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Instructional coaching: disrupting traditional math practices through inquiry and action research

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Instructional coaching: disrupting traditional math practices through inquiry and action research

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Instructional Coaching: Disrupting Traditional Math Practice Through Inquiry and
Action Research
by
Akonam Okoye

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
A dissertation submitted to the faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Education

May 2022

© Copyright by Akonam Okoye 2022
All Rights Reserved

The Committee for Akonam Okoye certifies the approval of this Dissertation

Elham Kazemi
Artineh Samkian
Julie Slayton, Committee Chair

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
2022

iv
Abstract
This study examines my enactment as an instructional math coach at College Prep High School.
To provide a holistic examination of my coaching practice, I deconstruct my coaching enactment
in relation to teachers and school leaders. My investigation asks: How do I engage teachers using
anti-racist pedagogy as a stance so that they will critically reflect on their practice and explore
and experiment in the facilitation of math tasks using CRP? How do I engage school leadership
to encourage inquiry as a stance in teacher practice? I collected observations in the form of
recorded discussion, reflections, and documented generated in my role as coach. As a result, I
found that I was able to assist teachers in establishing a reflective process to investigate their
practice and engage in leadership acts with school leaders to prioritize teacher inquiry in my
coaching actions.

v
Dedication
First and foremost, thank you God, for with you all things are possible.

To Mommy, Daddy, Diane, Odafe, Emerald, CJ, Gabe and Jacob. Thank you for being the pillars
I leaned on for love, support, and encouragement as I during the time it took me to write this
dissertation.

To the teachers and school leaders of College Prep High School. Thank you for being a part of
my study and investigating your practice with me. This study also gave me an opportunity to
experiment and learn more about my practice as an instructional coach, and for that I am very
grateful.

vi
Acknowledgements
To my committee: Dr. Julie Slayton, Dr. Artineh Samkian, and Dr. Elham Kazemi.
Thank you for all the ways you have helped me to see, confront, unlearn, and re-learn throughout
this process. I appreciate all the insights and readings you shared with me to push me in my
thinking and develop my intellectual capacity as a teacher educator.

vii
Table of Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... iv
Dedication ........................................................................................................................................ v
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ vi
List of Tables ............................................................................................................................... viii
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. ix
High School Math Moment ................................................................................................. 2
College Math Moment ......................................................................................................... 4
Secondary Math Teacher Moment ...................................................................................... 5
The Opportunity Gap ........................................................................................................... 8
Context .............................................................................................................................. 11
Conceptual Framework ..................................................................................................... 21
Research Methods ............................................................................................................. 36
Participants and Setting ..................................................................................................... 36
Actions ............................................................................................................................... 40
Data Collection .................................................................................................................. 46
Limitations ......................................................................................................................... 53
Delimitations ..................................................................................................................... 55
Credibility and Trustworthiness ........................................................................................ 55
Ethics ................................................................................................................................. 56
Findings ............................................................................................................................. 58
Afterword ........................................................................................................................ 102
References ................................................................................................................................... 106
Appendix A: Coaching Framework for Inquiry .......................................................................... 111
Phase 1: Creating Conditions for Inquiry (Coach–School Leader) ................................. 113

viii
Phase 2: Establishing a Critical Reflective Process (Coach–Teacher) ............................ 116
Phase 3: Sustaining Teacher Inquiry ............................................................................... 119

viii
List of Tables
Table 1: Teacher Educator Actions With Leadership 42
Table 2: Teacher Educator Actions With Teachers 43
Table 3: Codebook Excerpt 52
Table 4: Coaching Conversation Agenda Template 60
Table 5: Teacher Weekly Math Data Tracker and Launching Questions 71
Table A1: Dimensions for Coaching Framework 111
Table A2: School Leaders’ Ways of Knowing and Indicators of Progress 115
Table A3: Teachers’ Ways of Knowing and Indicators of Progress 118
Table A4: Planning Conversation Guide 120
Table A5: Observation Guide 121

ix
List of Figures
Figure 1: Hierarchy of Instructional Leadership Team 15
Figure 2: Conceptual Framework 23
Figure A1: Coaching Cycle 113

1

Instructional Coaching: Disrupting Traditional Math Practice Through Inquiry and
Action Research
Throughout my compulsory educational experience, I saw myself as being fairly good at
math. I received As in math classes and demonstrated proficiency on standardized assessments. I
received approval from teachers and was positioned as the tutor for my peers. At the time, I
conceptualized math to be a subject about accurately following procedures, rules, and formulas
to arrive at a singular answer. Although I had these positive experiences as a student, I also had
disorienting moments as a student taking college level math courses that challenged how I
viewed doing and learning math. Later, as a secondary math teacher I maintained my challenged
conception of math and taught my students the way I had been taught and focused on procedural
fluency. This led to another disorienting moment when I realized I perpetuated the concept of
math as a set of procedures which led to my students disoriented by college math experiences
like me. Through the process of reflecting on the moments that disoriented me as both a student
and teacher I came to understand math as a creative process of applying logic and mathematical
concepts to solve problems in various contexts. Once I came to this newer conception, I was
driven to work with other math teachers to bring mine and their students this new way of
understanding math. Together, the moments I experienced as a student who was taught
procedures in exclusion of concepts and later, as a teacher that perpetuated this way of
instructing math with my students, led me to engage in an action research project that would
disrupt the potential of me coaching other teachers to reproduce this one-dimensional way of
teaching math. Thus, the remainder of this section provides an overview of my journey as a math
student and math teacher. I then turn to discuss the opportunity gap as the historically entrenched
2

inequity I was interested in addressing in my action research, the context within which I
conducted my study, and my role in the organization at the time of the study.
High School Math Moment
I attended a small middle college high school. My freshman year of high school was the
fourth year the school had been in operation and the first year the school had students enrolled in
grades 9, 10, 11, and 12. My high school’s instructional identity was rooted in dually enrolling
students in high school and college courses to satisfy high school graduation requirements and
enable them to accumulate credits towards an associate’s degree in liberal arts. The partnership
with the community college allowed freshmen and sophomore students to take classes provided
exclusively to high school students that satisfied the California A–G requirements. Beginning
junior year, students were able to self-enroll in college courses that were pre-identified by high
school counselors and were not exclusive to high school students. Students were also able to take
courses they were interested in outside of the pre-identified list and that were not yet offered at
the high school.
While I was enrolled in my high school only four AP classes were offered: AP US
History, AP European History, AP English Composition, and AP English Literature. The limited
number of advanced placement courses was due to the hiring of faculty in proportion to the
growth of the student population as a grade level was added each year and simultaneously
establishing curricular pathways based on student interest and faculty capacity. Prior to my
senior year, few students were interested in students wanting to take AP Calculus AB. Given the
low numbers, it was sufficient to enroll them in the calculus course offered at the community
college and offer one-on-one tutoring support before or after school hours. In my senior year
there were approximately 11 students who wanted to take AP Calculus AB. The school arranged
3

for us to take the course at the community college and simultaneously enrolled us in an online
class during a support class period. That academic year we took the equivalent of AP Calculus
AB and BC with community college instructors. The online asynchronous course provided
during the support period was paced for AP Calculus AB for the academic year and was
supervised by a certificated teacher who provided minimal academic support. The goal of both
classes was to prepare us for the AP Calculus AB exam. However, by the end of the course my
focus shifted from passing an exam to wondering if I was prepared for college level math.
The learning experiences I had in the asynchronous college courses and the community
college courses were dramatically different from each other. The asynchronous online class
required that I watch learning modules and complete intermittent assessments embedded in the
curriculum for the course grade. Considering the course lacked student-teacher interactions due
to its online nature, it would have been difficult to create a deep learning experience in what
essentially was an independent study course. In contrast, the community college calculus course
primarily assessed my knowledge using open ended questions that pushed me to use academic
language to demonstrate my thinking around how concepts could be applied in different
scenarios and required me to distinguish when different calculus concepts were appropriate to
use. Prior to taking calculus, teachers had primarily assessed my procedural fluency and had
seldomly probed my conceptual understanding. The community college calculus course was the
first time I had been asked to explain my thinking and the first time I witnessed discussions in
math beyond describing a set of prescribed steps. This was an adjustment for me as a learner, and
as a result, I struggled to follow class discussions at times and on assessments.
While in my community college calculus courses, I received Cs, in the online high school
courses I received a B and A. Although I passed the AP Calculus AB exam with a 3, I could not
4

help but notice the range of grades I received for what I thought was the same course. I was also
struck by my inability to fully answer all the free response questions on the exam. At the time, I
concluded that college math courses were harder than high school math courses but did not
understand why this was true. This was a disorienting dilemma that was not resolved for me in
any way at that time. As I entered my undergraduate career as a math major, I wondered if this
community college calculus experience was a preview of what was to come.
College Math Moment
As an undergraduate math major, I became acutely aware of my identity in the math
community as I progressed through my math education. I am a Black, Nigerian, cisgender
woman in math, and that’s not something I thought about in high school. My peer group in high
school was racially and ethnically diverse so I rarely felt othered. The homogeneity of White and
Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) males in my college math classes became more
pervasive as I progressed through my coursework. Every physical science STEM major was
required to complete a six course calculus series. Initially, I knew three other Black female
students who were STEM majors with whom I took these introductory courses. By the time I
reached the end of the calculus series, I was the only one of my friend group left. My friends had
come to the same conclusion that I had after my community college experience, that college
math was different and required more effort to understand than secondary school math.
As I minored in African American studies and Education, the course work introduced me
to the historical and inequitable educational experiences and outcomes of Black and Latino/a
students. I began to see that what happened in my friend group was not an anomaly; it was an
example of a patterned and historically entrenched inequity. For instance, according to Bonous-
Hammarth (2000), African American, Latina, and American Indian women had higher rates of
5

attrition in STEM majors among all students in STEM majors and all women of color. As a
STEM major, I grew more dedicated to successfully completing my coursework and became
more interested in learning about the educational experiences of Black and Latino/a students. By
the end of my junior year, I decided to become a secondary math teacher. I hoped to create the
learning experience I had in my community college calculus courses. I wanted my students to
experience cognitively demanding math courses before they got to college.
Secondary Math Teacher Moment
My teacher education program focused on the philosophy behind the Common Core State
Standards and the pedagogical implications of teaching for depth and conceptual learning instead
of breadth and surface level understanding. We spoke at length about math tasks, problem of the
week (POW), and investigative activities that could help deepen students’ understanding beyond
the “rule” or “trick” of a concept. Initially, I carried these ideas into my teaching career, but very
quickly experienced challenges implementing POWs and other math tasks. I did not know how
to navigate these challenges to make them successful learning experiences for students. As a
result, I prioritized mathematical procedural competency over critical thinking and conceptual
understanding my first 2 years of teaching.
It was not until conversations about vertical alignment across courses during math
professional learning community (PLC) meetings that I began to think beyond the content
delivered in courses. During the meetings, colleagues shared numerous anecdotes about our
graduates’ college experiences with math. What emerged was an unsettling trend of recent
graduates being placed in collegiate math classes below what they studied in high school and
alumni in STEM majors who were struggling in their math courses and seriously considering
switching majors. I began to think: Does our instruction promote student acquisition of
6

mathematical practices? Can vertical alignment disrupt this trend? What was role does the
general absence of math tasks or contextual math problems play in shaping students’ conceptions
of math and what learning math entails? These conversations reminded me of my friends’
decisions to leave the STEM field and my first experience with calculus. In both moments, the
lack of exposure and development of conceptual understanding that drives procedures created
incomplete learning experiences. In my own teaching practice, I was recreating these same
incomplete learning experiences for students, disregarding the original epiphany I had of the
critical need to emphasize conceptual understanding and critical thinking. I recommitted myself
to teaching practices and math tasks that promoted mathematical practices that I learned in my
teacher education program.
During my third year of teaching, I began experimenting with my own practice to
incorporate what I learned in my teacher education program. I created more learning
opportunities that placed the cognitive lift on the students to explain the concept illustrated in the
math task. I believed this to be an instructional shift that needed to happen department wide and
sought out the opportunity to be the math PLC facilitator with a personal agenda to drive our
conversations around instructional practice shifts that promoted students’ conceptual
understanding of math. When I became a PLC facilitator, I encouraged instructors to implement
more open-ended math tasks akin to what students would see on the California Assessment of
Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP). The PLC conversations we had about math tasks
revealed that teachers believed that students were not ready to do those tasks because
mathematical procedural fluency needed to come before application. Additionally, teachers
believed that they would not be able to cover all concepts if they were explored through math
tasks rather than explicitly taught as skills. These were valid concerns that I genuinely wanted to
7

explore further and support teachers with, but my role at the time was not structured to truly
address these concerns or provide instructional support to teachers, largely because I still had a
full, 6-period teaching load. More specifically, I was not positioned well to interrogate what I
speculated to be teachers’ deficit beliefs about our students that informed these concerns. As a
PLC, we engaged in conversation about instructional beliefs and how we each interpreted student
responses to our pedagogical approaches. The stories about our graduates’ experiences coupled
with conversations in my PLC meetings about teaching skills before concepts led me to see
connections between the procedural nature of high school math experienced by me, my
undergraduate friends, and former students were not isolated incidents. They were all moments
that demonstrated there was limited opportunity or exposure to experience deep learning of
mathematics.
Now as a math coach, reflecting on my practice as a teacher and facilitation of math
PLCs helped me see that my, my friends’ and my students' math learning experiences are shaped
by our teachers. I came to recognize that the dominant experience of math as technical procedure
would continue as long as teachers’ epistemic and psychological beliefs remained uninterrogated
and opportunities for teachers to experiment and learn about their practice continued to be
excluded from conversations about student performance.
I undertook this action research study in my second year as instructional math coach at
College Prep High School. College Prep High School is one of roughly two dozen charter
schools in the same charter management organization (CMO). As an instructional coach, I was
positioned to support teachers and to examine systemic influences on instruction. For my
dissertation, I was interested in investigating how coaching actions in relation to teachers and
school leadership inhibited or created conditions for instructional change. Next, I discuss the
8

opportunity gap of learning mathematics and how it is expressed in my current context.
Additionally, I examine how I thought about my role as instructional coach in relation to
addressing this opportunity gap.
The Opportunity Gap
Disparate outcomes across student demographics are evident in standardized test results.
According to the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which measures
students’ math and reading performance in the 4th and 8th grade, White and AAPI students
continue to outperform Black and Latino/a students in math and reading assessments despite the
improvement in Black and Latino/a students’ scores from the 1990s (NAEP, 2019). This trend
persists in secondary schools as students are stratified through mechanisms such as tracking and
offerings of advanced courses, teacher quality (Flores, 2007). This academic gap widens in
advanced math courses such as AP Calculus AB and BC. The 2019 AP Calculus AB results
showed that the Black and Latino/a students who took the exam, 6.38% and 11% received a 5
while 67% and 62% respectively did not pass at all. On the other hand, 19% and 29% of White
and AAPI students passed with a 5 and 37% and 31% did not pass at all (College Board, 2019).
Similarly, the data results for AP Calculus BC suggest that fewer Black and Latino/a students
passed the exam compared to their White and AAPI counterparts.
Similar racial disparities in mathematics achievement appear at the local level. CAASPP
data revealed that Black and Latino/a students trail behind their White and AAPI peers, and on
average continue to underperform in meeting state standards (California Department of
Education, 2019). In 2018, approximately 20% of eighth graders at my school met or exceeded
mathematics standards, whereas 37% of students statewide met or exceeded standards; when
broken down by dominant ethnic groups, 19% of Latino/a and 0% of the Black eighth graders at
9

my school met or exceeded standards compared with 51% of White students statewide.
Outcomes for 11th graders are more promising, with 36% of our students meeting or exceeding
standards compared with 31% statewide; broken down by dominant racial groups, however, we
see the same 36% of Latino/a students meeting or exceeding standards, but approximately 44%
of White students doing so statewide. Again, none of the Black students met or exceeded
standards on CAASPP.
This unequal distribution of math scores for Black and Latino/a students compared to
their White counterparts is often described as an “achievement gap.” The frame of the
achievement gap alone is not enough to convey the underlying conditions and student-teacher
instructional interactions that subsequently affect student assessment data. The National Council
of Teaching Mathematics characterizes the “achievement gap” as a function of differential
instructional opportunities. Ladson-Billings’ (2006) reframe of “achievement debt” and Flores’s
(2007) lens of opportunities to learn allows for an authentic and inclusive inquiry into the inputs,
which include classroom conditions, instructional practices, and student learning experiences,
that contribute to student results. This type of inquiry heavily influenced my teaching reflections
and motivates my work as an instructional coach.
When examining data on educational outcomes, the nuances of teaching practice are
often overlooked in favor of hard data focused on testing. Federal and state policy, such as the
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has pushed education towards data-driven models that
encouraged school leaders make tweaks to the instructional system rather than make fundamental
changes needed in classrooms (Cawelti, 2006). NCLB intended to address the disparity in racial
educational outcomes through annual standardized testing and accountability systems to ensure
growth and proficiency for all students (Hursh, 2007). Unfortunately, NCLB created a high-
10

stakes testing culture that reinforced the historical industrial model of schools as factories where
learning was perceived as segmented, linear and time bound (Heckman & Montera, 2009). In
this factory, teachers function as the mechanism responsible for transmitting standardized
knowledge to students who are often perceived as empty vessels to be filled at each grade level.
In addition to the general challenge of teaching focused on the transmission of
knowledge, underprepared teacher recruits are disproportionately found in low income schools
serving historically marginalized youth (Darling-Hammond, 2001). Additionally, there are more
out-of-field teachers, instructors who do not hold at least a minor in the subject area, teaching
classes in low income areas (34%) than in higher income areas (19%) (Flores, 2007). One can
deduce that the potential lack of content mastery and understanding of mathematics beyond the
procedural level can influence the instructional approach teachers implement in the classroom.
Teachers’ beliefs about their students’ capacity affects the way teachers teach and test,
and often result in lower expectations for students (Flores, 2007). Low expectations about
students’ capacity likely result from what Rodgers (2002) describes as an inability to separate
seeing the classroom from the underlying assumptions that inform teachers’ reactions to student
learning responses. Milner (2011) argues that educators’ low expectations for particular students
limits their opportunities to engage in rich learning experiences.
Addressing what Ladson-Billings (2006) describes as the achievement debt and creating
opportunities for learning, requires critical reflection around the complexities of the context we
teach in, our pedagogical practices and belief systems as teachers to acknowledge the role we
play in narrowing or widening the opportunity gap (Brookfield, 2010; Milner, 2011). The
epistemic beliefs held by teachers professionally and personally drives how we deliver content
and interact with students. While the Common Core State Standards emphasizes pedagogy that
11

promotes critical thinking and analytical skills through student centered practices, the actions
teachers take to promote these skills only happen if teachers believe that students can be active
learners with proper facilitation from their teachers (Elmore, 2002) as evidenced by my
aforementioned PLC experience. Student centered practices are defined as practices that offer
students multiple opportunities to engage in deeper learning and focus on student needs (Darling-
Hammond et al., 2014). Student centered practices also lend themselves well to ambitious
teaching to assist students in developing a deep understanding of mathematical concepts and
gaining high-order thinking skills (Lampert, et al., 2013). As a coach, promoting ambitious
teaching calls for me to consider the inquiry cycles I promote with teachers and the epistemic
beliefs that influence teacher pedagogy to construct opportunities to change practice to expand
student learning opportunities that promote students’ active construction of knowledge and result
in improved student assessment data.
Context
At the time of this study, College Prep High School enrolled approximately 560 students,
where 93% of the population identified as Latino/a, 5% as Black, and 2% were AAPI or identify
as more than one race. The 56-person staff at College Prep High School was more racially and
ethnically diverse than the student population: 42% Latino/a, 24% Black, 18% White, and 15%
AAPI. The demographics illustrate this diversity further with 30 teachers: 33% White, 27%
Latino/a, 23% AAPI, and 17% Black. Outside of teaching, Black and Latino/a staff members
served as grade level counselors, coordinators, instructional aids, custodial staff, and front office
team members. The office and counseling staff were almost exclusively Latino/a identifying with
the exception of one Black staff member on each team. The administrative team was the most
diverse team and was led by a Black principal and consisted of three assistant principals who
12

