Examining How Teachers Enact the Suggestions of a Coach: Critique of a Methodology

In this methodology paper, we present a methodology for characterizing how teachers use coaches' suggestions. We identified suggestions from planning conversations and explored the extent to which the teachers implemented the suggestions in enacted lessons. The planning conversations took place within online content-focused coaching cycles. A primary challenge confronting content-focused coaches when working one-on-one with teachers is finding a productive balance between giving suggestions and inquiring into teachers' practices through reflective questioning. This paper articulates a process for identifying suggestions made by a coach during a planning conversation and an analytic process for examining how a teacher takes up the suggestion during lesson implementation. We discuss the methodological challenges we encountered and tradeoffs in our decisions related to low- and high-inference claims. [For the complete proceedings, see ED629884.]