Learning to teach mathematics in ways that support ambitious learning goals for students is hard. It takes all of us putting our heads together to think about the best ways to use high-quality curriculum materials to create rigorous learning opportunities for children in classrooms. Teachers are constantly learning about how to best support students to learn mathematics. Coaches are constantly learning too.
The purpose of this short article is to explore an orientation toward coaching that we’re calling “co-learning”. We learned the term “co-learning” from a project that examines teacher education clinical experiences. You can read more about the NSF-funded project at https://colearnemt.org. What we like about this term is that it signals that coaches and teachers come together, in classrooms, to learn from students in order to teach in ways that are responsive to them.
As we thought about how to organize coaches’ work in service of learning for all teachers across the entire system, we were trying to address two problems. The first was time. We wanted coaches’ primary responsibility to be facilitating teacher collaboration around unpacking curricular lessons. But coaches also needed to be in classrooms, both to see how lessons were being implemented and to support teachers as they developed and deepened instructional practices that help students reach ambitious learning goals. We wanted coaches in every classroom at least once a week, yet they didn’t have time for formal coaching cycles. The second problem followed from the first: if coaches weren’t in classrooms primarily to model, observe, and give feedback, or to conduct a coaching cycle, what would they do there? We wanted to help coaches see that they could serve as thought partners to teachers while also noticing and learning how students were responding to the ideas in the new curricular resources. We decided that co-learning coaching could address both problems. It positions coaches and teachers to engage in shared instructional decision-making, which supports learning for both of them.
Co-learning coaching is a form of instructional coaching that is not scheduled in advance and does not require a pre-conference or a post-conference. Instead, the coach moves through classrooms attuned to the current realities of the lesson enactment on this day, with this group of students. Co-learning is in accordance with situated learning theories that espouse that learning happens best in practice, at elbow with another person who can help them grapple with uncertainty of teaching as it arises and get feedback as they deliberately practice using new ideas in authentic settings. In co-learning coaching, the teacher and coach would learn together about how to elicit and interpret kids’ thinking, in order to consider how to respond to students, in-the-moment
We have been influenced by how coaching was organized by an elementary mathematics coach, Teresa Lind, at the school highlighted in Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Student Learning, who describe co-learning as “on-the-ground coaching” that supports teachers in-the-moment and is more free form where the coach moves between classrooms to support immediate teaching needs.
When a teacher is struggling in the middle of a lesson, the coach doesn’t wait for a debrief. They slip into the room, crouch beside the teacher during independent work time, and offer a quiet word — a reframe, a suggestion, a question that can open new possibilities. This is the huddle: brief, purposeful, low-stakes, and timed to the moment when the teacher can actually use it. Sometimes this looks like thirty seconds of a quick discussion. Sometimes it’s a gesture across the room, suggesting to the teacher this is a good time to have the kids turn and talk about their ideas. Other times, the coach or teacher may take a “teacher time-out” — a short, deliberate pause called by the coach or invited by the teacher, where both enter into an instructional decision together: how to represent a students’ thinking, what question to ask next, how to press on a mathematical idea, or what talk moves might best support many students to talk about the key mathematical idea. While students work, the teacher and coach think together: let’s try this, what if we, did you notice?
Notice that co-learning coaching positions coaches and teachers’ interactions to be connecting the vertices of the instructional triangle–students, pedagogy and mathematics. As we’ve written before, these connections are the crucial ingredients for discussions likely to shift teachers’ instructional practices. We’ve also written about the importance of focusing coaching on instructional decisions, because what a teacher chooses to pursue, question, represent, or make public shapes the opportunities students have to engage in meaningful learning.
What makes co-learning coaching distinct is situating learning in practice itself. The teacher doesn’t have to remember what the coach said, and the coach doesn’t have to remember to say something to the teacher — they just lived it together. They learn together. The co-learning happens in real-time, it is responsive and should feel low-stakes.
This kind of coaching requires a particular kind of coach: someone with deep understanding of the mathematics of the unit, ability to implement instructional practices that are responsive to students, and high relational intelligence. It also requires trust: a school culture where a coach appearing at your door is not surveillance but solidarity. The coach is not evaluating. The coach is thinking alongside.
Some questions that we’re grappling with are: Can coaches enter classrooms and interact with teachers without a formal planning session ahead of time? What does this look like in practice? In our upcoming posts, we will look at what this looks like in practice. We’ll also consider some powerful co-learning coaching pedagogies. We are planning to pull in teacher, coaches, and principals voices to share how co-learning coaching has shifted the way they think about supporting learning.
Leave a Reply