identified as Korean, Middle Eastern, and Latino. Each administrator oversaw one of the
following departments: science, math, English, history, world language, art, physical education,
and one grade level. As an administrative team, their espoused beliefs about education were that
it should be equitable for all students and our practices as a school should promote that equity.
The instructional leadership team was made up of the administration team, dean of culture,
special education coordinator, English language coordinator, instructional math coach (me),
instructional English coach, world language instructional lead, and the lead counselor. The racial
breakdown of the instructional leadership team (ILT) is as follows: 4 Black, 4 Latino/a, 1 AAPI,
1 Middle Eastern, and 1 White.
Academic departments at College Prep High School experienced varying degrees of
autonomy. Departments that did not have accountability tests such as CAASPP or CAST were
perceived by math, English, and science teachers to have more autonomy and less pressure. The
test taking scheduled—three internal district internal assessments, CAASPP and CAST—were
all located in math, English, and science classes telegraphing that these courses were more
important than the others. In particular, the math and English departments faced additional
instructional scrutiny from administrators due to CAASPP data, so both departments were
allocated an instructional coach and an assistant principal to strengthen their programs. Content
areas that did not have standardized tests associated with them were seen as additional
opportunities for students to develop the skills necessary to perform well on the CAASPP. For
instance, history and world language were leveraged as additional opportunities for students to
develop reading, analytic skills and writing responses to text dependent questions.
All academic departments were expected to follow the instructional cycle of planning,
observations, and weekly data meetings outlined by the CMO. Department leads were formally
13

identified for some departments and informally identified for other departments by school
leadership. For instance, there were five different titles to describe a department lead: coach,
coordinator, instructional leader, department chair, and grade level lead. Departments such as
math, English, world language, English language development, and special education did not
have a department chair. The process of becoming department chair and grade level lead was
informal—teachers expressed interest via a survey or an administrator provided a
recommendation—and these positions were not formally a part of the instructional leadership
team. Prior to my arrival to the school as an instructional coach, every department had an
instructional lead who served as members of the ILT. According to veteran staff, this practice did
not continue because instructional lead roles were poorly defined. The math and English
departments continued to have formally designated instructional leads because these content
areas were regularly assessed by standardized tests and faced more scrutiny than other
departments.
Context Changes Before the Study
The charter network governing my school has communicated an organization-wide
commitment to engaging in anti-racist practices. This stance was prompted by the national
discourse about the harmful and routinely fatal implications of systemic and structural racism
following the murder of George Floyd. Notably, these events took place during the COVID-19
global pandemic that had already begun to generate explicit email correspondence from the
CMO regarding the systemic and racial inequities of schools. The network messaged to all
school employees that anti-racism was a focus area for the 2020–2021 academic school year.
Tiffani and Hannah, the principal and math content assistant principal respectively, have
communicated to me their desire to re-position themselves as anti-racist educators. This has
14

resulted in a unique opportunity for me to advocate for an instructional cycle that supported
teacher inquiry and experimentation with the facilitation of math tasks using culturally relevant
pedagogy, a pedagogy I conceptualized as a dimension of anti-racism.
Before the murder of George Floyd and school closures, coaching at my school site
functioned to fulfill school leadership (the principal and three assistant principals) requests and
to develop teacher practice in performance areas identified by school leadership, me, and the
teacher. As the coach, my position is sandwiched between school leadership and teachers, and
that allowed me to directly influence how each group approaches its work.
Coach and School Leader Relationship
The instructional leadership team was organized in a hierarchical structure and is
illustrated in Figure 1. The role of the instructional superintendent, the principal’s liaison to the
CMO, was to provide coaching support to principals. The instructional superintendent utilized
connected data driven systems—internal data tracker and public data tracker—to understand and
interpret student performance for the purpose of helping schools monitor the progress being
made in the instructional cycle. The instructional cycle consists of planning,
observations/feedback, and weekly data meetings. The instructional cycle was a framework that
was developed by the district and was informed by research-based practices that promoted
effective teaching. The framework was used to ground all instructional support and guidance
offered by the CMO, and instructional leaders used the framework to support and guide teachers
they coached. More specifically, the CMO ensured that instructional leaders were trained by
Relay Graduate School of Education because CMOs across the nation credited this training to
their improvement in student outcomes. Relay training was primarily based on utilizing
formulaic scripts to facilitate coaching conversations and data meetings. The Relay scripts
15

employed a deficit lens in its approach to improve student outcomes by asking teachers to see the
learning gaps, name the gaps, and to take action on closing the gaps. In this approach, the
learning opportunity or presence of culturally relevant practices used to facilitate student learning
were not considered. When I adopted the Relay model into my own coaching practice, I noticed
some gains in student outcomes and found that my teachers were not more thoughtful about their
practice.
Midway through the study, the instructional cycle was narrowed to focus on teachers’
weekly exit ticket completion rates and proficiency rates as a way to encourage teacher to engage
in behaviors that would improve these in the following week. The goal was to ensure that no-
pass (NP) rates were low and teachers were not to exceed a 15% NP rate without providing
evidence of support and opportunities for students to make up their assignments. This hyper and
narrowed focus on grades was not one I agreed with but I knew it was something I was going to
have to manage.

Figure 1
Hierarchy of Instructional Leadership Team

Instructional
superintenent
Principal
Assistant
Principal
Math Coach
Assistant
Principal
Lead
Counselor,
ELA Coach
Assistant
Principal
World Language
IL, ELD
Coordinator
Special Education
Coordinator
16

I had a greater influence on school leadership as the math coach than I did in my role as a
member of the instructional leadership team. In meetings about the math program, school
leadership sought my input because they saw me as the math content specialist. In instructional
leadership meetings that included all student service areas, like curriculum, counseling, student
services for vulnerable populations, my input was reframed as either only being applicable to the
math team or something the school is not yet ready to explore. I viewed both responses as a
reminder that instructional messaging should be applicable across content areas, and that the
majority of my influence did not yet extend beyond math specific matters. As a result, I limited
my input in broader instructional spaces and focused primarily on strategically framing my input
interactions between myself and my school leaders.
The instructional cycle framework informed the structure of the weekly data meetings I
had as the coach with my principal, instructional superintendent, and assistant principal. The
purpose of these meetings was to assess the progress of math department in three lead measures
and develop next steps to instructionally develop teachers so that they could positively influence
student proficiency. To assess the math department, we utilized an internal data tracker—a
structure the instructional superintendent recommended to school leaders to use. Prior to the
study, I advocated that one of the lead measures on our internal data tracker looked for trends in
teacher facilitation of math tasks using CRP. The first lead measure was measured utilizing a 4-
point scale rubric, co-created by me and the assistant principal, that focused on how teachers
were using specific instructional strategies—such as scaffolds and questioning—to engage
students in mathematical discourse. As the coach, I was expected to use the rubric to provide
weekly scores after conducting classroom observations. The assistant principal and I calibrated
on how to use the rubric by observing a classroom together. The last two lead measures in the
17

internal data tracker measured the percentage of students demonstrating proficiency on the exit
ticket, short formative assessments provided by the CMO, and the percentage of students
completing the weekly exit ticket. Exit tickets were aligned to the curriculum and intended to
measure student progress towards mastery on the Common Core State Standard for the lesson.
Teachers inputted exit ticket proficiency data and exit ticket completion data into a public data
tracker, which was also suggested by the instructional superintendent, that was linked to the
internal data tracker, one that was only accessible to members of the instructional leadership
team. At first, the meetings explored teachers’ strength and growth in their facilitation of math
tasks more than the completion rate and proficiency rate data. By cycle two of the study, growing
NP rates shifted the focus on the latter two lead measures and meetings culminated with me
receiving a coaching action step that could support increased completion and proficiency data.
Towards the end of Fall 2020—by the beginning of Cycle 2 of the study, student grades
and assessing students was the school’s primary focus. The NP rate was extremely high, there
were 560 students and 296 NPs, with 279 students with 2 or more NPs. School leaders grappled
with how to address the NP rate since the school’s typical approach of using a multi-tiered
support plan was proving to be ineffective in the virtual world. School leaders questioned if it
was fair for students to receive a NP grade if the school did not have the infrastructure to provide
its typical supports with fidelity and rationalized that failing the students in the first semester of
distance learning would negatively affect the way they saw themselves and their ability to
succeed.
Historically, teachers were not privy to the school’s internal data tracker. Part of the
reasoning for not sharing this data with teachers was to prevent a perception of constant
evaluation. I was reminded that my professional position provided me with information that my
18

team might not have known at the moment or at all, and it required that I was aware of the
micropolitics of the school, my positioning as a coach, and how that influenced how I might have
filtered out certain pieces of information because it was information that was tied to school-wide
systems that teachers should hear from school leadership, not me. As a result, I was constantly
renegotiating my liaison-like position between administration and teachers to simultaneously
meet my supervisors’ expectations and my teachers’ needs.
Coach and Teacher Relationship
The math coach was a non-evaluative teacher leader who worked closely with the five-
teacher math department and assistant principal to implement the vision of the math program at
my school site. The assistant principal and I met weekly one-on-one to discuss individual
coaching meetings I had with teachers, supports I needed from the assistant principal to help me
in my role, and to discuss how coaching moves related to the school wide data systems
monitoring departmental progress. The work of coaching focused on developing the math team
in planning, enacting that plan, and using data to drive instructional decisions, which mirrored
the data systems and instructional cycle provided by the CMO. In addition to coaching, I was
also the department lead and a member of the ILT. In this section, I share my reflections of my
first year of coaching and discuss approaches I set out to implement to in my second year of
coaching through this action research.
Before the study, I believed it was important to co-construct knowledge because it
promoted a positive coach-teacher relationship that decentered the coach as the expert to position
both parties as adult learners who can collaboratively use their expertise to engage in
instructional change (Marsh et al., 2015). According to Marsh et al. (2015), vertical expertise
was the accumulation of knowledge and skill over time and horizontal expertise was co-created
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through interactions and movement across professional contexts. Planning and weekly
observation feedback sessions are activities I engaged with teachers in a one-on-one context and
were the majority of my work my first year of coaching. In these contexts, my practice aligned
more with vertical expertise as evidenced by the following actions: modeling math tasks for a
teacher, providing written feedback to teachers via an online platform used for teacher formal
evaluations or during planning meetings, and requiring teachers to practice a portion of their
lesson. Prior to conducting the study, I believed these actions consistently positioned me as the
expert and teachers as the novice, thus limiting the opportunities for horizontal expertise, or co-
creation of new knowledge and ideas between me and the teacher.
Prior to joining College Prep High, I had no formal experience coaching or with using
data to encourage instructional change. My new coaching role forced me to understand and use
data intentionally. I was learning data driven instruction and coaching as I went along, which
could be one reason why I defaulted to reproducing top-down instruction in my interactions with
teachers my first year of coaching.
Before conducting my action research, I believed that I engaged in and promoted surface
level changes using data (Marsh et al., 2015) as a first-year coach. Data driven conversations
typically took place during PLC meetings, which were infrequent and aligned with data days
embedded in our school calendar. Data days took place about every 10 weeks, around the same
time of ILT data meetings with instructional superintendent and after students took the district
interim assessments. Teachers examined student results and took note of standards students
performed well on and standards students missed, in addition to data disaggregated by the
subgroup categories of special education and English-language learners. For standards students
missed, teachers looked at answers commonly marked as incorrect, re-worked those problems
20

themselves, created re-teach plans, and rehearsed those re-teach plans in front of the PLC.
Teachers’ re-teach plans yielded students understanding the problem in that moment, but
ultimately resulted in small gains on the subsequent CMO interim assessment within the same
standard. This is the guidance provided by the CMO and this was what I followed prior to the
study.
Many of the coaching moves I engaged in as a first-year coach and prior to school
closures resulting from COVID-19 in March 2020 were heavily influenced by school leadership
recommendations and careful navigation of my coach/teacher and coach/leadership relationships.
Upon entering my second year of coaching and this action research, I had a better handle of
school dynamics and internal politics. I planned on exploring new ideas which included one-on-
one support to teachers with the goal of co-constructing instructional ideas, and more intentional
vertical expertise coaching practices. I also planned to leverage dialogue during one-on-one
meetings to promote teacher critical reflection. I set out to establish a PLC structure that was
consistent with van Es et al. (2014) and used video analysis as a vehicle to facilitate discussions
of student learning opportunities, and offered opportunities to slow down to see and describe
moments of instruction (Rodgers, 2002).
Examining the Issue
In the eyes of my supervisors, my role was primarily to develop teachers’ practice as
captured in our internal data tracker, student performance, coaching notes, and department
agendas. While there was some conversation regarding teacher beliefs and mindsets, it was
deprioritized in my coaching work. Working in an organization where the primary measure for
student and teacher learning was standardized assessments created internal philosophical
challenges in my coaching work. I viewed teacher learning and growth as a long game that was
21

balanced between a teacher’s self-identified learning goals and the unlearning/learning that was
not yet visible to the teacher (McCarthy, 2018; Mezirow, 1991). Through critical reflections,
interviews, and observations my research explored: How do I engage teachers using anti-racist
pedagogy as a stance so that they will critically reflect on their practice and explore and
experiment in the facilitation of math tasks using CRP? How do I engage school leadership to
encourage inquiry as a stance in teacher practice?
In the remainder of this dissertation, I will discuss the conceptual framework that outlined
the iterative process of coaching and the action research cycles I engaged in, a description of my
data methods, followed by my findings and retrospective takeaways.
Conceptual Framework
Maxwell (2013) defines a conceptual framework as a tentative theory that provides a
comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon and informs the research. This conceptual
framework served as a process map in which my anti-racist stance as a teacher educator was
operationalized through my coaching practices. In this section, I offer a revised conceptual
framework informed by what I learned from my in the field experiences and relevant theories
central to accomplishing my long-term goal of teachers incorporating culturally relevant
pedagogy in their practice. This conceptual framework is a combination of what I learned from
engaging in action research and practices I have yet to investigate. Subsequent action research
cycles will continue to inform any changes needed to my conceptual framework.
This conceptual framework examines the relationship of four components within the
instructional system: school leadership messaging of the instructional cycle, the role of a teacher
educator, the teacher, and the evidence of promoting student discourse in lesson plans. My
conceptual framework continues to be informed by adaptive leadership, inquiry, critical
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reflection, and anti-racist pedagogy theories. In this framework, anti-racism functions as an
active stance that reflects the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) and beyond
(Kishimoto, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2000). During my action research study, I was able to
investigate and experiment with practices involving adaptive leadership, inquiry, and some
reflective processes. In Figure 2, this is consistent with the bidirectional arrow between school
leadership and the teacher educator as well as the first two concentric circles for both the teacher
and teacher educator. The concentric circles in Figure 2 signify the aspects of practice central to
the long-term goal–and the order they should be considered–starting with the most inner circle.
Both teacher and teacher educator need to sufficiently explore and internalize the conditions of
the first two concentric circles in order to engage in anti-racist pedagogies. Although I was
unable to experiment with anti-racist pedagogy, I still believe that the incorporation of these
practices are central to promote teachers’ use of culturally relevant pedagogy. To embrace an
anti-racist stance in my future coaching practices, this revised conceptual framework now
accounts for the necessary preconditions to intentionally promote CRP—my long-term goal. In
this section I will describe how my conceptual framework has evolved because of my in the field
experiences.

23

Figure 2
Conceptual Framework

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The interactions between these four components are depicted by the bi-directional arrows
with particular emphasis on my position, the cycle of adult learning, and the enactment of that
learning. Figure 2 illustrates this cycle of learning in the interaction between me and the teacher
and me and school leadership. With respect to me and the teacher, the data that serves as the
opportunity for critical reflection and experimentation is the evidence of teacher’s lesson
enactments where the teacher has intentionally incorporated student discourse opportunities.
With respect to my interaction with school leadership, I serve as the instrument who positions
school leadership as learners to expand the instructional cycle to include critical reflection of
practice and investigation of the learning opportunity for students. In my initial conceptual
framework, I intended to ground my work in adaptive leadership practices when I communicated
with all school stake holders. In my interactions with teachers, I intended to coach them to adopt
the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). After conducting my study, I revised my
conceptual framework based on my recognition that before I can coach towards CRP, I need to
engage in critical self-reflection to examine how I enact the instructional cycle (i.e., planning,
observations, data meetings). Further, I need to consider the developmental level of the teacher
during coaching interactions. Thus, I included the innermost concentric circles for both the
teacher educator and teacher. According to Drago-Severson and Blum DeStefano (2017),
instructional leaders can make more progress towards getting teachers to take up culturally
relevant practices by understanding teacher’s orientation to social justice and the meaning
making systems they use to inform their practice. This can help coaches determine the
appropriate coaching moves that can push teachers to engage with the growing edges of their
practice and promote CRP. The awareness of my practice in relation to the school’s instructional
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cycle and the developmental level of the teacher are precursors to my critical reflection and
engagement in anti-racist pedagogies and teachers’ thorough examination of their practice.
The next thing, which I did not get to in this study, would be for teachers to interrogate
the way their underlying beliefs and assumptions of their students influenced teachers
facilitation of students’ interactions with the math content. Thus, my current tentative theory,
anticipates that reflection of instructional moments will help teachers better examine their
practice and any underlying beliefs behind their practice to take intelligent action (Rodgers,
2002) and move toward CRP. Culturally relevant pedagogy is not a strategy and is instead an
orientation that is fostered through community critical discourse, which seldomly occurred.
Given that the instructional messaging from school leadership focused on student
academic data and teacher compliance, my current tentative theory continues to incorporate
reflection and introduces examination of teacher practice as valuable coaching activities to enact
with teachers. To encourage school leadership to expand the instructional cycle to include these
coaching activities, I will continue to draw on adaptive leadership theory in my interactions with
school leaders. Similar to the action research cycles I undertook in this study, adaptive leadership
is an iterative process of observing, interpreting, and intervening (Heifetz et al., 2009) that is
necessary for taking up an anti-racist stance.
Anti-racism centers on identifying systems, organization structures, and policies as either
racist and leading to racial inequity or antiracist and promoting racial equity (Kendi, 2019). Anti-
racist pedagogy is an active approach to engage in action that disrupts and challenges current
racist systems and structures for the purpose of increasing opportunities of racial equity. The
tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy operationalize the ideology of anti-racism by articulating
ideal teacher-student interactions and implications to address the needs of students from
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historically marginalized communities: (a) believing all students are capable of academic
success, (b) developing or maintaining student cultural integrity, and (c) fostering students’
critical consciousness of the world (Ladson-Billings, 1995). The role of coach is a systemic
intervention for the math department implemented by school leadership. Thus, how I enact my
role as coach in relation to the math department (one system) and with school leadership (another
system) in context of the broader instructional system requires that I continue to remain
reflexive, adaptive, and inquiry focused in applying my current tentative theory.
In the remainder of this section, I explain meaningful learning opportunities as a product
of student discourse and my interactions as a teacher educator with school leadership and
teachers to promote math discourse. I start with meaningful learning opportunities because the
evidence of teachers promoting discourse served as the catalyst for cycles of teacher reflection
and inquiry that informed my interactions with teachers and school leaders throughout the study.
Lastly, I identify areas in my conceptual framework that I did not get to during the study but still
conceptualize to be true by viewing these areas as the work I will engage in future cycles of
inquiry with school leaders and teachers.
Evidence of Teachers Promoting Discourse
In my experience as a math student and math teacher, the most meaningful learning
experiences involved my contribution or facilitation of a classroom discussion. As coach, I aim
to replicate these experiences by improving the quality of student discourse. My goal is for
teachers to investigate and reflect on the role of discourse in the learning opportunity created for
students. I believe that facilitation of math tasks through a culturally relevant frame will use
cognitive strategies and structures that emphasize the conceptual mathematical ideas by
promoting discourse that allows students to express their thinking using their cultural capital and
27

