Developing a Critical Stance Through Teacher Candidate Coaching

Introduction

The journey to become a teacher educator began for me while I was a high school teacher when I was selected by my school district to become an instructional coach. Our school district hired consultants to implement a year-long professional development program to train teacher leaders in the theory behind Instructional Coaching (Fitterer, Harwood, Locklear, & Lapid, 2008) as well as in the use of a specific Teach for Success Classroom Observation Protocol (T4S, 2013) in order to improve rigor and engagement to improve student performance at our school. This professional development afforded me the opportunity to dig deep into pedagogy and practices used in the classroom in order to scaffold the growth of my colleagues through instructional coaching. The scaffolded professional development focused on all aspects of planning, teaching, and assessment through modules focused on student engagement, assessment practices, cognitive levels of questioning, instructional approaches, and learning environments (Fitterer, Harwood, Locklear, & Lapid, 2008). As an instructional coach, I was trained to use specific protocols for coaching and observation using an observation instrument to identify instructional attributes within a lesson (T4S, 2013). This experience changed my career. While I was often at odds with taking time from my own students in order to attend professional development and observe and coach my peers, the experience was transformational for me as an educator and inspired me to follow a path into graduate school with the goal of impacting teacher preparation through this type of targeted professional growth.

After graduate school, I was offered a position in a teacher preparation program with a strong regional reputation for preparing high-quality teachers, many of whom remain in the area to support the local school districts. The program offers extensive field-based experiences for the teacher candidates during their preparation, and my position embedded me, with my teacher candidates, in a local area partner school. In the semester prior to clinical teaching, the teacher candidates are placed in a classroom two days a week, and during that time I spanned the boundary from university to school sites to work alongside the teacher candidates to develop their pedagogical practices through seminar, lesson planning, observation, and coaching using an Instructional Coaching Protocol developed specifically to foster growth in this field placement (Tejeda-Delgado & Johnson, 2018). Teacher candidates are expected to use the experiences they have during this time, through both observation and teaching, to connect teaching, assessment and technology to their emerging practice. I served as a facilitator for their seminar, but more importantly, I spent time in their classroom observing their teaching and strengthening their impact with targeted, pedagogical goal setting connected to practice during one to one instructional coaching sessions. With instructional coaching as a passion that drives me as a teacher educator, this chapter explores how instructional coaching with teacher candidates fosters their pedagogical growth and challenges them to think critically about their instructional practices during their initial clinical experience.