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It has been established for nearly a decade that literacy coaching positively impacts teachers and students ([2] Casey, 2006; [4] Duncan, 2006; [15] Toll, 2006). Most of these studies have reported on coaches who have been hired into that position by their school or district. Very few studies have been conducted on peer coaching ([7] Hasbrouck and Denton, 2007) and, of those, none have addressed the process by which teachers enrolled in master's degree programs learned how to engage in collaborative peer coaching or how university coursework could help teachers learn to become peer coaches. We undertook this study to fill that gap in the literature. This paper provides an account of the coaching element that we included in an existing graduate course as well as a description of the responses of experienced and less-experienced teachers as they began to add collaborative peer coaching to their identities as teachers.
Background of the study
To better understand the process by which teachers learned to be peer coaches, we re-conceptualized a course offered to students earning an MEd in Language and Literacy at our institution. Within the course, we embedded a coaching element that asked the teachers to identify a colleague at their school as a partner teacher, to meet with this teacher for three rounds of the coaching cycle, to keep a coaching journal throughout the process, to videotape one of the post-observation conferences, and to write a reflection about the coaching process in which they articulated the decisions they made and the processes and procedures they followed during their coaching experiences across the semester.
[16] Wells' (1999) ideas about teaching and learning as a dialogic conceptualization in which knowledge is co-constructed as teachers "engage in joint activities which are negotiated rather than imposed" (p. 227) guided the coaching element. A central notion of this stance focusses on learning as a social engagement which involves interactions with "learners in activities to which they are committed, observing what they can already do unaided; then providing assistance and guidance that helps them to identify the nature of their problems in order to find solutions [...]" ([16] Wells, 1999, p. 159). This stance mirrored the kind of coaching relationships we envisioned for this course. From this perspective on...