privileging the acquisition of common analytical math language. By improving the facilitation of
math tasks, I believe students will be able to use sophisticated cognitive processes that promotes
student critical thinking and flexible application of their math understanding which will signify
meaningful learning.
I characterize meaningful learning as the opportunities teachers construct through
instructional moves to “assist student performance,” such as mathematical discourse structures,
will equitably promote critical thinking and engage students in conceptually rich mathematical
experiences. Meaningful learning is consistent with viewing learning as construction of
knowledge (Mayer, 2002). Meaningful learning is the cognitive processes learners engage in to
make sense of their experiences to solve new problems and the mindful active agency of seeking
out new understandings (Mayer, 2002; Wergin, 2019). For example, the use of questioning helps
produce student thinking and cognitive structuring that organizes that thinking (Tharp &
Gallimore, 1989). Tharp and Gallimore (1989) refer to this as a method of “assisting
performance” and I argue that anchoring classroom practice in the tenets of culturally relevant
pedagogy is also a form of assisting performance because leveraging students’ cultural capital
and adopting an asset mindset when promoting student discourse can yield more opportunities
for students to learn.
To assist teachers in using inquiry to analyze and see themselves as the instrument of
students learning through discourse, my current conceptual framework utilizes classroom
observations and teacher lesson plans as evidence of teachers promoting student discourse.
Further, observational data focused on students in the process of learning and how teachers took
in student thinking as they taught (Elmore, 1995; Franke & Kazemi, 2001). This includes
evidence of students engaging in sophisticated cognitive strategies, like building on their
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understanding, interrogating, and probing. As a result, my current tentative theory views
teachers’ discourse with me during one-on-one coaching conversations about teachers’ lesson
plans and observable student discourse in their classroom as evidence of teachers’ efforts to
promote discourse with their students. All of this evidence informs the multiple relational arrows
between school leader, the teacher educator, and teacher in the conceptual framework.
School Leadership and Teacher Educator Interaction
In Figure 2, the teacher educator has three concentric circles: location in relation to
school, critical reflection, and anti-racist pedagogy. Concentric circles and the ordering of the
circles from the innermost to outermost signify that the practice in each circle is connected and
functions as levels of practice I need to accomplish to reach the most sophisticated level of anti-
racist pedagogy. Thus, my location in relation to the school (i.e. the innermost concentric circle)
coupled with critical reflection (i.e. the second concentric circle) work together to activate an
anti-racist coaching stance for myself. Initially, I did not consider examining my coaching
practice in relation to the school’s instructional cycle. As a result of the study, I recognize that is
essential that I reflect on school leadership’s conceptions of instruction and how rooted my
coaching actions are in those same conceptions to discern the areas of my practice that I need to
stretch in (Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2017) or unlearn to sufficiently disrupt the
school’s instructional cycle and assist teacher reflection and examination of their practice.
Influencing a change in teacher practice is an adaptive problem that requires learning and
confronting beliefs, priorities, and habits of all components present in this framework
(Brookfield, 2010; Heifetz et al., 2009). Teaching is a complex act (Lampert et al., 2013) that
takes place in non-neutral settings with cultural, social, historical, and political implications.
Cochran-Smyth and Lytle (1999) offer inquiry as stance as a useful learning process that allows
29

teachers to inquire into their practice to generate knowledge and theories relating to their practice
to interrogate them using the positional and orientational ideas raised by Brookfield (2010) and
Heifetz (2009). In my interactions with school leadership, it is important I continue to work with
school leadership to see that grounding the instructional cycle in an inquiry as stance approach
can address teachers’ beliefs about their students’ capacities and their instructional decisions.
Thus, creating an opportunity for teachers to engage in tenets of CRP and for the school to
authentically act on its espoused anti-racist vision.
In this current conceptual framework, instructional messaging telegraphs to teachers a
pedagogical framing that accounts for teacher identity and serves as an anchor for classroom
practices. I continue to believe that the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy are useful to frame
and disseminate an instructional message to teachers because it positions teachers as learners of
student learning. I expect that this will communicate to teachers, in addition to traditional teacher
expectations, it is important to facilitate a meaningful learning experience.
My relationship with school leadership is focused on how I manage the tension of
enacting the school’s instructional cycle and responding to the school’s messaging through my
expressed coaching actions. My school’s instructional cycle and messaging is aligned with the
CMO’s instructional cycle, which consists of lesson planning, observation/feedback, and weekly
data meetings to analyze student work samples. Instructional leaders, like myself and other ILT
members, are expected to enact this instructional cycle to improve instruction and support the
school’s primary goal of improving student performance as represented in the achievement data.
While I still find merit in student achievement data, I am committed to expanding the use of data
to include other data sources that does not mask the instructional dimension of teaching and
learning. I believe that the school’s and the CMO’s data-driven lens fails to capture the complex
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and robust nature of the processes that create learning by only focusing on the product. To
supplement the quantitative student achievement data, its necessary to add a qualitative
dimension by using classroom observations, teacher lesson plans, and coaching conversations to
examine teachers’ promotion of meaningful learning through student discourse. Thus, during the
study, I articulated to school leadership the need to complicate our messaging, classroom
observations, and teacher feedback to integrate elements of inquiry as stance to get to the tenets
of CRP: belief all students are capable of academic success, developing or maintaining student
cultural integrity, and fostering students’ critical consciousness of the world to sufficiently see
long lasting change in our instructional program (Heifetz et al., 2009; Ladson-Billings, 1995).
During the study, school leadership made reference to tenets of CRP. However, the
instructional message emphasized fulfilling a teacher checklist and weekly evidence of student
learning as represented in exit ticket data. This unintentionally implied an urgency in proficient
student outcomes and limited the latitude teachers had to experiment with their practice. School
leadership made sense of good instruction by positioning teachers as instrumental learners who
needed exposure to classroom strategies to improve student performance data. To shift this
positioning, I am dedicated to consistent messaging to school leadership the importance of
positioning teachers as communicative learners to support teachers in examining the process of
learning in the moment by considering students’ understanding and misconceptions (Drago
Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2017; Franke & Kazemi, 2001).
Improving instruction and supporting teacher learning to construct meaningful learning is
an adaptive challenge I am committed to address using my revised conceptual framework. To
address this challenge, I need to continue to engage in critical self-reflection to develop
internalized anti-racist pedagogical principles to challenge my school leadership’s expectations
31

of me and to find a way to take coaching risks without disappointing school leadership more than
necessary (Heifetz et al., 2009). In the field, engaging in adaptive leadership behaviors like
getting on the balcony helped me understand how the four components of the instructional
system (i.e., school leadership, teacher, teacher educator, and evidence promoting student
discourse) interacted with each other. The act of getting on the balcony provided me with clarity
in relation to my coaching practice in the context of the instructional cycle and the specific
coaching actions I needed to engage in to disrupt an instructional cycle that did not promote
elements of anti-racist pedagogies. I will continue to encounter resistance and skepticism from
my leadership by shifting away from evidence of student learning as represented in exit ticket
and interim assessment data, to more closely examining qualitative data evidence of teacher
practice and promotion of meaningful learning for students (Elmore, 1995; Heifetz et al.,
2009). In my conversations about teachers with school leadership, I will always need to frame
teachers as active learners and not through a deficit lens; by positioning teachers as learners, I
emphasize the need to create a space for them to take risks and make mistakes as necessary
components of learning and developing instructional practice. Thus, I must be cognizant of the
power I have in how I choose to represent teachers and their performance progress to school
leadership. I will need to maintain a focus on my goal (Heifetz et al., 2009) with school
leadership to examine the support we provide teachers in taking up culturally relevant pedagogy
by enacting cycles of inquiry to change the culture of teaching and learning at my school
(Elmore, 1995).
Teacher Educator and Teacher Interaction
The concentric circles of the teacher educator express the tension of taking up anti-
racism as a leadership stance and the requirement to first examine one’s practice in relation to the
32

system (an evolution from my original conceptual framework) to engage in cycles of critical
reflection to authentically engage in anti-racist pedagogies. By anchoring my coaching in anti-
racist pedagogy, I seek to encourage school leadership learning and teacher inquiry by doing the
following:
1. Challenge assumptions and foster [teachers’] critical analytical skills.
2. Develop [teachers’] awareness of their social positions.
3. Decenter authority in the [PLC meetings] and have [teachers’] take responsibility for
their [learning] process.
4. Empower [teachers] and apply theory to practice.
5. Create a sense of community in the [PLC] through collaborative learning.
(Kishimoto, 2018, p. 546)
The purpose of anti-racism as a coaching stance is to confront the imposed authority
relationships between me and school leadership. Additionally, anti-racist pedagogy shares
intellectual dimensions with CRP, which allows for the teacher concentric circles to mirror the
teacher educators. The teacher concentric circles depict iterative cycles of inquiry to support
teachers’ reflections and examination of their teacher practice by providing appropriate scaffolds
based on their learner orientation (another expansion on my original framework) to assist
teachers in critical reflection and the adoption of CRP. Thus, it demonstrates the need for
teachers to be positioned to take up culturally relevant pedagogy, which lives in the interplay
between me and school leadership, me and the teacher, and school leadership and teacher. The
relationship between the teacher and me as a teacher-educator is influenced by the power and
political structures that come with school hierarchy and my quasi-administrative role as a coach.
The hierarchical structure at my school positions teachers as “below” me, a presumed content
33

expert. I will continue to ground my practice in anti-racist pedagogy to decenter my authority
over teachers (Kishimoto, 2018). To better understand how teachers orient themselves to
coaching, I must also continue to reflect on how the close working relationship I maintain with
school leadership grants me both formal and informal authority and creates a power dynamic
between me and the teachers. For instance, the authority I am granted to review teachers’ lesson
plans, conduct classroom observations, facilitate professional learning community meetings, and
schedule individual coaching sessions with teachers are all extensions of school leadership. This
positions me as an intermediary that satisfies school leadership administrative expectations and
assists teachers in their practice. As I pass along instructional messaging to teachers, it is
important that I critically reflect on implicit power dynamics and explicitly communicate how I
approach my coaching practice. In my direct interaction with teachers, I will explicitly coach
teachers to assert inquiry as stance in relation to their practice.
My goal as a coach continues to be to initiate and facilitate what Mezirow (1991) would
describe as transformative learning, to help teachers become more critically self-reflective, to
participate more fully and freely in pedagogical discourse, and to move them developmentally
towards more culturally relevant teaching practices. The bilateral relationship between teacher
educator and teacher centers on how I coach teachers using their orientations as learners to
engage in reflection practices to inquire into their practice by using iterative cycles of inquiry as
a way towards experimenting with culturally relevant pedagogy. I use my coaching
conversations with teachers as opportunities to promote teacher inquiry as stance (Cochran-
Smyth & Lytle, 1999) by engaging in coaching behaviors that promote a turn toward practice
(Horn & Little, 2010). A turn toward teaching involved teachers unpacking a specific teaching
moment in-depth to use as the foundation to theorize advice for general problems and principles
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of teaching. Drago-Severson and Blum-DeStefano’s (2017) developmental typology lens for
adult learners contributes to teachers’ asserting an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smyth & Lytle,
1999) and turning toward practice (Horn & Little, 2010). Understanding the developmental
trajectory (i.e., instrumental, social, self-authoring, and self-transforming) allows for the
appropriate differentiation of supports and stretches for growth needed to build teachers internal
capacity to embrace elements of culturally relevant pedagogy—something I did not provide
during my experience in the field.
Additionally, posing key questions about their sociolinguistic, epistemic, and
psychological beliefs (Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2017; Mezirow, 2009) support
understanding teachers’ orientational ideas in relation to their practice. My interpretation of these
conversations influences how I implement anti-racist pedagogy and allows me to reflect on how I
support teachers use of culturally relevant pedagogy. Teacher participation in critical discourse
requires that I establish and enforce norms that embody ideal conditions of learning as much as
possible, including equal opportunity to participate, focusing on issues, hearing alternative
perspectives, examining assumptions, and role reciprocity (Mezirow, 2009). I expect evidence of
transformative learning to manifest in answering the following observable questions: Who
participates and how frequently? Do quiet voices join the conversation? Does the conversation
quiet louder voices?
For teachers to develop tools for culturally relevant pedagogy, the teachers and I must
continue to extend our interactions beyond the expert-novice binary. More specifically, I need to
resist the urge to offer teachers with solutions or strategies because that would discourage and
diminish the importance of inquiry as stance. Instead, I need to recommit to sharing expertise
with teachers by prompting them to reflect on epistemic and psychological beliefs and then
35

facilitate the interrogation and interpretation of those beliefs through the lens of culturally
relevant pedagogy and their expressed teaching practices (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). As a
professional learning community, I need to continue to use observational data and teacher
reflections to examine student discourse and the role the teacher played in facilitating that
discourse. Future cycles of inquiry would utilize similar data sets to make discrete connections
between the presence of student success, cultural competence, and socio-political
consciousness.
The use of observation data helps teachers become aware of student discourse patterns
and the conditions established that created those learning opportunities. More specifically, it is
important teachers became aware of “how they are thinking, judging, feeling, acting” to
understand the reason why they experienced student learning opportunities the way they did and
took action based on those insights (Mezirow, 1991, p. 197). It is my job as the coach to next
help teachers look critically at their beliefs and behaviors to move them along this continuum of
self-awareness and inaction to insightful and intelligent action (Rodgers, 2002).
Conclusion
My conceptual framework was constructed using the literature of anti-racist pedagogy,
CRP, adaptive leadership, and adult learning theories. Together these ideas supported evidence
of teachers promoting student discourse as the instructional embodiment of facilitating math
tasks using CRP. Further, this conceptual framework helped me theorize how to strategically
leverage my coach position. Utilizing evidence of student discourse is a departure from centering
student achievement data to inform instructional cycle and instructional messaging. To disrupt
the cycle of promoting product focused teaching as learning, anti-racist pedagogy is used to push
the quality of the instructional cycle in support of learning as an active construction of
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knowledge through the use of cycles of inquiry. This will support the iterative process of adult
learning and move teachers, school leadership, and myself developmentally towards more
sociolinguistic and cultural conceptions of learning to better serve historically marginalized
students. This conceptual framework may evolve again and lead to revised tentative theory as I
continue to increase my coaching capacity.
Research Methods
This study focused on how I managed interdependent relationships with school
leadership, and teachers to coach staff towards instructional experimentation and investigation to
improve teacher practice. This study was guided by the following research questions:
1. How do I engage teachers using anti-racist pedagogy as a stance so that they will
critically reflect on their practice and explore and experiment in the facilitation of
math tasks using CRP?
2. How do I engage school leadership to encourage inquiry as a stance in teacher
practice?
Participants and Setting
In this section, I present the participants with whom and settings in which this action
research study took place. I purposefully sampled to select information-rich settings and
participants (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015) to deeply understand and learn about the relationships
and actions that influenced teacher learning. More specifically, I chose math teachers and school
leadership who directly oversaw math content for my action research cycles as I was responsible
for guiding math teachers’ efforts to meet the needs of their students and my work was guided by
the expectations of leaders who oversaw math content.
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Participants
Participants in this study included two school leaders positioned in different levels of
organization hierarchy structure and five secondary math teachers who made up the ninth-grade
math team. Tiffani served as the school principal and Hannah was the school assistant principal
who oversaw math. The math team included Phillip, Louis, Kyle, Harold, and Kassandra.
Racially, the math team identified themselves with the following communities: Phillip, Louis,
and Kyle as AAPI, Harold as Latino, and Kassandra as Middle Eastern. The number of years as a
classroom teacher within the math department is between first-year novice teacher to 7 years of
classroom experience. The math department offered five courses that are delineated across the
team: Phillip and Kyle taught Integrated Math 1 (IM 1), Harold taught Integrated Math 2 (IM 2),
Kassandra taught Integrated Math 3 (IM 3), Louis taught Pre-Calculus, and Kyle also taught AP
Calculus AB. Teaching lines were assigned to teachers based on preference, teacher experience
with the course, and the creation of strategic subject-specific teams that were likely to
collaborate productively. Kyle was the only teacher who taught two courses because there was
only one section of AP Calculus AB offered, a course he had experience teaching, and he
preferred to teach IM 1 to gain insights on the vertical alignment between IM 1 and AP Calculus
AB.
According to Drago-Severson and Blum-DeStefano (2017), educators have different
developmental meaning-making systems that are expressed in qualitatively different ways:
instrumental, socializing, self-authoring, and self-transforming. During the first cycle of data
collection, my school leaders–Tiffani and Hannah–appeared to be socializing in their learning
orientation. This was evident by the latitude I was given to adjust my coaching actions however I
saw fit during Cycle 1—something I did not have my first year of coaching. They viewed the
38

2020–2021 distance learning school year as the biggest educational experiment to date and
concluded there was not one universal way to teach online. Additionally, because they had never
instructed on Zoom themselves, they prioritized the feelings and perspectives of others who were
expected to teach and learn online which made them very amenable to my suggestions. School
leaders prioritized the mental health for teachers and students, and I believed this to be what led
to their “hands-off” approach with me and other instructional leaders at first. However, by the
second cycle of this action research, which corresponded with the beginning of Spring 2021, my
leaders’ orientation shifted to self-authoring and instrumental. School leaders grew into self-
authoring knowers because while they continued to welcome feedback from others, they were
only likely to implement the feedback if it was aligned to their established conception of
teaching and learning. The CMO and the school, wanted to adjust practices to quickly address
the challenges schools faced towards the end of Fall 2020–increasingly high numbers of no-pass
(NP) rates. As instrumental knowers, school leaders believed that it was the “right” approach to
focus on putting concrete systems in place that would address the high NP rates.
The developmental orientation for the math department was diverse with at least one
teacher located in each of the qualitatively different ways of knowing (i.e. instrumental, social,
self-authoring, and self-transforming) described by Drago-Severson and Blum-DeStefano
(2017). Phillip and Kyle, whom were new to the math team, had different learning orientations.
Phillip was a first-year novice teacher and looked for me to give concrete suggestions of he
should try to promote discourse in his class. Phillip’s instrumental orientation was also expressed
during coaching conversations where he often questioned if he was making the “right”
instructional decisions. Kyle was developmentally oriented to a self-transforming lens and
viewed the reflective process I introduced as an opportunity to authentically collaborate and push
39

him to expand his practice Harold and Kassandra were self-authoring learners and had 6 and 7
years of classroom teaching experience respectively. As self-authoring learners, Harold and
Kassandra discussed their practice in terms of what they “like” to incorporate or saw as “helpful”
to students all based on their beliefs about teaching and learning. Louis carried a socializing lens
because he often sought feedback and validation of his teaching choices from me as his coach.
At the beginning of the study, I carried a socializing way of knowing as my coaching
practice and conception about adult learning was based on school leadership and CMO
recommendations. However, by the end of the study I had come to assert my own set of values
and a willingness to engage in any necessary conflict to promote teacher inquiry. As the teacher
educator participant and action researcher, I learned to develop an acute awareness of my
responses and reactions interacting with teachers and how that influenced teacher responses.
Cycles of critical self-reflection on how my in the moment responses pushed teachers towards
practice and to embrace inquiry as stance increased my awareness. In relation to school leaders, I
learned to justify my intended actions in a way that addressed their concerns. I also grew in my
capacity to defend the choices I made in my coaching actions to help expand their conception of
learning to include an investigation of the process and not only the product of student learning. I
was unable to engage teachers on topics such as their identity, epistemic beliefs, and underlying
assumptions of student ability because this action was a part of the third level of the teacher
concentric circle in my conceptual framework (Figure 2) and was cognitively too demanding for
me to take on during the study. If I were able to begin to promote teachers’ critical reflection of
how their identities informed their teaching, I imagine I would have experienced challenges
navigating and probing the conversation appropriately to sufficiently promote critical reflection.
Additionally, managing the expectations of the action research and the expectations of my school
40

leaders proved to make engaging in anti-racist stance even more difficult because the high
cognitive demand required to grow from a socializing learner to a self-authoring learner.
My goal was to engage in coaching behaviors with teachers and school leaders to make
progress towards a structural and ideological shift in what it means to actively construct
culturally relevant instructional practices that influence student outcomes. However, managing
the implications of being a novice coach, the expectations of my action research and the
expectations of my school leaders made coaching at the highest level illustrated in my conceptual
framework too high of a cognitive demand at the time. I will discuss what I mean by this more in
my findings section.
Setting of Action
The study was designed to focus on the professional learning experience in one-on-one
coaching conversations, PLC meetings, and external leadership meetings that influenced the PLC
space and coaching conversations. Due to distance learning during the 2020–2021, all my coach
interactions took place on the Zoom meeting platform. I investigated how I encourage teachers to
take up an inquiry as stance to examine how their facilitation of math tasks provided
opportunities for student discourse. Additionally, I observed how my actions with school
leadership supported teacher inquiry stance into the facilitation of math tasks. The shift in school
leaders’ orientation and hyper focus on grades created an environment that at times made it
difficult to engage in coaching actions I saw fit and coaching actions my school leaders expected
of me.
Actions
Inquiry as stance refers to a long-term and consistent positioning or way of seeing rather
than a single point in time or activity (Cochran-Smyth & Lytle, 1999). Teacher inquiry into the
41

facilitation of math tasks had the potential to thoughtfully integrate beliefs, experiences, and
research and not simply raise questions about the impact of a particular technique. I believed
cycles of teacher inquiry into practice to be the most appropriate response to adapting to
instructional changes due to COVID-19 since there was no blueprint available that made the shift
to teaching online a smooth or clear transition. Consistent with my conceptual framework, I
viewed inquiry as stance and engaging in cycles of inquiry to be the foundation of my coaching
philosophy. My vision for the math department was for all students to engage in equitable
meaningful mathematical experiences that fostered critical thinking, promoted flexible uses of
mathematical understanding affecting students’ lives and improving the world.
Progress towards this vision was limited. My inquiry as stance philosophy was
challenged and at times compromised throughout the study. Table 1 outlines the interactions I
had with school leadership to work towards the goals below. It also details the data I collected
for each period of the study.

