Theses and Dissertations Collection

Coaching has become a widespread form of professional development to improve learning opportunities for teachers, yet little is known about how mathematics coaches interact with teachers. Building on prior discourse studies from mathematics education and literacy coaching, I identified five different discursive moves for how coaches talk with teachers: invitation, suggestion, explanation, description, and evaluation. These discursive moves served as the primary codes for two projects in which I examined the discursive actions of mathematics coaches during their conversations with teachers within video-assisted coaching cycles. In the first project, I explored the different ways mathematics coaches talked with teachers during planning and debriefing conversations as part of video-assisted coaching cycles. I identified similarities and differences in the discursive tendencies of coaches and present implications of the variability in coaches’ verbalizations. In the second project, I examined how mathematics coaches leveraged written annotations to support teachers’ professional discourse about classroom events during synchronous debriefing conversations. Mathematics teachers and coaches created the annotations while asynchronously watching video of implemented lessons as part of a video-assisted coaching cycles. I examined the extent to which coaches and teachers discussed the annotations during debrief conversations in coaching cycles, the discursive moves used by coaches when discussing annotations, and the characteristics of annotations (e.g., content, analytic stance, specificity) that were most commonly taken up in debriefing conversations. I present a rationale for needing increased articulation about the relationships between video annotations, the discursive actions of mathematics coaches, and professional discourse as well as the implications of such knowledge for mathematics teacher education.