Onsite coaching: supporting prospective teachers to enact and appropriate instructional strategies in their field placements

Abstract

ABSTRACT Coaching supports have been used in the past few decades with practicing teachers in professional development programs seeking to improve teachers’ and novice teachers’ practice. Prospective teachers experience the complexity of teaching when they start their field experiences. In some cases, prospective teachers struggle to enact what they learned in university coursework in real classroom settings. In an effort to bridge this gap, this paper provides an innovative approach to onsite coaching in the form of modelling, along with dialogic feedback to support prospective teachers’ development of their teaching practice in their field experiences. Onsite coaching supports as described in this study, have implications on teacher learning to promote prospective teachers’ enactment and appropriation of instructional strategies from university course work in field experiences. Findings suggest that field supervisors use this onsite coaching model to support prospective teachers in developing their teaching practices in the context of practice by taking a clinical stance. This paper unpacks the appropriation cycle and provides coaching moves (e.g., types of feedback in lesson plans, planning sessions, debriefing sessions, and onsite coaching moves) by sharing representative stories of prospective teachers facilitating literacy and mathematics in general education classrooms, and by differentiating instruction for emergent bilinguals.