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Table 1
Teacher Educator Actions With Leadership

Action researcher Coach Setting Data collected
Before study Attempted to influence
the data system and
my work by
advocating for a focus
on facilitation of math
tasks as a lead
measure on the
internal data tracker
the CMO encourages
all school leaders to
use.

Co-created a system to
monitor/track
opportunities for
student learning that
included teacher
practice that would
lead to CRP.

Coach/AP
Meeting
Document:
• Internal
weekly
data
tracker
• 4DX
rubric for
the
facilitation
of math
tasks

Cycle 1 Expressed confusion
with the role
expectations of coach
and sought clarity.
Provided written
feedback to Hannah
asking that she be
more attentive to
ensuring my role as
coach was not treated
as a quasi-supervisor.
Coach/AP
Meeting
agenda
Document:
• 3 math
leadership
meeting
agendas
Cycle 2 Communicated inquiry
stance approach to
coaching with school
leadership.

Suggested
the instructional focus
be to focus on
promoting student
discourse specifically.

Explicitly shared my
coaching philosophy
with Hannah.

Shared the PLC
agenda/materials that
introduced student
discourse as the
instructional focus
and how teacher can
expect we engage in
that work.
Coach/AP
Meeting
agenda

Coach/AP
Meeting
Agenda

Document:
• 3 math
leadership
meeting
agendas

Cycle 3 Suggested and
developed a PLC data
meeting structure that
expanded data to
include video
recordings of
teachers’ classes.

Shared the data meeting
protocol.

Coach/AP
Meeting
Agenda

Document:
• 2 math
leadership
meeting
agenda

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The actions I took with school leaders both preceded and was concurrent with the actions
I had for teachers. The goal was to get teachers to experiment in the facilitation of math tasks to
create opportunities for students to share and justify their mathematical thinking by investigating
their practice using inquiry as stance. Table 2 outlines the coaching interactions with teachers
that occurred.

Table 2
Teacher Educator Actions With Teachers
Action researcher Coach

Setting Data collected
Before study

Objective:
Communicated
what coaching
support would
look like and
distinguished the
coach and AP
role.

Activity: Teachers
participated in
introductory PLC
meeting to get to
know members and
understand what to
expect from their
coach and their AP

PLC Meeting None
Objective: Modeled
for teachers how
they could use
different
technology
platforms in
conjunction for a
variety of
instructional
purposes.

Activity: Teachers
participated in a
demo math lesson
and then discussed
other ideas the
demo gave them.

PLC Meeting Document:
• Presentation
slides of
Demo lesson

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Action researcher Coach

Setting Data collected
Cycle 1 Objective:
Introduced a
reflective process
for teachers to
engage in around
a recent
classroom
interaction.

Objective: Teacher
collaboration on
the creation of a
lesson for the
2020 election.
Activity: Used
launching questions
to help teachers
reflect on a recent
study.

Activity: Brought pre-
work to the
collaboration to
help teacher
collaboration.
Coaching
Conversation

Collaboration
Meeting
Document:
• 2 Coaching
conversation
agendas per
teacher

Observations:
• 2 Zoom
recordings
per teacher
• 1 Zoom
recording for
collaboration
meeting

2 Critical
Reflections

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Action researcher Coach

Setting Data collected
Cycle 2 Objective: Gauged
how teachers
viewed their
practice and
helped them self-
identify their area
of focus.

Objective: Framed
the instructional
focus and how it
would be
addressed as a
PLC and in
coaching
conversations.

Literature that
informed activity:
Rodgers (2002)
Horn and Little
(2010)
van Es et al.
(2014)
Jay and
Johnson (2002)

Objective:
Leveraged internal
data tracker as an
entry point for
teachers to reflect
on their practice
Activity: Utilized
probing questions
around how and
why teachers
arrived at their
chosen focus area.

Setting up the new
PLC Structure
Activity:
Teachers read two
articles about
teacher inquiry
cycles and math
video club and
discussed
takeaways from the
articles.

Readings teachers
were asked to read:
Sherin (2003)
Fong (2020)

Activity: Adjusted the
coaching agenda to
include data
reflection
questions.

Coaching
Conversation

PLC Meeting

Document
• 2 Coaching
conversation
agendas per
teacher
• 2 PLC
meeting
agenda

Observations
• 2 Zoom
recordings
per teacher
• 2 PLC
Meeting –
Zoom
meeting
recordings

2 Critical
Reflections

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Action researcher Coach

Setting Data collected
Cycle 3 Objective: Teachers
will be able to
analyze how
student discourse
was facilitated
and identify
evidence of
student thinking
from a video clip.

Readings:
van Es et al.
(2014)
Trivette et
al. (2009)

Activity: Each week
the PLC reviewed
the following for
one member of the
PLC: lesson, a
video recording clip
(7–10 minutes)
facilitating a math
class, and student
work.

PLC Meeting Document
• 2 Coaching
conversation
agendas per
teacher

Observations
• 2 Zoom
recordings
per teacher
• 1 PLC
Meeting –
Zoom
recordings

2 Critical
Reflections

Phillip and Kyle met with me once a week for coaching conversations and met with the
PLC bi-weekly. At times, PLC meetings did not occur bi-weekly due to other school priorities
such as parent-teacher conferences and other scheduling conflicts. The coaching conversations
prompted reflection on a recently observed lesson and provided meaningful insight on teachers’
developmental meaning making systems. During cycle 2, the reflection time shifted to focus on
the teacher’s weekly exit ticket data–per the request of school leadership.
Data Collection
The purpose of this study was to investigate how I interacted with teachers and school
leaders to promote teacher inquiry as stance. As illustrated in my conceptual framework, I was
looking at how I managed my sandwiched positioning between teachers and school leaders.
Specifically, I was looking for how I encouraged teachers to take up inquiry as stance to explore
and experiment with their practice to promote student discourse. In relation to school leaders, I
47

was investigating how I engage teachers to include teacher inquiry into the instructional cycle.
As the action researcher, I served as the instrument of data collection and data analysis
(Maxwell, 2013). In this study, my data collection consisted of observations and documents. For
the purpose of this study, I observed coaching conversations from Phillip and Kyle because I was
able to hold regular meetings with these two teachers and experienced and experienced irregular
coaching conversations with the remain members of the PLC. I captured my interactions with the
remaining PLC members (i.e. Harold, Louis, and Kassandra), in addition to Phillip and Kyle,
during observations of PLC meetings.
Documents and Artifacts
Over the course of 3 months, I collected documents generated from the nature of my
coaching role. The generation of these documents occurred in direct relation to the settings of
planned actions and are recorded during and after those actions take place, which make these
documents primary sources that are data rich with firsthand accounts of events (Merriam &
Tisdell, 2015). Thus, I received permission from my school leaders to utilize documentation I
created or used in my coaching role for my action research. For teacher interactions, I collected
coaching conversation agendas, PLC agendas and written critical reflections. In both PLC and
individual teacher coaching conversations, I created agendas and took notes directly on the
agenda throughout the meeting. Similarly, for school leaders, I collected math leadership
meeting agendas with Hannah and Tiffani and written critical reflections. I maintained a digital
journal where I reflected after each formal week of coaching interactions with teachers and
school leaders. The total number of these critical reflections mirrored the number of weeks of the
action research study. For instance, PLC meetings, coaching conversations and leadership
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meetings all occurred three, seven, and eight times respectively which equates to 8 weeks of
critical reflections regarding my weekly teacher and school leadership interactions.
Additionally, questions I reflected on included: What do they see as their greatest
opportunities for improving practice? What kinds of experiences could I facilitate that might get
teachers closer to seeking changes? How can those experiences be shared in ways that normalize
problems of practice for the purpose of interrogating those problems together and experimenting
with new practice? My hope was that I would become more present during my interactions and
observations of teachers to see evidence of teacher learning. More specifically, I asked myself:
How do I work to challenge bureaucratic compliance measures constraining the instructional
coaching interactions when I have a seat at the planning table with school leaders?
Observations
Throughout my action research study, I conducted observations of my coaching
interactions with teachers and school leaders. Observations took place during PLC meetings,
coaching conversations, and math leadership meetings which were all held on Zoom. PLC
meetings occurred bi-weekly on Fridays when classes were asynchronous. Coaching
conversations occurred during the teacher’s preparation period approximately every other week.
The school’s distance learning bell schedule and constant adjustment to operating online created
fewer opportunities to meet with teachers and school leaders.
The quantity of observations collected was as follows: three-hour long PLC observations,
seven 45-minute coaching conversations observations per teacher participant, and 8 math
leadership meetings with Hannah and Tiffani. I received permission from school leaders and all
math teachers to record PLC meetings and coaching conversations. I did not have permission to
record math leadership meetings, thus I relied on observational jottings and meeting agendas to
49

help me critically reflect on the presence and influence of school leadership. Each Zoom
recording was transcribed through an online web platform called Rev.com.
The purpose of observations was to discern the coaching moves I used in my interactions
with teachers and school leaders to answer my research questions: How do I engage teachers
using anti-racist pedagogy as a stance so that they will critically reflect on their practice and
explore and experiment in the facilitation of math tasks using CRP? How do I engage school
leadership to encourage inquiry as a stance in teacher practice? To answer these questions, I
included a reflective process like what Rodgers (2002) describes as an iterative cycle of seeing,
description, analysis, and intelligent action. Generally, the observations captured sequences of
interactions, conversations, relevant participant characteristics, and the physical or virtual setting
of the observations. For example, PLC meetings I observed the dynamics of the PLC, how my
role influenced those dynamics, and nonverbal communications (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). I
also looked for conversations or dialogue that demonstrated how I encouraged teachers to
explore how student discourse was promoted. In coaching conversations, I observed the
characteristics of the teacher and the dialogue between me and the teacher. After all observations
I reflected on my own behavior, feelings, and responses in the moment.
It’s important that I captured my actions and responses while also noting internal thoughts and
interpretations during the observation.
Data Analysis
Bogdan and Biklen (2007) describe data analysis as a systematic process of organizing
and breaking data into manageable units with the goal of discovering findings. Merriam and
Tisdell (2015) describe data analysis as a recursive and dynamic process. Much like my
conceptual framework that illustrates an iterative process of interactions between school
50

stakeholders and student learning opportunities, my data analysis mirrored the cadence of this
process. My dissertation is constructed as an action research project, and data analysis occurred
after each action research cycle during the 3-month time span. Data analysis during data
collection used a priori codes focused on concepts present in my conceptual framework (Patton,
2007). This ensured that my actions yielded data that was applicable to my research questions
and allowed flexibility to adjust actions according to findings in previous observations (Merriam
& Tisdell, 2015).
Consistent with Coughlan (2019), each cycle included constructing and planning action
(documents), taking action (field notes and recordings), and evaluating action (reflections and
memos). Prior to analyzing an action cycle, I reviewed the data collected during the cycle to
write a memo. The memo synthesized what happened during the cycle, documented what I
learned, and made any applicable connection to a priori codes. Some of these a priori codes
(Figure 3) included instructional messaging, anti-racist pedagogy, coaching moves, toward
practice, and away from practice. The presence or lack of connections to the a priori
codes assisted me in understanding the level I was in according to my conceptual framework
how those levels interacted, and how to advance to the next level. For example, during the first
cycle my in the field analysis of coaching conversation transcripts revealed that I responded to
teachers in a way that moved them away from practice by responding to teachers with solutions
instead of probing questions to assist their investigation into their practice. This takeaway after
the first cycle showed me that I had yet to engage teachers in critical reflection which was the
first level of my original conceptual framework. Additionally, memos documented my thoughts
as a researcher and how I made sense of what learning in each action research cycle. More
specifically, the memo at the end of cycle 1 described the actions I took and how far I was able
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to get with teachers and school leaders. At the time of this memo, it became clear that I had yet
to have many interactions with school leaders about the importance of teacher inquiry. This
informed decisions about the next action research cycle and also helped me consider actions,
such as communicating my coaching philosophy with school leaders, that I would later
implement to engage with school leaders more directly about promoting teacher inquiry.
Organizing and analyzing data collection by cycles of action inquiry allowed me to
manage planned and unanticipated events that occurred during the implementation (Coughlan,
2019). More specifically, this increased my awareness to notice when engaging in certain acts
made useful contributions to this action research or would take my attention away complete.
Data analysis informed my responses in the field and allowed me to make sense of how my
collective actions shaped the study. For example, when school leaders asked that I include a
review of weekly data with teachers, I responded by incorporating data in a manner that was
more consistent with my conceptual framework. I discuss this moment in more detail in the
findings section.
Once I left the field, I engaged in more intensive analysis that included open coding,
cycles of coding, and creating a code book (Miles et al., 2014) as seen in Table 3. The open
coding process included the use of emergent codes when reexamining all the data collected in the
field. Emergent codes included carrying the mental work, activity driven, exerting structure,
teacher response and presence. In addition to emergent and a priori codes, I also used analytic
tools such as asking questions of the language in the data and drawing upon my experience
(Corbin & Strauss, 2014) to develop to assist me identifying any analytic and pattern codes
present.

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Table 3
Codebook Excerpt
A priori code Definition Examples
Instructional messaging The messaging teachers
receive regarding
instructional priorities from
school leadership and/or
coach.

A: Make sure that you start
with the exit ticket
exemplar, like we did last
week and uploading that
and then do the core tasks
exemplar and looking for
the pre, the misconceptions
and how you're going to
make connections to the
exit ticket.

A: One thing that I know
other departments are
doing is, they're limiting
their final to one standard.
… Students pick a standard
or you give students a
standard and they go ahead
and do a presentation on
that particular standard on
what they've learned.

A: Did we see Tiffani’s email
about the NP document?
Any questions about this
email or the document?
This is the document.

A: She sent one a while back
saying about grade
replacements and replacing
Z's that if you have a quiz,
but students, for instance,
didn't do the exit ticket or
the assignment, that quiz
grade, say they have a Z for
that, that quiz grade she
replaced the Z.

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Limitations
The context of COVID-19 and unprecedented consequences of the pandemic created
challenges that I had to navigate throughout the study. These challenges included navigating
what I viewed as a school leaders’ actions of creating a culture of low expectations for students
and assisting teachers with adjusting to online instruction.
The culture of low expectations at College Prep High was expressed in the ways school
leadership adjusted the grading system as way to alleviate the stress students felt with managing
fulfilling school expectations while also managing the impact pandemic had on their home lives.
At the beginning of fall 2020, College Prep High implemented a standard-based grading system.
The intention of standards-based grading was to emphasize the value of learning to students by
tracking student progress on a standard and providing students multiple opportunities to
demonstrate mastery. Students were assigned one assignment, which was attached to one
standard, per week for each class. Across all content areas, students struggled to complete and
turn in assignments which negatively impacted students’ grades and led to a high number of no-
pass (NP) grades. According to school leaders and counselors, they heard from students that they
were not doing the work because it was too much work and they were overwhelmed by the
amount of work to complete. School leaders were concerned about the negative effects of a
student receiving an NP fall semester and their motivation for the following semester and
worried students receiving NPs was due to teachers not implementing standards-based grading
correctly. In response to these student concerns, school leaders asked teachers to create a one
pager of 4 assignments, typically assignments with the same standard, students can complete to
receive a passing grade. Additionally, school leaders developed an NP tracker that listed every
NP and the corresponding teacher. For the last 3 weeks of the Fall 2020 semester, teachers were
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required to update the grade and supports they provided to each student in the track on a weekly
basis. In lowering the expectations for students to 4 assignments out of the possible 17, school
leaders communicated to teachers that what teachers did in their classroom was secondary to
ensuring that students passed. The school’s focus was on if students were passing and I as the
coach, it was made my responsibility to ensure they knew how to implement standards-based
grading in the gradebook. This focus on students’ grades and assignment completion continued
in the second semester and I was asked to prioritize grade and assignment data in my meetings
with them. This focus on gr and monitors students learning progress on a specific standard while
providing increasingly high number of no-pass grades students received. This limited the time I
had to develop teacher inquiry and reflection into their facilitation of math tasks.
Math teachers at College Prep High navigate a myriad of online instructional challenges.
Teachers needed to digitize their course for online instruction, learn how to instruct via Zoom,
adopt digital tools for lesson delivery, and experiment with creative strategies to sustain student
engagement. Due to a school policy, teachers were also teaching to a Zoom class where students
did not have their camera on and the teacher had to rely on what was in the Zoom chat or what
students shared when they came off mute. The lack of Zoom video on made it difficult for Phillip
read the room when waiting for students to respond and teachers were unsure how to interpret
the silence. For Phillip in particular, he struggled with students’ consistent silence and saw
waiting for students to share their thinking took up instructional minutes he could use to model
their thinking. Data collection with respect to observations of Philip promoting discourse was at
times difficult to collect when students appeared unresponsive. Considering the challenges
teachers were managing in their practice, I viewed a push toward critical reflection as one that
was outside of his zone of proximal development. Kyle did not experience the same challenges
55

as Phillip and actually had success in promoting discourse in the whole group setting but
struggled in breakout rooms.
Delimitations
Although I identified where Phillip and Kyle were on the developmental typology, I did
not refer back to their orientations to help inform my interactions with them. Instead, I adopted a
one size fit all approach for both of them.
This action research also required that I take on a new approach to coaching that I had yet
to implement and was different from the way the CMO had instructional coaches trained. I was a
novice coach going through cycle of inquiry as an action researcher, managing my school
instrumental orientation, and experimenting with how to make my tacit knowledge explicit for
teachers. As a second-year coach and first-year coach attempting to incorporate CRP and critical
reflection my actions were constrained because I was a novice coach. While I was not new to the
ideas of CRP, I was new to enacting them through cycles of inquiry. Thus, I relied heavily on the
planning I did before coaching conversations to shape my interactions with teachers by scripting
launching questions.
Credibility and Trustworthiness
During the data collection and data analysis phases, I implemented a few of Maxwell’s
(2011) strategies to maximize credibility and trustworthiness: rich data, triangulation, and
numbers. Process validity in action research includes using triangulation for multiple
perspectives and a variety of methods used to collect data, such as observations and reflections,
to ensure that the study promoted ongoing learning. I continued to learn as I collected data and
this helped me engage in catalytic validity and being open to reorienting how I understood my
role as coach.
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The actions of this study required collaboration with teachers and school leadership, the
primary stakeholders. I was the subject of this action research, and the teachers were both the
participants and insiders of this action research project. I acted in the spirit of collaboration so as
to not coerce teachers into actions or treat them as a means to an end for research. Herr and
Anderson (2015) refer to the collaboration of all parties as democratic validity and call for action
researchers to consider to what extent that collaboration with stakeholders was observed in the
action research cycles.
The extent of my collaboration with teachers depended on how I navigated the role of
researcher and coach. The two roles were inextricably intertwined and in both roles my behavior
demonstrated integrity as a colleague and action researcher. It was important that I
acknowledged the data I collected in my role as coach and the data I collected as a researcher.
For instance, I shared with teachers that the Zoom recordings of our coaching conversations was
not something I would share with school leaders because I did that as a part of my role as an
action researcher. Given my dual role identity in this action research study, the data required for
each role could be the same (Coughlan, 2019). Thus, I considered other ways I might capture the
data I collect for work through reflective notes and received consent from teachers and school
leaders to use any data collected for my coaching role. Part of this was addressed by participating
in critical and reflective dialogue with a critical friend as a form of dialogic validity. It is within
this dialogue that I discerned ethical considerations of how and the extent in which I collaborated
and informed stakeholders of my study as a researcher.
Ethics
The nature of an insider action research project of my current organization involved
ethical considerations, some anticipatable and others that unfolded with the implementation of
57

