different geographical locations.


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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.

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.

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.

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Appendix 1. Transcription conventions . , ? ! underline – quiet (.) (n), e.g. (2) [ ] [ ] wor:d ((comment)) ((…))

falling intonation continuing intonation rising intonation exclamatory intonation emphasis abrupt sound stop quieter than surrounding talk Brief pause pauses timed to second overlap sound stretch transcriber comment Some text omitted for clarification