Practicing inquiry: Investigating how coaches support teachers to lead inquiries in project-based learning classrooms

Abstract

In high-quality project-based learning (PBL), teachers lead inquiries that position students as knowledge producers. We know little, however, about how to prepare teachers for this work. Following teachers through PBL professional development (PD) focused specifically on disciplinary inquiry (DI), researchers scored teaching videos, student work, and teacher interviews. Next, they examined relationships between teachers’ scores and the time their instructional coaches spent on four coaching practices: representing, decomposing, and reflecting on practice, and preparing teachers to enact practice. Results reveal that teachers improved at facilitating DI and that their growth was highly correlated with time spent analyzing representations of practice.