the action research project. As part of staying aware of all ethical considerations, this action
research treated people as ends, action that did not increase power, and served the good of the
whole. Because this action research project was focused on my actions with teachers and school
leadership personnel with whom I worked directly, it was important I remained attentive to these
relationships and the dual role of being both researcher and coach.
The role of a coach at my school was a position of power because of the decreased class
load, perception of authority, and the expert-novice binary that arose in the enactment of
coaching. In discussing transformational learning, Mezirow (1991) recognizes the power and
influence of a teacher educator and maintains that planning transformational learning without
making the learner aware of the results of the transformation is ethical if done properly. While
Coughlan (2019) and their colleagues argue that ethical considerations include meaningful
informed consent, transparency, and political consequences that can come with action research. I
addressed these ethical considerations in one-on-one conversations with each teacher where I
explained the purpose of my action research, sought consent to record my meetings with them,
and assured them that these were not recordings any school leaders will see.
In navigating and negotiating ethical behaviors for each role, I engaged in a structured
ethical reflection process before each action research cycle; this allowed me to grapple with
ethical principles guiding my action research and how I was understanding them (Coughlan,
2019). For example, I considered how confidentiality and anonymity be preserved in action
research. To help mitigate this I utilized pseudonyms when writing up my findings. Further, I
also asked myself how informed consent can remain meaningful in an evolving action research. I
addressed this by maintaining transparency around the work I intended to do with teachers by
communicating this with Hannah and Tiffani in our math leadership meetings. I also went
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through the IRB review process to ensure that this action research study followed federal
regulations. The goal was to remain critically aware of my position of power as a researcher and
coach so that I could avoid further disturbing the power dynamic between me and my colleagues.
Findings
In this section, I discuss my findings in relation to my research questions: How do I
engage teachers using anti-racist pedagogy as a stance so that they will critically reflect on their
practice and explore and experiment in the facilitation of math tasks using CRP? How do I
engage school leadership to encourage inquiry as a stance in teacher practice? This section will
answer Research Question 1 in two parts: my progress and areas I grew in my practice. In the
first part, I discuss the actions I took to establish conditions and opportunities for teachers to
engage in the beginning stages of Rodgers’s (2002) reflection and to collectively explore and
discuss teacher facilitation of math tasks. In the second part, I discuss the areas in which I grew
as coach to promote more teacher inquiry interactions. For Research Question 2, I discuss my
growth in using adaptive leadership behaviors to promote teacher inquiry with school leaders.
Research Question 1, Part 1: Establishing Conditions and Opportunities to Reflect and
Collective Exploration
At the outset of the study, teachers were not engaging in any form of reflection, and I
realized that before I could get them to explore and experiment in their practice, I first had to
help them engage in critical reflection. Although I set out to promote critical reflection, I was
able to support their adoption of a reflective cycle. To address part 1 of research question 1, the
remainder of this section discusses the four themes related to this finding: established conditions
through structure/process/routines, opportunities to reflect through the enactment of routine,
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opportunities to reflect on in relation to modifications of my coaching practice, and collective
exploration. Followed
Establishing Conditions Through Structure/Process/Routine
According to Mujis et al. (2014), teacher learning is supported through the time to engage
in the learning task and the opportunity to learn. Sustained focus on the learning task over time
leads to continuous teacher improvement (Elmore, 2002). Consistent with this, I allocated time
for teacher learning on every coaching conversation agenda and the learning opportunity was
embedded in the launching questions and the time for reflection associated with those questions.
During the 3-month study, I had 14 coaching conversation agendas split between Phillip and
Kyle equally, 12 of those agendas included reflection time and launching questions and coaching
conversations were scheduled for 30 minutes per teacher but typically lasted approximately 45
minutes. Table 4 is an example of a typical coaching conversation agenda.

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Table 4
Coaching Conversation Agenda Template
Time Agenda item Launching questions
Meeting objective: By the end of this meeting, the teacher will receive thought partnership in
any requested support and reflect on a recent classroom observation.
4 minutes Check in Typically, the check in question probes
the teacher’s personal wellbeing.
10 minutes Item 1: Math Data Tracker
a
• What trends or surprises do you
see in the Week 4 data?
• What do we know about what’s
happening in our classroom that
might help us understand the data
point?
• What part of what you shared is
within our control so that our
actions can influence student’s
learning experience and ultimately
the data?
10 minutes Item 2: Observation
Reflection/Feedback
• Describe the learnings students
demonstrated during class. How
do you know?
• Can you recall any feelings or
thoughts you had during the
lesson?
• Interpret: By the end of the lesson,
did you feel that you addressed
the objective with students?

5 minutes Action Step Given your reflection and my feedback,
what are you considering as next
steps?
1 minute Pluses/Deltas • What went well during this
meeting?
• What did not go well and can be
improved for the next meeting?

a
Originally, this item served as time for teachers to update the data tracker. The launching
question for the math data tracker were not used until mid-way through the study when the
school’s focus shifted to grades.

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As demonstrated in the template, each agenda allocated 50 percent of the meeting time to
teacher learning. In the 30 minutes allotted to the coaching conversation, 15 of those minutes
was meant for teacher learning. The learning task, the opportunity to learn, was primarily present
in Item 2 and the Action Step of the agenda. The launching questions under Item 2 were meant to
assist teachers in actively investigating their practice using Rodgers’s (2002) cycle of reflection.
The launching questions were intended to serve as model of what reflection should sound like
and a scaffold to assist teachers’ engagement in the cognitive act of reflection (Tharpe &
Gallimore, 1988). For instance, the first launching question was meant to help teachers learn to
see their practice through detailed description of their experience followed by an analysis of that
experience. The second and third launching questions were intended to help teachers to see with
other senses, such as their feelings during their instruction, and analyze how they were feeling in
relation to the intended objective they planned to reach with their students. These questions were
meant to serve as a starting point for teachers to develop their ability to see and describe
instructional moments. Consistently making time for teacher reflection and providing launching
questions encouraged teachers to engage in a reflective cycle.
Opportunities to Reflect Through the Enactment of Routine
Across the 3-month study, I enacted the learning opportunity I constructed using the
launching questions in Figure 1 in six out of the 12 coaching conversations. The learning
opportunity was unevenly distributed with Phillip having four learning opportunities compared
to Kyle’s two learning opportunities. Prior to each coaching conversation, I observed teachers
teach to familiarize myself with the lesson teachers were going to reflect on during our meeting.
After each observation, I met with the teacher and spent approximately 12 minutes supporting
teacher learning through reflection. As an example of this process, the excerpt below shows how
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I scaffolded the reflective learning task for Phillip by using the launching questions and asking
applicable follow up questions based on Phillip’s responses or my own observation of his lesson.
A: So, the first one is, describe the learning students’ demonstrate during class. And
how did you know, or how did you see it as their teacher?
P: So, I think my thing was in three parts. It was, the first part was the matching, and
the second part was the defining the variable and then third part was the geometry
problems. The first part, I felt like they understood because I saw that through
Classkick throughout the most of my classes. They were able to match correctly,
maybe the, Do Now helped in that regards. … I thought the, Do Now was
effective because it allowed them to see the words right away, the five times as
much or four minutes longer.
P: So, I think that actually helped with the matching. Most of my, actually like 80%
of my students were able to match correctly. It was the second part where I felt
stuck and I didn’t know how to navigate, maybe I should have scaffolded the
second part better. I think my presentation, the second part was bad, this part right
here. So, they were stuck, when they were asking them to find.
A: And how did you know that? Or what did you see when you …
P: Because I didn’t see much work on Classkick through most of my classes, or
some classes got better than other, but a lot of people, there’s only a couple of
students of both, that attempted to define the, Z variable.
P: Yeah. And then, even Oliver said he was confused, he’s getting confused. So, in
the chat too.
A: I noticed that too.
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P: Yeah.
A: Was there any other student that chatted you, saying they’re confused?
P: Nope. I think just Oliver, in all my classes.
A: Are there students who …
P: Oliver, usually when he’s confused, he’ll tell me he’s confused.
In this example, I facilitated Phillip’s movement into reflection by asking the launching question
on the agenda “describe the learning students demonstrated during class,” thus enacting the use
of the launching question as prompt towards reflection as I intended. I then furthered the
launching question by adding “How did you see it as their teacher.” Here I guided Phillip to first
focus on seeing and describing what he saw as evidence of student learning (Rodgers, 2002).
Phillip’s response was to describe the learning experience in what he identified as three key
components of the lesson and conclusions on how well students performed with little detail on
how he arrived at his conclusion that they were stuck. Thus, I again asked Phillip, “How do you
know, or what did you see?” By doing this, I redirected Phillip’s attention to the learning
experiences and encouraged him to slow down and to be present in seeing and describing the
moments (Rodgers, 2002) that led to his understanding that they were stuck. Phillip responded
by pointing to student work evidence—or lack thereof—he could see on the technology platform
his students were using. He also pointed to evidence of his student Oliver saying he was
confused.
A: Okay. Are there other students like Oliver, who would tell you when they’re
confused?
P: Yeah. No, I haven’t seen it.
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A: Do you think there’s a culture there, where students feel like they can say that
they’re confused?
P: If there’s a culture? I try to tell them, to say, “If you’re confused, please let me
know.” But I haven’t developed that culture where they’re, willing to open up or
willing to tell me.
A: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
P: So, I’m wondering how I could put that as well. It’s just silence or no response.
A: And you interpret silence and no response as in?
P: As in?
A: Still stuck?
P: Yeah. That’s what I figured.
Phillip and I then engaged in a back and forth with me using probing questions to help Phillip see
his class and his teaching practice. The probing questions were evidence of me actively engaging
Phillip in the cognitive act of elaboration for the purpose of producing a more descriptive
reflection that allows him to see student responses and learning in relation to his practice (Tharp
& Gallimore, 1988). The launching questions coupled with the probing questions modeled the
type of descriptors I expected to hear and by the end of the interaction Phillip was able to provide
details that led him to consider the role his classroom environment has on student participation
and his ability to tangibly see student learning.
During the time I was able to provide Kyle with a learning opportunity through engaging
him in a reflective task, I employed the same approach that I used with Phillip. Kyle’s response
to the first launching question was consistent with Phillip’s response in that he initially left out
the details that supported his conclusions. After employing similar coaching moves, I used with
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Phillip, Kyle was able to describe the student thinking he saw during his instruction. In his
discussion about student thinking, Kyle naturally began to discuss a specific moment in class
where he intended to model a math task for students so that they could do subsequent tasks on
their own. Before Kyle was able to complete his model, students began to private message him
what they believed to be the answer. The excerpt below shows how I utilized probing questions
to facilitate Kyle’s ability to reflect on what was a frustrating moment for him and see his
practice as it related to his students.
A: And you said those answers were incorrect, correct?
K: None of them were correct.
A: Were they partially correct?
K: I got their idea. They had the right idea. For example, if 30 ounces of metal is
created by mixing zinc with silver, that one. They would use all the right
numbers, right? Like 12 times the number of zinc and stuff like that. They would
use 12. They would use S, they would use C, they would use 30. But they would
all be jumbled up in a different order.
A: That didn’t communicate with the context you were saying.
K: Right. Exactly.
The first two probing questions I asked–” And you said those answers were incorrect, correct?
and “Were they partially correct”—were meant to verify what Kyle saw and to help him
elaborate on what student thinking was demonstrated in their private messages to him. In doing
so, I pushed Kyle to slow down and ground his reflection in the descriptive details that took
place during this frustrating moment (Rodgers, 2002). Kyle was able to articulate that he did “get
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their idea” and proceeded to describe the learning experience he saw from their messages in
much greater detail than “none of them was correct.”
A: I see. And then my next question is, why don’t you want students to go ahead?
K: That’s a …
A: I think one thing I heard you say a lot was, you got to take a step-by-step with me.
You really wanted them to stay with you. And my question is why?
K: I think at a certain point I got frustrated because they were sending me so many
incorrect answers. And that told me that they were thinking on their own, which is
good. But they weren’t paying attention to the steps. And it was only number one
[crosstalk 00:13:53]. Yeah, it was only number one. And they were already
moving forward. I told them, just take this one step-by-step with me. And then
they would send me an answer.
K: I would tell them, try again. And then that’s when they would say, “Oh, I have
already given up.” And I was like, this is number one [inaudible 00:01:47:16].
We’re on step two or three on number one. So, I think it was another reminder for
me, that word problems really freak them out. I noticed that with my seniors,
when I was at Simon. I’m sure it’s a lot more for the ninth graders.
A: I’m hearing students were trying to do the problem on their own and then getting
discouraged. Because they weren’t getting it right. And you were getting
frustrated because you were like, I’m trying to explain it to you right now, and
you’re not letting me.
I probed Kyle further by asking, “Why he didn’t want students to go ahead” and in response he
shared that he was feeling frustrated and revealed a belief he had about students and their ability
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to persevere in solving word problems. Additionally, I grounded my probing question in the
learning experience by using a statement I heard him say in class during my observation as the
evidence I wanted him to consider. As a result, Kyle was able to unearth his own assumption that
word problems “freak students out” and they were more likely to experience success by going
step by step with him (Rodgers, 2002).
A: What happened in fifth period, did this happen to other periods?
K: It happened all day.
A: Okay. So, all day, students were eager to just try the problem [crosstalk 00:15:49].
Well, that’s something to really be happy about [crosstalk 01:48:54]. But by fifth
period, did you still find yourself getting more and more frustrated as the day
went on, because it kept happening?
K: Yeah. I was like, I have these steps for you. I think I could have definitely
adjusted to their actions. That probably would have been better, just an error
analysis. But I think by fifth period, I was just so over it. The human in me came
out
…
A: I think it’s great the students are trying to think on their own too. I think it’s even
more awesome that you are reflective in identifying, like, I had some frustration
as a teacher because all these students were doing something, that was outside of
what you had originally envisioned for that particular section of the lesson. Like
you had envisioned it being one way and that was not how they were responding
to it in class. Which sometimes happens.
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K: Yeah. Which is completely fine. I think I was more pressured because I was
strapped for time. I think that was the main thing that got to me. It wasn’t that
they were so fully engaged. I loved it. I was like, Oh my goodness. I wish we had
a 2-hour class to talk about this. I would let you go off and explore.
Kyle’s analysis also revealed that other factors such as lack of instructional time, virtual
classroom setting, and the student trend of attempting the problem with little success all
contributed to his feeling of frustration and decision to show the students step by step. In
response, I normalized Kyle’s experience by sharing that in my own teaching practice I had
experienced frustration when I was pressed for time and lessons did not go how I envisioned
(Horn & Little, 2010).
K: I think it passed my mind as I was talking about the other stuff, as coach Kyle
came up, that kind of went out the door.
A: Coach Kyle [inaudible 01:52:10]. Because I definitely don’t think you were
angry. I’d sense frustration and just wanting to get students to a certain place. And
I can see definitely what you’re talking about. Having that tunnel vision, feeling
strapped for time. And it’s like, we need to just do it this way so I can move on to
the next thing.
A: So, I guess you already started talking about what your suggested actions that
could be. Which is really what I want you to think about, in these moments where
you feel frustrated or tunnel visioning and students are doing things outside of
what you expected them to do. How can you respond to that? Or what might be
something [inaudible 01:52:56].
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K: I think I could definitely utilize everything that my students give me. I think
oftentimes I forget that some of them were actually engaged. I can definitely
utilize their knowledge better. Their prior knowledge, like the error analysis I was
talking about. I wish I had done that actually. Just put up a wrong answer, that a
student gave anonymously and then work out from there. I think showing them
that by example would have been better than just like telling them, just follow
what I’m doing.
Subsequently, I asked Kyle to think about how he would respond to students in the future when
they do not respond in a manner he expects. Kyle’s response was to do an error analysis using
student response as starting point for class discussion. This was consistent with Rodgers (2002)
fourth phase of the reflective cycle where the teacher learns to take intelligent action for their
next learning experience.
Opportunities to Reflect in Relation to Modifications to My Coaching Practice
Towards the end of fall semester of distance learning, I noticed leadership’s focus and my
focus as a coach were diametrically opposed. Leadership began to put a heavy emphasis on
quantitative data that was grade related and I was focusing on using qualitative data about
teacher practices and their interaction with their students to guide their reflection on student
learning. Leadership messaged to teachers via professional development throughout fall semester
that the not passing (NP) rate should not exceed 15% per teacher. In the last five weeks of fall
semester, most teachers were nowhere near this goal. For example, 35% of students enrolled in
all math classes had an NP. In response to the overall high NP rate across all subject areas,
leadership implemented a school wide data tracker that listed every student who had an NP and
their teacher. Teachers were required to update this tracker weekly with the students’ grades and
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supports they provided to the students that week. At the same time, leadership placed the
emphasis on grades and the NP rate, they were grappling with the competing tensions: how well
positioned teachers were to provide students with the instructional support they needed given the
virtual context something teachers had not previously done and the recognition that conditions
for students were much more challenging during COVID. This was further complicated by
managing the relationship between not being overly harsh with not passing students and an
overwhelming number of students who needed to recover credits during summer school.
My school leaders believed that if teachers were looking at data on a weekly basis this
would positively impact NP rates. At their insistence, I changed my practices to incorporate
weekly exit ticket data into my coaching conversations. The data tracker and the corresponding
launching questions were priority agenda items during coaching conversations in the latter half
of my action research project. I incorporated new launching questions specifically to assist
teachers in using data as a starting point to reflect on their instructional practices. On the
surface, the idea of using revised launching questions in tandem with the data tracker to assist
teacher reflection into their practice seemed like a compromise that would address the competing
emphasis of leadership and me. This change in my practice led to traditional conversations
between me and the Kyle and Phillip that did not promote their turning towards practice or
critical reflection of their roles in relation to the students’ learning (Horn & Little, 2010; Horn et
al., 2015).
I framed the launching questions around the weekly assignment data the math team
tracked. Teachers assigned and graded one assignment per week. After grading the assignment,
teachers tracked the following data points for each class period: completion percentage, mastery
percentage, and missing percentage. Additionally, teachers had the option to list the
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misconception, next steps, and identify target students for the next step. Table 5 is an example of
the data tracker, Phillip’s specifically, that I looked at with teachers as requested by my school
leaders.

Table 5
Teacher Weekly Math Data Tracker and Launching Questions
Period 1 Period 2 Period 3 Period 4 Period 6
Standard and
assignment
F-LE Exit
Slip 3
Constructing
Exponential
Equations
from a Graph
F-LE Exit
Slip 3
Constructing
Exponential
Equations
from a Graph
F-LE Exit
Slip 3
Constructing
Exponential
Equations
from a Graph
F-LE Exit
Slip 3
Constructing
Exponential
Equations
from a Graph
F-LE Exit
Slip 3
Constructing
Exponential
Equations
from a Graph
Completion % 44% 50% 42% 59% 60%
Mastery % 31% 50% 27% 44% 46%

Note. The table skips period 5 because that was the teacher’s planning period. The launching
questions that accompany this data tracker is listed in Table 4.

