A Low-Career Elementary Teacher’s Paradigmatic Shift Experience in Lesson Discussion through Cognitive Coaching

Abstract

This study explored the process of cognitive coaching in relation to social studies lessons for a low-career elementary teacher. The purpose was to scrutinize the procedures and principles followed by the coach and the teacher and to identify changes in the teacher’s instructional and curricular expertise. During the coaching, the coach utilized mediational tools such as paralanguage, response behaviors, and mediative questioning to facilitate the teacher's self-directed learning process. Consequently, the teacher experienced autonomy in lesson discussions. Reflecting on lesson planning, she recognized the necessity of reading children's books and the need to restructure units. She established goals to enhance her teaching expertise, expressed a willingness to explore self-reflection methods, and hoped to improve her use of mediational tools.
 Over a span of 7 months, data were collected from the coach and the teacher. The data collection included pre-coaching open-ended survey responses, transcripts of coaching dialogue over two cycles, and open-ended survey responses from a mid-term evaluation. Additionally, instructional plans for the teacher's 6th-grade social studies class were gathered. These data were analyzed using the constant comparative method, and a validation process was conducted for the results. As recommendations, a paradigm shift focusing on teachers' thinking in lesson discussions, establishing a culture where observers mediate teachers' internal thoughts in a non-judgmental manner, reevaluation of mandatory classroom observations, providing coaching related to individual teachers' lessons within the learning community, concurrent emphasis on personal reflective thinking and sharing and discussing experiences and knowledge within the learning community, fostering collaboration between teacher training institutions and educational authorities for developing and expanding cognitive coaching training programs, and coupling training for the enhancement of instructional expertise and curricular expertise were suggested. Further studies were proposed.