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The way the questions framed the data teachers were analyzing and the use of collective
words (i.e., we, our) did little to encourage teachers to move toward practice (Horn & Little,
2009) and examine how their teaching practices contributed to the data. The first launching
question, “What trends or surprises do you see in the data,” was oriented towards teachers
turning away from practice and pushed teachers to share observations that were reflective only in
the quantitative data. The second launching question had the potential to push teachers toward
practice because the question asked teachers to consider “What’s happening in our classroom.”
The phrase “What’s happening in our classroom” signaled an engagement in Rodgers’s (2002)
first stage of reflection, description. Simultaneously, the phrase “What’s happening in our
classroom” was vague because it did not directly point to a description of the teacher’s practice
in relation to the students. The framing of the launching questions did not foster an appropriate
disorienting dilemma (Mezirow, 1991) for the teacher to reflect on their role as the facilitator of
student learning. Thus, the framing of the questions as written left it open for the teacher to turn
away from or toward practice. By extension, the integration of collective words such as “our,”
“we,” and “us,” further pushed teachers away from practice. I used collective words to avoid a
space that may feel accusatory for the teacher. However, the use of these collective words
inadvertently did not promote teacher recognition that they were responsible for students’
learning and therefore did not turn teachers toward practice. This is more explicitly visible in the
third launching question where teachers were asked to consider “What’s within our control so
that our actions can influence students’ learning” where the use of the word our suggested that
responsibility was shared between the teacher and the coach. The collective word use did not
foster an appropriate disorienting dilemma (Mezirow, 1991) for the teacher to reflect on their
role as the facilitator of student learning. Therefore, the combination of ambiguous questions that
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did not push teachers to consider their specific practices as teachers and the language of
collective words like “us” and “our” embedded in the question did not encourage teachers to turn
towards practice.
My enactment of the launching questions and the follow up questions I asked during the
data conversation was consistent with the constraints identified in the analysis of the intended
curriculum. An excerpt of my coaching conversation with Phillip below illustrates how the vague
framing of the launching questions and use of collective words such as “us” and “we” led to a
turn away from practice.
A: What trends or surprises do you see in the data this week?
P: Okay. So out of the four that I’ve seen, my sixth period has the most participation,
has the most submission rates. And I would say that’s kind of weird cause they
are the least participating class. And then my first period, they’re usually very
good. And then they only have 44%. So, it’s like kind of like what Kyle saw last
week for some reason.
A: Yep. So, sixth period has the highest submission rate, but the lowest
participation.
P: And first period, in class participation is really good. And when I checked for
understanding for my first period, most of them usually understand, but they
didn’t really submit that much this time.
A: Are they the lowest this week?
P: Submission? Yeah. Out of the four so far. Yes. And last week they were the
highest, submission rate wise. So, I don’t know what’s happened there, overall
though the average is higher for completion this week than last week.
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A: Yeah.
P: Same with the mastery. It went from 46% to 53%. Well, I have not included third
period, which might bring it down. But as of now, yeah, third period probably
would be down. And I think this week more people came to office hours, and we
worked a lot of problems. I think that’s, that has to do something with it. Last
week only one person showed up, this week I, I met up with a couple of people
one-on-one and then five, six students this time. So maybe that has something to
do with it.
P: Yes. So, let’s see. I think two was from six period. One was from fourth, one was
from second. Two was from fourth. One was from second. And I don’t remember
the last one, I think fourth. Yeah. I think three from fourth, two from six one from
second. Yeah. No one from first. So maybe that’s why.
A: What else do you know? What else do we know about what was happening in our
class that might help us understand the data point?
The data conversation above reveals that my use of the launching question did not move Phillip
toward practice. According to Horn and Little (2010), a turn toward practice is defined as a set of
conversational routines that normalizes the problem of practice as expected and shared, allows
for detailed discussion and revision of specific classroom instances related to the problem of
practice to allow for emergent advice that generalizes the problem to make connections to
principles of teaching. A turn away from practice is defined as a set of conversational routines
that limits the investigation of specific classroom instances, orients the character of the problem
of one that is individual and not shared, and positions the teacher to be the passive recipient of
advice (Horn & Little, 2010). By asking “What trends or surprises do you see in the data,” I
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pointed Phillip to look at the data, which ostensibly represented his students and their
performance. The question itself was disconnected from practice because it was not oriented
around Phillip’s interaction with his students and was instead focused on the product of student
learning. Phillip’s response to the question,
So out of the four that I’ve seen, my sixth period has the most participation, has the most
submission rates. … [Mastery] went from 46% to 53%. … And I think this week more
people came to office hours, and we worked a lot of problems. I think that has to do
something with it.
described connections to moves he believed positively influenced the data. Phillip’s reference of
the moves he made to support students was a slight turn toward practice because he referenced
his role as their teacher. Overall, it represented a turn away from practice because he did not
elaborate on specific classroom instances related to the lack of participation or what happened in
office hours. To get Phillip to elaborate on the learning conditions of his classroom (Horn &
Little, 2010), I asked the second launching question exactly as written, “What else do we know
about what was happening in our class that might help us understand the data point?” This
question had potential to turn Phillip towards practice because it asked Phillip to provide details
to events or contexts of his classroom, but only as it related to the product of student learning.
The question utilized the collective word “we” and “our” as if I shared the teaching
responsibility with Phillip and limited his agency as the teacher to articulate and revise a specific
classroom instance.
P: Okay. So, let’s see. This one was construction week four. Oh, this is the most
useful. Okay. So, this one in my class, it was kind of hard. Lesson was kind of
hard for them
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A: In what the lesson was hard. You’re saying?
P: I felt like when I was checking for understanding within the class, a lot of people
weren’t getting it right away. We had a practice a couple of times with the graphs,
but yeah, I guess towards the end of it, it was getting better because there is a lot
of passing rates.
A: And this was the checking for understanding across the board that students seem
to understand that.
P: Yes, like the period you came to, it was kind of difficult. I forgot which period
that was. I think it was fourth. No, sixth period. Yeah. Sixth period. Sixth period.
So that period, very low participation. Yeah. So, it was hard to get through to
them, but I guess towards the end of it with more practice, I think they got a little
bit better. Yeah. I just really struggled with finding the multiplier. They’re good
with y-intercept now, just the multiplier part, that’s what they are struggling with
a lot.
A: So, when you say they have the lowest participation, what does that mean? What
does that look like?
P: Oh, okay. So, it looks like when I like call it, like randomly calling people, they
don’t answer it. That’s one. Just even getting them to log into Power School. I
mean Classkick sometimes. And then, and then of course showing the work on
Classkick and those three. So yeah. So, like cold calling, they don’t answer. And
then yeah. Not showing work on class for logging in the class
A: And then for first.
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P: Yeah. And so, I think my issue is like, I’m trying to figure out if they’re
unresponsive. Cause they’re just scared. Cause they don’t know the answer and
they’re scared of talking so they are unresponsive. Cause they’re just not there.
So, that’s maybe more check for understandings, somehow.
A: So, you’re trying to figure out why their unresponsive because they don’t
understand or are they unresponsive because they’re scared to talk.
P: Don’t understand or scared to talk or not present.
Phillip response to my question “what else do we know about what’s happening” included, “this
lesson was hard for them,” “I kept checking for understanding but students weren’t getting it,”
and “sixth period has very low participation.” Phillip’s response was a turn away from practice
because it was insufficient in providing details that incorporated his role as their teacher in
relation to students learning experience. After Phillip responded to the second launching
question, I made the following subsequent statements to extract more details about what Phillip
seemed to be identifying as a problem of practice: “When you say they have the lowest
participation, what does that mean? What does that look like? And then for first.” And Phillip
responded with the additional details I asked for:
So, it looks like when I like call it, like randomly calling people, they don’t answer it.
That’s one. Just even getting them to log into Power School. I mean Classkick
sometimes. And then, and then of course showing the work on Classkick … So, like cold
calling, they don’t answer. Not showing work on class for logging in the class … And
so, I think my issue is like, I’m trying to figure out if they’re unresponsive. Cause they’re
just, they’re scared. Cause they don’t know the answer and they’re scared of talk or
unresponsive. Cause they’re just not there.
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Phillip’s response was oriented toward practice because he was able to revise and specify the
problem of participation in his classes. My follow up question, “So you’re trying to figure out if
they are responsive because they don’t understand or are they unresponsive because they’re
scared to talk?” turned Phillip away from practice as I did not push him to unpack or analyze his
ideas any further. I did not challenge or question the dichotomy of his interpretation and why in
both scenarios the onus was on the student.
A: Did students get a chance to start their exit ticketing class last week?
P: Last week? Good question. Let me think back. Did we run out of time last week?
Can you give me one second? Let me see what I got through. I got to refresh
myself. I don’t remember. See the slides were, this was for the first day, right?
Day one. For the exit ticket.
…
A: Okay. So, given everything that you shared on, what part of what you shared is
within our control so that our actions can influence student learning and student
learning experiences and ultimately the data.
P: Okay. So, are you talking about with regards to how it affects that this data, right?
A: Yeah. The data, but also like given like what you shared around what you were
noticing about students and participation, like what are some actions? What are,
what might be some next steps or actions that you can take that might influence
what that experience looks like or what you see and, and ultimately the data.
P: So, I guess with participation is keep emailing them or reminding them and then
keep like, I try to message them and say, “Hey, why aren’t you present?” If that’s
what you’re asking.
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A: Reminding them to do the exit tickets,
P: Or like, because they don’t respond, say “Hey, are you okay? Like what’s going
on?” Just like messaging them, but I still don’t get it. I still don’t get a response
when I do that sometimes. And then with the exit ticket. Yeah. I think, I think
carving out some time to start it would be, I think I should continue to do that at
least one, one of the two days of the week. And I usually do that on the second
day. I give them like 10 or 15 minutes to like start it and ask them questions. So
about 10 to 15 minutes, that affects the data. And then to I guess that effect
mastery, I feel like the misconception did help like reviewing the misconceptions.
Cause I never did that last semester really, I did like maybe once or twice, but
maybe this time it helped.
I stayed with him and reinforced Phillip’s turn away from examining his own practice and then
continued to focus on the student by asking “Did they get to start on the exit ticket in class.” By
asking consecutive follow up questions focused on the student and asking the launching
questions as written, which also did not explicitly telegraph a teacher practice lens, I perpetuated
the idea that the students’ responses happened within a vacuum and did not include how the
teacher’s practice and belief systems about their students can influence the teacher’s facilitation,
observation and interpretation of the lesson and their students. I ended the data conversation by
asking Phillip the third launching question, “So given everything that you shared on, what part of
what you shared is within our control so that our actions can influence student learning and
student learning experiences and ultimately the data,” without directing Phillip to reflect on the
role of his facilitation of the learning task or the learning conditions he established played on
students’ ability to engage in the lesson. Phillip responded by sharing the following next steps he
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planned to take as the teacher: remind students to do the exit ticket, give them time in class, and
check in with students one on one who were not responsive. Absent from Phillip’s next steps
were the intentional adjustments Phillip was going to make within his practice to promote
student participation and discourse during the lesson. By the end of the data conversation, the
launching questions and subsequent probing questions I asked did not push Phillip towards
investigating his practice in relation to the way students were reacting to his lesson. Instead, the
questions sustained Phillip’s turn away from practice and implied that describing what was
happening with students was sufficient for his reflection as a teacher.
Collective Exploration
Kyle and Phillip were also a part of the math PLC with Harold, Kassandra, and Louis. As
a PLC we named that we wanted to promote a student discourse that demonstrated how students
were making sense of the content or lesson. Teachers and I believed that by actively encouraging
students to share their currenting thinking about the lesson, it would translate to some
internalization of math for students. Although I indicated in my conceptual framework
promoting a form of student discourse, neither I or the PLC clearly defined student discourse
prior to this study. While we agreed on the idea of intentionally promoting student discourse, we
did not concretize teaching implications or investigate what promoting student discourse
entailed. In the reconstruction of my conceptual framework, I clarified the definition of student
discourse as a precursor to achieving intentional learning. Researchers such as Elmore (1995)
characterize intentional student discourse as discourse that reveals students’ current thinking and
sense making of the lesson as intentional learning. Intentional learning refers to the cognitive
processes that enhance learning in a way that provides students with the opportunity to share
their thinking and promotes their ability to construct and articulate sophisticated explanations of
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concepts they are learning (Elmore, 1995). Teaching in service of intentional learning has
implications for how teachers teach and facilitate students’ learning and those implications is
what the PLC data meetings were intended to explore the interaction of teachers’ instruction and
student learning.
We explored this interaction by using an updated PLC data meeting protocol I created for
the purpose of my action research, that included analyzing the teacher student interaction.
Typically, our data meetings leveraged the Relay model and solely focused on student work
analysis. In the updated data meeting protocol, I incorporated van Es et al. (2014) framework for
video analysis to observe the teacher student interaction during the lesson. I did this because I
believed that when exploring teacher promotion of intentional student discourse, we needed to
see what took place during the lesson to make better sense of what students learned at the end of
the lesson as demonstrated by their student work. Initially, my PLC colleagues were intimidated
by the idea of recording their Zoom classes for the rest of the PLC to view. Their fear was
evident in their facial expressions after I mentioned we would watch recordings of each other
teaching. To assuage this fear, I shared the research that informed my coaching decision to
include video analysis in our data meeting and as a teacher I volunteered to be the first to share a
recording of their classroom. By the end of this action research study, I and one other PLC
member – there were 6 PLC members including myself –shared our classroom practice with the
PLC.
In this section, I will focus on how I set out to implement van Es et al. (2014) framework
for video analysis to see student discourse patterns and the role the teacher played in promoting
that discourse. Consistent with van Es et al. (2014), I structured and organized the video analysis
portion of the meeting to include context of the video clip, watching a 5–7 minute video clip of a
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student teacher interaction, followed by a debrief discussion of the clip. The excerpt from the
data meeting below is on the PLC discussion around the first clip of me interacting with three
students in a breakout room about the math task they had to solve. In the meeting, I asked
teachers (i.e Phillip, Kyle, Harold, Kassandra, and Louis) to consider the following questions as
they watched each clip: (a) What is the teacher doing to guide student thinking and prepare them
for the exit ticket? (b) And what kind of discourse or participation is being produced by the
students? I utilized launching questions and probing questions to facilitate our exploration of
how my facilitation of math tasks promoted intentional student discourse and student sense
making. I was able to leverage van Es et al. (2014) idea of helping teachers focus on the teaching
through video, but the choices I made as a facilitator in analyzing the video did not encourage
teachers to turn towards practice and make explicit connections between the discourse students
produced and teacher actions.
A: So, the two questions that you want to consider are here. What is the teacher
doing to guide student thinking and prepare them for the exit ticket? And what
kind of discourse or participation is being produced by the students?
…
L: You’re asking questions and pushing students to be clear about picking their
points. Are they sure they’re picking the correct points that are on the graphs
making sure that they’re clarifying that it’s negative versus positive and how to be
accurate with their notation?
A: Kassandra, do you want to share out loud what you’re typing in the …Thank you,
Louis? Kassandra, do you want to share out loud for what you’re typing there?
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Ka: Yeah, sure. Same thing. So, the students were confused about for directions, I
think at first. And so, the teacher, offered clarification on where to get the original
points, so then they can invert them. And when we talk about inverting or
opposite, then the students usually think that we’re changing the signs of the
numbers. But then the teacher offered clarification on that as well, that the signs
don’t change. We’re just switching x and y.
A: More thoughts about what we saw the teacher doing to guide student thinking?
Har: The teacher there remind the students that they’re not solving it. They’re just
looking for points on the graph.
Ky: The teacher reframed the expectations multiple times.
A: What do you mean by that, Kyle?
Ka: I heard the teacher repeating what the students should be doing in different ways.
So, she was saying the same thing but she was saying it differently each time the
students either confused or were getting it wrong.
The debrief discussion above illustrates how my moves as the facilitator during the
debrief did not guide teachers to turn towards practice and understand that the student discourse
was the product of the teacher actions. For instance, teachers’ responses to the first launching
question “What is the teacher doing to guide student thinking and prepare them for the exit
ticket” included the following: “asking students to clarify points,” “reminding students they are
not solving it,” and “clarifying the directions for students who were confused.” While teachers
were successfully able to name the teacher action they observed in the video, they did not speak
to the implications those actions had on student thinking. These responses by the teachers were
sustained by my action as the facilitator when I requested “More thoughts on what we saw the
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teacher doing,” which suggested I wanted teachers to simply summarize what teacher moves
they saw me doing in the video. For us to investigate the teacher move as a PLC, I as the
facilitator needed to call for PLC members to point to specific evidence in the video that
illustrated the teacher move and how the move informed the student response. According to
Elmore (1995), intentional learning focuses on the quality of the student discourse and their
ability to articulate sophisticated explanations at the direction of their teacher. My facilitation did
not push PLC members to connect my teacher move to the student thinking and discourse in the
video. I did not push teachers to point to specific evidence from the recording to explicitly name
the teacher move I was implementing or to connect my teacher moves to the student thinking and
student discourse in the video. Furthermore, my facilitation illustrates that I did not have a clear
definition in my mind of what meaningful learning would have looked like at the time since
during the discussion I lost sight of the quality of the student discourse necessary for intentional
learning.
A: Okay, so let’s move to this the student. What kind of discourse participation is
being produced by the student? And how does that relate to what we named in the
know/show chart? And I want to say Faiza started talking about that too a little bit
already with the original points to get the inverse piece. I’m just going to
highlight that part again. [inaudible 00:26:13] build of what Faiza was sharing.
Han: I saw evidence of students locating the coordinate point from the parent graph,
well, maybe not the parent but the original function, right? Because that was a
transformed quadratic, right, not a parent. But that’s essential for them to be able
to be successful on the exit ticket. So, a good chunk of the video was focused on
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that, students correctly locating the points, and then identifying the inverse
coordinates from that original function.
Har: There was also the part where one of the students mentioned the wrong ordered
pair and the other student jumped in and is like, "Oh, no, this is the correct one."
So, instead of just letting it be, there was communication where they’re correcting
each other or supporting each other, however we want to see it
A: So, where would we see that in our know/show chart? I realize half of my face
was showing, okay. No backup. Where would we see what we’re saying in
know/show chart?
Har: On the showing part, it would be the plotting or reflecting of x and y. It’s not
really plotting, I’m going to [inaudible 00:28:02] right below there, which is
locating the coordinate points.
A: Does anyone have anything else that they would like to add to either of these
questions?
L: For the second one, I think it was really important for the kids to voice out their
misconceptions around what they were being asked to do. On the exit ticket, there
were two parts, there was an algebraic piece and a graphing piece. And if right
now they’re going over the graphing piece, and one of the students is like, “Oh, I
thought we were supposed to solve for it.” And so, it’s really important that they
know what they’re working on. And it was really cool to see that. There were
multiple students who had that misconception and they are all bonded over. I
don’t know if bonding is correct, but they validated each other for it.
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A: Yeah, before we move on to the next video clip, there’s something that I noticed
right now that I didn’t notice in the moment. I can say I didn’t notice in the
moment when I was talking to Natalie, when she went back to, okay, I got that on.
I saw over here we had zero, and 0.5 x plus three, and she was pointing to the
graph. I was like, “No”" Way in the moment, I also was like, I didn’t understand
what she was saying. I didn’t understand. But now I understand that she was
literally looking at the coefficient and the number and was like, that’s a point.
And that’s how she got three, negative six. And that’s how she thought we got
zero, three. So, that’s something I just wanted to share that I noticed in what her
thinking was, which was, are these points coming from the equation versus the
graph.
The second launching question, “What discourse or participation did the students produce,” had
the potential to connect the teacher action to the student discourse and analyze the quality of the
student discourse. The way I asked this question suggested that I wanted teachers to name what
they saw the students did in the video. While teachers were able to name that “students located
coordinate points” and students “correcting each other,” they were unable to make a clear
connection to the how action of the teacher led to those student actions and discussions. As the
facilitator, I did not encourage PLC members to point to specific examples from the video of
how the teacher move informed any sophisticated response from the student (Elmore, 1995). My
facilitation illustrates that I did not have a clear definition in my mind of what intentional
learning would have looked like since during the discussion I lost sight of the quality of the
student discourse necessary for intentional learning. My implementation of the launching
questions and the lack of collective common analytic understanding and concretization of
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intentional student discourse constrained the PLC’s ability to turn towards practice and see
teachers moves as direct instigators of student discourse.
Although the PLC discourse around teacher practice was seemingly constrained by my
choices as facilitator, there was a willingness from PLC members to engage in collective
exploration of practice. After reading literature on van Es et al. (2014) video analysis framework
and watching me go through the data meeting protocol using my class, PLC members were more
open to exploring and analyzing their practice as a collective. Some of the feedback the PLC
members gave after my model included the following:
H: Personally, I like it, although I wasn’t on the hotspot or like on the hot chair,
being not analyzed or evaluated. I feel much more comfortable and look forward
to my turn. So, I like it.
Ky: Yeah, the flow of how the presentation went with video, then reflection, video
reflection, and then staying grounded in the knows and shows rather than … And
then like, what the teacher is doing, what the student is doing. And it’s simply just
observation feedback. I thought the flow was very constructive.
…
P: Yeah, I liked it. That was very reflective and informative and just like different
perspectives put on the table. And I like that. I was able to see how you approach
your classroom. So, there’s takeaways that I could implement for mine as well.
So, just to see a different point of view.
This feedback demonstrates that not only did PLC members look forward to their turn in sharing
their practice, but they also saw the value in the collective inquiry. Teachers were able to engage
in the early stages of Rodgers (2011) reflective cycle by describing what they saw in the videos.
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Moreover, the feedback shows that I was successfully able to create the conditions where sharing
practice was no longer scary but viewed as an opportunity to reflect.
Research Question 1, Part 2: Growth
Over the course of this action research study, my practice as a coach evolved in two
specific and interrelated ways: how I structurally planned teacher interactions and procedurally
distributed the mental work with teachers. In this section, I will discuss how the structure of my
meetings shifted from activity driven interactions to inquiry driven interactions. This led to
procedural changes in how I conceptually approached teacher learning for the purpose of
improving teacher practice. Within the activity driven structure, I used the knowledge-in-practice
approach positioning myself as the teacher expert and holder of knowledge who brought
potential activities to teachers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) as opposed to an inquiry driven
structure, where the knowledge-of-practice approach that acknowledged teachers’ expertise and
positioned teachers to use their classrooms as sites for intentional investigation of their practice
(Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). The knowledge-in-practice approach led to me as the coach
doing most of the mental work and facilitating intellectually shallow discourse with the teachers
that prioritized lesson components and pushed teachers away from practice. While the
knowledge-of- practice approach turned teachers towards practice by giving them the mental
work (Horn & Little, 2010). Throughout this section, I will share my reflections on my coaching
actions and their subsequent implications. Additionally, my practice as coach focused on the
early stages of Rodgers (2002) reflective cycle. I was unable during the interactions to push
teachers towards critical reflection and the use or value of CRP. I will look back at the
aforementioned interactions with teachers to point out the opportunities for critical reflection and
CRP.
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Activity Driven
During cycle 1 of the action research study, I used a knowledge-in-practice approach and
by extension this made my meetings with teachers’ activity driven. These conversations
demonstrated a knowledge-in-practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) approach because I
expected teachers to learn from probing the “expert teacher” pre-work I shared in our meetings.
With teachers, I was focused on the construction of lesson and activity components for the
purpose of implementation, irrespective of who their students were and their current teaching
practices. For instance, I structured a collaboration meeting with three math teachers about the
2020 election lesson around the completion of lesson materials that I as the coach already started.
Consistent with Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999), I shared all the lesson materials I prepared thus
far and my thinking behind it with teachers positioning the lesson materials as exemplary work
with embedded knowledge the teachers could reflect on and learn from. Below is an excerpt of
how I promoted activity driven interactions and facilitated a conversation that turned teachers
away from practice and towards the instrumental task of designing and refining the lesson plan.
So, I went ahead and put together like a quick agenda for us in terms of what we’re trying
to accomplish. So, here are a few goals for this meeting. One is the core task of the
lesson, like what is that. Make sure we agreed upon that and solidify those. Two, the
objective for the lesson. Three, timestamping the different components of the lesson, like
how long is everything going to take. Fourth thing being lesson materials, slides, class
kick.
…
So, what I also have here is like a rough lesson plan, have some ideas and thoughts
around like tomorrow’s lesson. Okay. So here, you can click on like the actual slides, and
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you’ll see what it looks like. But I just want to kind of go through what I was thinking
when I was putting this together, a few different things. So, part of what we talked about
in our PLC last week around just pulling data, statistical bias, and things like that. So
that’s something that I was taking into consideration. And as I began to try to build this
agenda and create the slides, the slides which are very rough, by the way, a few things
that came to mind was like, the do now we can come back to, but really just starting off
with one, what is a poll? What is polling mean, and making a connection to sampling?
And then the next thing was, what do polls measure? I think that’s really important, this
measuring the public opinion, which means like the popular vote, not necessarily the
electoral vote in itself. So somehow stamping that. And then which brings me to my first
core task, these are also your suggested core tasks, which is like, one question that we
hear, or I know I’ve been hearing from the news, or we heard four years ago was, can we
even trust the polls? The math was wrong, etc., etc., etc.
At the outset of the meeting, I reproduced traditional learning interactions consistent with a
knowledge-in-practice approach by asserting activity construction completion by the end of the
meeting. I said,
One is the core task of the lesson, like what is that. Make sure we agreed upon that and
solidify those. Two, the objective for the lesson. Three, timestamping the different
components of the lesson, like how long is everything going to take. Fourth thing being
lesson materials, slides, class kick, etc. So, what I also have here is like a rough lesson
plan, have some ideas and thoughts around like tomorrow’s lesson.
Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) would refer to this as a knowledge-in-practice approach
because I, as the facilitator, positioned myself as the “expert teacher” by centering my ideas and
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already prepared lesson materials. I was leading teachers to finalize the lesson, without
consideration of classroom composition and teacher current practice, through an activity I
primarily authored and expected them to make adjustments during the meeting. At the beginning
of a lesson planning meeting, I directed their attention to a “rough lesson plan” and to “click on
the actual slides.” My actions implied that I possessed the expert knowledge teachers needed to
reflect on to improve their practice and complete the lesson.
So, I guess to say, essentially, the goal or the mindset that I’m coming from, in terms of
putting this together is, how can we make sure that students are, one, our students who
are going to be like in the near future, like be able to civically engage in this process of
election. Like how can they be aware of, one, what these polls are talking about? And
two, how the news is essentially getting to the analysis or making the claims that they
make at the end of each day. As we get closer and closer, like how and why are they
saying what they’re saying and be able to do some of that analysis themselves, when they
see the information. As we talked about as a school, we want them to be politically
aware, or have some sort of sociopolitical consciousness around what’s happening. And I
think one way to do that is understanding the role that statistics and polling makes, and
why we care so much about polling, especially around like presidential elections. So, I’m
going to pause after all of that, and I’m here to get feedback. What are our thoughts?
In addition to being the expert, I carried the mental work and turned teachers away from
practice. Sharing the pre-work I prepared at the start of the meeting, communicated that I owned
the mental work and only expected teachers to give feedback. Consequently, I pushed teachers
away from practice because I constrained the potential discourse we could have had by taking up
so much space with my ideas and leaving little room for teachers to engage with the lesson
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construction intellectually and not just instrumentally. The focus on lesson components alone
also signaled a turn away from practice due to the focus on the activity in absence of addressing
the broader problem of practice of leveraging the November 2020 election as an opportunity for
students to use math to help develop their own sociopolitical consciousness (Horn & Little,
2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995). After 5 uninterrupted minutes of me sharing all my ideas around
the lesson I told the teachers “I was [there] to get feedback” and wanted to hear their thoughts.
This cemented the fact that I intended to carry all the mental work and that I did not truly
position teachers as co-constructors of the lesson. They were there to give feedback on a lesson
that was partially created without consideration of how teachers have facilitated learning thus far
or how the 2020 election could be relevant to students.
Inquiry Driven
By cycle two of my action research study, I was more intentional about creating inquiry
driven interactions with teachers by promoting teacher reflection about their practice. I did this
by employing a knowledge-of-practice approach that utilized launching questions to assist
teachers in slowing down to investigate their practice. For instance, during a coaching
conversation with Phillip, I asked him the launching question “Describe the learnings students
demonstrated during class. How do you know?” Phillip’s response was that the students were
quiet and that led him to presume that they were likely lost. This response led me to ask the
follow up question: “What opportunities were there for students to show you they were
understanding the lesson?” Phillip’s response to this question led to a dialogue around a
particular practice Phillip employed to elicit participation from students. The excerpt below
illustrates how I used guided questions to turn Phillip towards practice in order to investigate his
facilitation moves in class and their subsequent effect on students.
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P: So, when I ask them to read out loud, it’s usually someone that’s correct.
A: I see. And that’s on purpose?
P: Yes.
A: Why do you do that I guess I’m wondering.
P: I do that because I feel like kids aren’t confident talking out loud, and they’re
scared they’re getting it wrong. So, if I know I’m calling on someone that’s
correct, they have confidence in just speaking up, and I just want to hear their
voice. I guess that’s why I do it.
P: I see.
P: And they all do it. So, I don’t know. Should I keep doing that?
A: I think that’s up to you. What sort of culture do you want to establish in your
classroom? How do we treat mistakes or incorrect answers or is that we always
have to be right? Because I can understand on one hand wanting to support a
student because you’re like, "Okay, you might not be confident or it might be
hard to share it, and it might be wrong, but it’s easier to share it if you know that
you’re right." But then it’s also like, "Well, how do students learn from their
mistakes?"
P: Yeah, that’s a good question.
A: How can we model that for them as well, that it’s okay to take risks and make a
mistake, because we all do?
P: No, I totally understand what you’re saying. I want them to make mistakes. Yeah,
how should I approach that? Should I show those to that did the incorrect answer?
Because I don’t want to call them out on it.
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The excerpt indicates an inquiry driven interaction because the questions I asked throughout the
exchange identified Phillip’s classroom practices as a place of reflection. Guided questions
centered on teacher practice is an example of knowledge-of-practice approach (Cochran-Smith &
Lytle, 1999) because Phillip’s classroom is treated as the site of intentional investigation and
Phillip as the teacher brings his own expertise to learn what’s needed to improve his practice.
Probing questions such as “Why do you do that” positioned Phillip as the expert of his practice
and led to Phillip investigate his own practice of only lifting the voices of students who are
correct or have a response that is aligned to what he envisioned. Rather than the expert, I served
as Phillip’s partner in his inquiry into practice.
Within this inquiry driven interaction, my use of questioning and the presence of teacher
voice indicated a redistribution of the mental work and a turn toward investigating practice. For
instance, after I asked Phillip “Why do you do that” Phillip reflected on his reasoning stating he
believed students will feel more confident to speak up if they were correct and by the end of his
reflection he wondered “should he keep doing that?” While Phillip posed the question to hear my
take, I responded by asking additional follow up questions: “What sort of culture do you want to
establish in your classroom?” “How do we treat mistakes or incorrect answers or is that we
always have to be right?” “Well, how do students learn from their mistakes?” All these questions
were used to give the mental work back to Phillip and assist him in slowing down to answer his
own question for himself. By the end of the interaction, Phillip’s thinking shifts from “should he
keep doing this” to “how should I approach that” suggesting he is willing to make adjustments
and experiment with his practice to promote student discourse.
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Missed Opportunities
In hindsight, there were opportunities to push towards critical reflection and CRP in my
inquiry driven interactions with Kyle and Phillip. I was a novice coach working to incorporate
CRP and critical reflection into my coaching practice for the first time and was unable to see or
act on some of these opportunities in the moment. During the study, it seemed like Kyle’s
readiness to examine his practice and assumptions driving instructional decisions was higher
than with Phillip. I believe this was because Kyle was a self-transforming learner who naturally
leaned into naming his assumptions and examining his actions. Phillip was an instrumental
learner who simplified teaching as the “right” action would lead to the anticipated rection from
students. Considering Kyle and Phillip’s readiness for critical reflection and CRP, there were
actions I need to take as their coach to position them to engage in these activities. Below are my
responses to Phillip during the inquiry driven coaching conversation.
A: I think that’s up to you. What sort of culture do you want to establish in your
classroom? How do we treat mistakes or incorrect answers or is that we always
have to be right? Because I can understand on one hand wanting to support a
student because you’re like, "Okay, you might not be confident or it might be
hard to share it, and it might be wrong, but it’s easier to share it if you know that
you’re right." But then it’s also like, "Well, how do students learn from their
mistakes?"
A: How can we model that for them as well, that it’s okay to take risks and make a
mistake, because we all do?
My response and questions were in the realm of CRP and critical reflection but I posed them as if
they were rhetorical questions. I did not require Phillip respond to any of my questions. I needed
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to ask a clear concise question such as “how do you negotiate the power structure in my class to
allow students to feel safe and able to take risks in student discourse” and provide Phillip the
time and space to think and respond. To support Phillip further, it would be helpful for me to
share my own response to a question like this when I think about my classroom.
Research Question 2: How Do I Engage School Leadership to Encourage Inquiry as a
Stance in Teacher Practice?
The coach position sandwiched me between school leaders and teachers. My position as
coach led to membership on the instructional leadership team and an opportunity to comment on
the school’s emergent instructional identity in light of our new virtual learning context.
However, my lower positional status in the instructional hierarchy (Figure 1) at my school site
afforded me the least amount of influence in shaping the instructional identity. In relation to
teachers, my influence was much greater because school leaders authorized and distributed
coaching practices such as classroom observations and coaching conversations to me. The
precondition of taking on these coaching actions was that I would do so within the paradigm and
instructional identity dictated by my school leaders.
As illustrated in my conceptual framework, coach-teacher interactions were directly
influenced by the instructional identity defined by school leadership. Initially, this instructional
identity was defined as an instructional cycle that included the following interdependent
elements: creation of lesson plans, implementation of lessons, and use of data to drive
instruction. The emerging instructional identity focused on consistent examination and analysis
of student performance data expressed in the form of weekly exit ticket data and student grades.
Strategy adoption to positively influence student performance data and consistent examination of
the date were the instructional leadership moves all ILT members were expected to employ with
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their respective teachers. The instructional identity shifted from an instructional cycle that
included lesson planning and implementation to an exclusive focus on student performance data.
This was antithetical to the inquiry my action research aimed to promote and created unavoidable
barriers that pushed my growth in embodying adaptive leadership behaviors. This section will
discuss how I grew in my ability to leverage adaptive leadership behaviors to implement my
action research coaching practices considering the narrowed focus.
Adjusting Action Research Coaching Practice
At the beginning of Cycle 2 of my action research project, I struggled to engage in
adaptive leadership behaviors to push back against the pressure of operating within the school’s
narrowed instructional identity. School leaders made it clear to me during our interactions that
my coaching actions needed to fall within the narrowed instructional identity. For instance, at a
check-in meeting with my principal and assistant principal it was proposed that I incorporate
reviewing student performance data as an agenda topic in my coaching conversations. Student
performance data was not a part of my intended coaching action and could potentially disrupt the
data collection from my action research project. Entering my second cycle of my action research,
I wanted to maintain disciplined attention (Northouse, 2011) on using reflection to promote
teacher inquiry into teacher facilitation, thus the ask to make use of more student performance
data could ostensibly shift my attention. An excerpt from my reflective journal illustrates how
my inability to engage in adaptive leadership behaviors to maintain our focus on teacher
facilitation of math tasks led to a change in my coaching practice.
I can’t recall how it was said but Tiffany was saying I think it’s important to look at the
data on a weekly basis. Her focus is she wanted all teachers to spend time looking at their
data. I was pushing back because I didn’t feel like I had time to make my coaching
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conversations data meetings and do teacher reflection. Teachers needed the reflection
time. Also, look at the data for what purpose? How is the data going to change teacher
practice or is we just want teacher behaviors to change? All questions I asked in my head
and did not say out loud. Why not I’m not quite sure, probably because I was too busy
being annoyed by fulfilling the request, I was unable to really probe the why behind this.
… So, when Tiffany said look at the data I was thinking in my head “no” because how
can I look at data meaningfully and have time to do teacher reflection, observation and
feedback or discuss upcoming lessons (if they want) with teachers all in 30 minutes. So, I
asked specifically “is this something you are saying needs to be a part of my coaching
conversations because it takes a lot of time.” Tiffany said “I think it’s important and
something to consider. It doesn’t have to be the whole meeting. Maybe you and Hannah
can talk about that.” So essentially, yes, my supervisor wanted me to look at data.
In my reflection, I started off by recognizing that “I didn’t feel like I had the time to make my
coaching conversations data meetings and do teacher reflection. Teachers need the reflection
time.” I was concerned about my ability to maintain disciplined attention (Northouse 2011) on
teacher reflection on their practice. I questioned the purpose and benefit of looking at data with
teachers, but only within my reflection and not with my principal as I wondered “look at the data
for what purpose? How is the data going to change teacher practice or is we just want teacher
behaviors to change?” In the moment, my presence was focused on how I could meet the
expectations of my supervisor and that of my action research. I asked “is this something you are
saying needs to be a part of my coaching conversations because it takes a lot of time”
telegraphing to my school leaders that my concerns were primarily technical in nature and not
adaptive at all. This led my principal to refer me to my assistant principal to address my time
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concern. I did not voice my pedagogical reservations when it came to teacher practice and as a
result, I missed an opportunity to engage in adaptive leadership behavior of getting on the
balcony (Northouse, 2011) to ask key questions to make sense of how student performance data
was linked to teacher practice beyond a strategy adoption. As a result, I adjusted my coaching
practice to use launching questions to assist teacher reflection on student performance data. As I
mentioned in an earlier finding, this did not push teachers toward practice as I intended.
Maintaining Action Research Coaching Practice
By the end of Cycle 2, I was able to get on the balcony and identify how to accomplish
my agenda while simultaneously regulating the distress of my school leaders when they saw my
plan. The ILT decided that all PLC meetings during second semester would be data meetings but
was unclear if the Relay model for data meetings was appropriate in our virtual context. Prior to
distance learning, instructional leaders were trained and expected to use the Relay model, which
focused on analyzing student performance data and teachers creating reteach plans using one of
two strategies in class to respond to the data. In a check in meeting with my assistant principal, I
suggested a data meeting protocol that leveraged recorded videos of classroom teaching as a
form of data in conjunction with student performance data. Hannah confirmed she was willing to
experiment with a different protocol and I agreed to draft the protocol and share it with her at our
next meeting. The script I intended to implement and shared with my assistant principal was a
departure from the Relay model my assistant principal was familiar with. An excerpt from my
reflective journal recalls how I got on the balcony and regulated Hannah’s distress to manage the
expectations of instructional identity and carry out my intended coaching action.
For example, I asked these two questions: What knowledge did students demonstrate on
the exit ticket? What was not demonstrated on the exit ticket? Hannah’s feedback is that
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she could see how me posing the first question as a converse was me trying to get at the
gap in the learning but that it was not clear. My response to her was that I purposely did
my best to stay away from deficit framing language and so language like gap is not
present. She nodded seemingly understanding what I meant and said I can keep playing
with the language. I did see her point and later adjusted the question to be what
mathematical misconceptions do we see in the student work. Hannah mentioned after this
discussion point that it’s not clear where this data meeting was going. She said in the
network wide PD when we practiced data meeting it was very clear where they were
going with their script. And the script that I was using was just different. Now I wonder if
she felt like she had that clarity because they were using a protocol (Relay model) she
was familiar with? I expressed, I think all the components of the relay model are present
in this model and that it is possible to get the same outcome and that was what I was
aiming for. I also expressed I think there is still room to grow with the script and after the
first run through it will be clearer what those tweaks should be.
Consistent with Northouse (2011), one way to maintain productive levels of stress is creating a
holding environment to confront the competing perspectives creating the stress. By sharing the
draft protocol with Hannah before implementation, we were able to attend to the tension the draft
protocol highlighted. For instance, Hannah’s feedback around the questions was grounded in her
belief that the questions should clearly lead the teachers towards a particular path of analysis that
aids teachers in identifying the gap in student learning. In response to this, I shared that I
intentionally left out language such as gap to avoid deficit framing language. I wanted to avoid
how
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According to Northouse (2011), when addressing an adaptive challenge one of the key
leader behaviors is regulating the distress because the process of change could create uncertainty
for people. In this excerpt of my reflective journal, my recollection of my assistant principal’s
commentary on the new data meeting protocol caused her some uncertainty. For instance,
Hannah’s concern with the number of questions and how open ended the questions were
suggested that she was trying to reconcile her current belief and understanding of data meetings
with what I was proposing. Additionally, Hannah revealed she was unsure of the direction the
meeting will go in and referred back to the PD we both attended that she had a clear
understanding of what the data meeting would lead to.
Conclusion
While I was able to create conditions for teacher reflection and space for collective
inquiry into teacher practice, there were other aspects of my conceptual framework that was
noticeably absent from my enactment because of the following circumstance. Namely, critical
reflection and taking up anti-racist stance in my interactions with teachers and school leaders. I
found that I needed to attend more to carrying out the preliminary work to ensure I had an
opportunity to carry out my coaching actions. Engaging in adaptive leadership behaviors from a
middle management position was at first unsuccessful and resulted in me modifying practice and
in the end, it exhausted and limited my ability to lean into critical reflection and an anti-racist
stance. By the end of my action research, my analysis revealed that operating in a space that
appeased my school’s instructional identity and met the expectations of my action research was
challenging for me to navigate. Thus, I was unable to address CRP and critical reflection with
teachers. For my second research question, my analysis suggests that I grew in my ability to
embody adaptive leadership behaviors to get school leaders to support teacher inquiry
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Afterword
In this final section, I will discuss retrospective takeaways from the challenges I
experienced when conducting this action research and the ways confronting these challenges will
continue to inform my growth as an instructional coach. As a second-year instructional coach at
the time of research, this was my first time attempting to incorporate anti-racist pedagogies and
critical reflection into my coaching practice. While I was able to make progress, I underestimated
the high cognitive capacity I needed to operate at within each concentric circle of my conceptual
framework to sufficiently coach towards CRP. For my teachers, I engaged in the prework of at
least identifying their location on Drago-Severson and Blum-DeStefano’s (2017) learner
typology. For myself as the coach and inside action researcher, I did not examine my practice in
relation to the school’s instructional cycle before-hand. Instead, I made assumptions that my
practice was primed to take up anti-racist pedagogies because that was what I wanted. This had
implications for my coaching actions. In this final section, I will discuss retrospective takeaways
from the challenges I experienced when conducting this action research and the ways
confronting these challenges will continue to inform my growth as an instructional coach.
Coach in Relation to School
After my first action research cycle, I began to realize that my coaching practice was
rooted in the instructional system that I was attempting to confront with my action research
project. To develop my capacity as coach, I needed to address my external and internal
challenges simultaneously. Externally, I had to make space for coaching actions that promoted
teacher inquiry and reflection within a system that did not position teachers as intellectual beings
and conceptualized coaches as the expert teacher who possessed the secrets to teaching.
Internally, I need to acknowledge how invested I was in the instructional cycle I wanted to break.
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I was forced to assess my position within the system and how my actions were initially
perpetuating the instructional system in place. I attribute my ability to see the ways I had been
indoctrinated and positioned to maintain my school’s instructional system to the reflection
process during my in the field analysis. It took a great deal of cognitive effort for me to attend to
the internal realization of my actions not aligned with my espoused beliefs and engage in
strategic intelligent coaching actions that sufficiently challenged the instructional system and
aligned to an inquiry as stance approach. I needed more space to question the assumptions
underlying my practice to affirm or disaffirm my coaching behavior and create strategic
interventions to develop inquiry in a system that did not center inquiry as a pathway to improve
professional practice. While my findings suggest that I experienced some success in pushing
against the school’s instructional agenda, it also revealed that I was a novice coach incorporating
inquiry as stance for the first time.
Assessing my coaching practice in relation to the school’s instructional system revealed
where I needed to grow in my practice to meet the cognitive demands of coaching from an
inquiry as stance frame. This intrinsically motivated me to complete this action research with as
much fidelity as possible. Subsequently, this led to my extrinsic motivation to confront the
instructional agenda to make space for my own agenda. In the absence of my action research to
assist me in seeing and understanding of my coaching practice, I would have likely remained
unaware of how my own coaching actions reproduced the status quo and left the instructional
agenda unchallenged. This sobering reflection point led to the realization that it was insufficient
me to simply want to change my coaching practice and or the school’s instructional system.
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Coach in Relation to Learner
Promoting inquiry and experimentation was a cognitively demanding task that required
me to be both attuned and responsive to the learning needs of my teachers. Prior to conducting
this action research, I attuned myself to their learning needs by identifying their developmental
orientations using Drago-Severson and Blum-DeStefano (2017) framework. Phillip was an
instrumental learner and required concrete feedback on what was right or wrong about his
practice while Kyle was a self-transforming learner who responded well to collaborative
reflection to explore alternative teacher actions. While conducting the action research, I was
unsuccessful at being responsive to their needs as individual learners and used the same scaffolds
for both teachers. I was limited in my capacity to sufficiently provide scaffolds due to my
inability to take on the additional cognitive demand to select or develop the appropriate scaffold.
Cognitively, I was attending to unanticipated insights about my practice, making sense of the
implications the ideological frameworks and theories mentioned in my conceptual framework
had on my practice, and strategically pushing my action research agenda despite messages to
take up the school’s opposing instructional agenda. Inquiry as stance was new for me and for my
teachers. Thus, my ability to respond to their unique learning needs was constrained by me being
a novice coach. As a learner, I experienced the cognitive demand of authentically working to
embed inquiry as a stance in my practice. As their coach, I needed cognitive space to guide them
in this work and unfortunately much of it had already been taken up my personal learning needs.
I believe this lack of cognitive space contributed to my inability to fully incorporate anti-
racist pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy into my practice. While I consistently noted the
absence of these pedagogies in my cycles of reflection in relation to my teachers, it did not
manifest in my coaching in subsequent cycles. Initially, it was unclear to me of how I could be
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increasingly aware that CRP was missing and still not act. After completing analysis and
additional reflection, I believe that I was unsuccessful because I reached my cognitive capacity
early in the study and coaching another individual through utilizing CRP was outside of my zone
of proximal development.
This action research project serves as the first moment in my teacher education
experience. Like my high school, college, and teacher moments, I am left pondering the
following: Where am I today in location to my school? What supports do I need to continue to
grow in my coaching capacity and will I know I am progressing? How do I promote critical
collaborative discourse within a PLC as a form as pushing teachers toward practice? These
questions combined with my retrospective takeaways suggests that the next step for my growth is
to continue to engage in the iterative process of inquiry and action research. I will do this by
creating an instructional guide that outlines my intended coaching actions. This guide will serve
as living document I use to reflect and evaluate coaching actions I implement during my cycles
of inquiry. I believe the guide will provide me with the foundation of how I intend to coach and
serve as the tangible distinction between how I conceptualize coaching and how the system I
work in expects me to coach.

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Appendix A: Coaching Framework for Inquiry
This document introduces how to ground coaching within in an anti-racist frame with the vision
of creating meaningful learning opportunities for students.
Vision: All students to engage in equitable meaningful mathematical experiences that
fostered critical thinking, promoted flexible uses of mathematical understanding affecting
students’ lives and improving the world.
The promotion of these learning opportunities for students relies on how the teacher educator
constructs their interactions with teachers and school leaders in the following dimensions: critical
reflection, developmental level, and instructional identity. Table A1 defines these three
dimensions for coaching.

Table A1
Dimensions for Coaching Framework
Critical reflection Developmental level Instructional identity
The extent to which learners
(teacher and coach) are
able to unearth and
scrutinize the assumptions
that drives their practice.
Reflections are centered on
analyzing practices through
the following lens:
students’ eyes, colleagues’
perception, personal
experience, and theory and
research.
The extent to which learners
have opportunities to
develop their practice when
given appropriate supports
or challenges. Positioning
adults as learners reveals
the diversity in the ways of
knowing and calls for
coaches to respond to this
diversity through
differentiating their
scaffolds to support teacher
and school leadership
development.
The extent to which teachers
are provided opportunities
to engage in inquiry cycles
ad critical reflection.
Broadening the way
teachers assess their
teaching to included
qualitative data. This is
also an opportunity for the
teacher educator to
examine their practice in
relation to the school’s
expectations.

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Cycle of Coaching Actions
Below is a comprehensive list of the expected coaching actions necessary to address the three
dimensions of the coaching framework. Figure A1 illustrates the iterative cycle of coaching.
• Coach: self-critical reflection
• Coach: Plan intelligent next action
• School leader-Coach: Discussion of coaching needs and expectations
• Teacher-Coach: Coaching Conversation
o Teacher Critical Reflection Questions (kick of coaching cycle and as needed)
o Observation Reflection
o Planning lesson or lesson sequence conversation
o Development of intelligent action
o Other relevant topics
• Coach: Observation of Teacher
• Coach: Reflection of teacher and school leader interaction

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Figure A1
Coaching Cycle

Phase 1: Creating Conditions for Inquiry (Coach–School Leader)
Goal: To assist school leaders in the incorporation of inquiry as stance into the school’s
instructional identity and professional learning system.
Outcomes:
• Engage in self-critical reflection in relation to school leaders.
• Identify ways of knowing for school leaders.
• Assess the school’s instructional identity and determine how much does it align with
inquiry as stance.
• Identify potential challenges for committing to inquiry as stance.
• Identify potential supports for committing to inquiry as stance.
Coach
Self critical relfection
in relation to teachers
and school leaders
Coach: Plan next
intelligent action
School leader–Coach:
Discuss needs and
expectations
Teacher–Coach:
Coaching conversation
Observation of teacher
classroom practice
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Coach: Self-Critical Reflection
1

• How will my race influence my work as a coach with school leaders of color?
• How will my school leaders’ race influence my role and work as their coach?
• What may be the issues most important to my school leaders and me? What may be the
nature of race on these issues?
• How do I situate and negotiate the school’s instructional identity, experience, expertise,
and race with my own?
Events that ensure commitment to teacher inquiry
• Willingness to position teachers as a diverse set of learners
• Focus on student learning experiences
• Focus on teaching and learning as two interdependent acts
Events that can delay commitment teacher inquiry
• Focus on improving student assessment data (standardized assessments) in the absence of
the exploration of teaching
• Lack of experience or understanding of the inquiry approach
• Focus on measuring effect of inquiry on teacher practice or misalignment with teacher
evaluation system
Table A2 considers school leaders developmental levels and the ways the different supports and
challenges the coach would have to consider to move towards a commitment to teacher inquiry.

1
From “Reflection, Racial Competence, and Critical Pedagogy: How do we prepare Pre-service
Teachers to Pose Tough Questions” by H.R. Milner, 2003, Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 6(2),
p. 205.
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Table A2
School Leaders’ Ways of Knowing and Indicators of Progress
Supports Challenges Indicators of progress
Instrumental Plan of action
containing specific
curricula, research, or
examples that
provides school
leaders with an idea of
what it means to
encourage teachers to
take up inquiry as
stance.
Encourage knowers to
look beyond “right”
solutions for teaching
and to consider more
than one approach to
improving instructional
practices.
School leaders show
an openness to
experimenting with
other approaches.
Socializing Validate commitment to
teacher inquiry and
offer suggestions of
inquiry driven
practices leaders and
teachers can engage
in.
Model and support the
engagement of difficult
conversations with
colleagues, supervisors,
or valued others
regarding instructional
identity and the nature
of race in that identity.
Willingness to
address and discuss
the conflict of
taking up inquiry.
Self-authoring Explicitly recognize the
value of some
traditional approaches
to supporting teacher
development.
Encourage leaders to look
beyond their sets of
belief and values.
Suggest the
consideration of
inquiry.
After participating in
collegial inquiry
about school
practice, self-
authoring knowers
will be able to
critique their own
ideology and
values.
Self-
transforming
Collaborative reflection
that explores the
internal and systemic
inconsistencies of
alternative approaches
to teacher
development.
Support knowers to
manage adjust to the
slow pace of change in
teacher practice.
Willingness to stick
with the inquiry as
stance approach
and meet teachers
where they are in
their cycle of
inquiry.

Note. Adapted from “The Self in Social Justice: A Developmental Lens on Race, Identity, and
Transformation” by E. Drago-Severson and J. Blum-DeStefano, 2017, Harvard Educational
Review, 87(4), p. 474–475.
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Phase 2: Establishing a Critical Reflective Process (Coach–Teacher)
Goal
To promote teacher critical reflection of their practice and instructional moments through
the use of launching questions and reflective process.
Outcomes
• Engage in self-critical reflection in relation to teachers
• Identify Ways of Knowing for teachers
• Promotion of critical reflection with teachers
• Identify potential challenges for committing to inquiry as stance
• Identify potential supports for committing to inquiry as stance
Coach: Self-Critical Reflection Questions
• How will my race influence my work as a coach with teachers of color?
• How will my teachers’ race influence my role and work as their coach?
• What may be the issues most important to my teachers and me? What may be the nature
of race on these issues?
• How do I situate and negotiate the teachers’ knowledge, experience, expertise, and race
with my own?

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Teacher: Critical Reflection Questions
2

• How will my students of color’s race influence my role and work as their teacher?
• How do I, as a teacher, situate myself in the education of others, and how do I negotiate
the power structure in my class to allow students to feel safe and able to take risks in
student discourse?
• How do I situate and negotiate the students’ knowledge, experience, expertise, and race
with my own?
Events That Ensure Enactment of Teacher Inquiry
• Perspective of coach as a support to improve practice
• Productive coach-teacher relationship
• Growth and asset framing of teacher practice
Events That Delay Teacher Inquiry
• Perspective of coach as an administrator appointed spy
• Coach positioned as evaluative member of teacher practice
• Teachers experiencing negative consequences of critical reflection
Similarly, Table A3 considers the different supports and challenges that correspond to a teachers’
specific way of knowing or understanding their practice.

2
From “Reflection, Racial Competence, and Critical Pedagogy: How do we prepare Pre-service
Teachers to Pose Tough Questions” by H.R. Milner, 2003, Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 6(2),
p. 205.
118

Table A3
Teachers’ Ways of Knowing and Indicators of Progress
Supports Challenges Indicators of progress
Instrumental Specific step-by-
step
guidelines of
how to use
inquiry as a way
to examine
individual
practice and
disorienting
classroom
moments.
If teacher does not feel
like the inquiry
process is leading
them to the “right”
experiment, it would
be helpful for the
coach to remind the
teacher that there is
more than one
approach to
addressing a
problem of practice.
Teacher willingness to
experiment with norms,
structures, and routines that
supports student discourse.
Socializing Express
appreciation
and acceptance
of teacher as an
individual with
ideas and a
perspective on
how to grow
their practice.
Invite knower to
express
their thoughts and
feelings. Support
their engagement in
difficult
conversations
regarding
assumptions on
student beliefs.
Teachers’ increased
capacity to grapple with the
conflict of their perspective
on practice and the
perspective of others.
Self-authoring Offer explicit
recognition of
their expertise
and competence.
Create opportunities
for
teachers to
experience collegial
inquiry as way to
support their
capacity to look
beyond their own
values and ideas
about good teaching
and instructional
practice.
Teacher’s increased
capacity to see beyond their
established perspective and
reflect on their teaching
practice through the eyes of
their students and theory
and research.
119

Supports Challenges Indicators of progress
Self-
transforming
Reflect
collaboratively
on instructional
practice to
explore
alternatives and
internal and
systemic
inconsistencies.
Support knowers to
manage adjust to the
slow pace of change
evident in students’
response to teacher
practice.

Willingness to stick with
the inquiry as stance
approach and ability to see
the value in inquiry into
their practice despite the
lack of immediate change
in their teacher-student
interactions or challenges
experienced in the attempt
to shift their practice.

Note. Adapted from “The Self in Social Justice: A Developmental Lens on Race, Identity, and
Transformation” by E. Drago-Severson and J. Blum-DeStefano, 2017, Harvard Educational
Review, 87(4), p. 474-475.

Phase 3: Sustaining Teacher Inquiry
Goal
Sustaining teacher engagement inquiry and school leaders’ commitment and
understanding of inquiry through the enaction and reflection of various coaching actions.
This phase contains tangible tools to facilitate the progression of coaching actions.
A conversation guide from the TRU framework is outlined in Table A4. The guide
provides teachers with reflection opportunities prior to the lesson that can assist with the
intention construction of lesson plans and learning sequence for students. Subsequently, Table
A5 focuses on the student learning experience and pushes the coach/observer to focus on
students response and engagement during the lesson.

120

Table A4
Planning Conversation Guide
Things to think about
• What are the content goals for the lesson?
• What connections exist (or could exist) between important ideas in this lesson and
important ideas in past and future lessons?
• How do important disciplinary practices develop in this lesson/unit?
• How are facts and procedures in the lesson justified?
• How are facts and procedures in the lesson connected with important ideas and practices?
• How do we see/hear students engage with important ideas and practices during class?
• Which students get to engage deeply with important ideas and practices?
• How can we create more opportunities for more students to engage more deeply with
important ideas and practices?

Note. From “An Introduction to the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) Framework” by
A.H. Schoenfeld, 2016, Framework. Berkeley, CA: Graduate School of Education.
http://truframework.org.

121

Table A5
Observation Guide
Observe the lesson through a student’s eyes
The content • What’s the big idea in this lesson?
• How does it connect to what I already know?
Cognitive
demand
• How long am I given to think, and to make sense of things?
• What happens when I get stuck?
• Am I invited to explain things or just give answers?
Equitable
access to
content
• Do I get to participate in meaningful math learning?
• Can I hide or be ignored? In what ways am I kept engaged?
Agency,
ownership,
and identity
• What opportunities do I have to explain my ideas? In what ways are
they built on?
• How am I recognized as being capable and able to contribute?
Formative
assessment
• How is my thinking included in classroom discussions?
• Does instruction respond to my ideas and help me think more deeply?

Note. From “An Introduction to the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) Framework” by
A.H. Schoenfeld, 2016, Framework. Berkeley, CA: Graduate School of Education.
http://truframework.org.

The TRU framework conceptualizes the attributes of powerful classrooms in five
domains: content, cognitive demand, equitable access to content, agency, and formative
assessment. The purpose of this guide is to support the coach’s ability to see instruction through
a student perspective using a focused lens. Additionally, this also supports the teacher’s ability to
reflect on their lesson using a student’s lens.
Post Observation Reflection
• Can you identify a moment from your lesson that stood out to you in a positive or
negative way? If so, describe that moment.
• What did you hear in students’ discourse?
122

o If you did not witness student discourse, what questions did they pose?
o How did you elicit feedback from students after the lesson about their experience
of the lesson?
• How did you interpret students discourse or students’ feedback?
o How did your assumptions about you students influence your interpretation?
The Classroom Critical Incident Questionnaire
3

Please take about five minutes to respond to the questions below about this weekend’s class.
Don't put your name on the form - your responses are anonymous. If nothing comes to mind for
any of the questions just leave the space blank. At the next class we will share the group's
responses with all of you. Thanks for taking the time to do this. What you write will help us
make the class more responsive to your concerns.
• At what moment in class this weekend did you feel most engaged with what was
happening?
• At what moment in class this weekend were you most distanced from what was
happening?
• What action that anyone (teacher or student) took this weekend did you find most
affirming or helpful?
• What action that anyone took this weekend did you find most puzzling or confusing?

3
From Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (p. 106) by S.D. Brookfield, 2017, John Wiley
& Sons.
123

• What about the class this weekend surprised you the most? (This could be about your
own reactions to what went on, something that someone did, or anything else that
Iterative Coach Reflection
• How did my actions push teachers toward practice or away from practice?
• Circle back to “Coach Critical Reflection Questions”
• Circle back to text resources that outlines routines and structures for student discourse
Resources for Routines and Structures for Robust Student Discourse
• Debate Math by C. Luzniak
• Necessary Conditions by G. Krall
• Intentional Talk by E. Kazemi and A. Hintz

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This study examines my enactment as an instructional math coach at College Prep High School. To provide a holistic examination of my coaching practice, I deconstruct my coaching enactment in relation to teachers and school leaders. My investigation asks: How do I engage teachers using anti-racist pedagogy as a stance so that they will critically reflect on their practice and explore and experiment in the facilitation of math tasks using CRP? How do I engage school leadership to encourage inquiry as a stance in teacher practice? I collected observations in the form of recorded discussion, reflections, and documented generated in my role as coach. As a result, I found that I was able to assist teachers in establishing a reflective process to investigate their practice and engage in leadership acts with school leaders to prioritize teacher inquiry in my coaching actions.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Okoye, Akonam Nicole (author)

Core Title Instructional coaching: disrupting traditional math practices through inquiry and action research

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Educational Leadership

Degree Conferral Date 2022-05

Publication Date 05/09/2022

Defense Date 02/24/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag action research,anti-racist,culturally relevant pedagogy,inquiry,instructional coaching,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Slayton, Julie (committee chair), Kazemi, Elham (committee member), Samkian, Artineh (committee member)

Creator Email akonam.okoye@gmail.com,nokoye@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111307103

Unique identifier UC111307103

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Okoye, Akonam Nicole

Type texts

Source 20220510-usctheses-batch-941 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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