This is part 2 of a series of posts focused on a stance for coaching we call “co-learning” coaching. In the first post, we explored this coach design. 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.
In this post, we want to give an image of what co-learning coaching can look like in practice. In the vignette below, we see a coach (Tara) as she moves across three 4th grade classrooms. All of her coaching takes on a co-learner stance, like what is described below. She did not plan with any of the teachers ahead of time. However, she has studied the curriculum in depth, and because they meet in each week in grade-level teams, she is familiar with the big mathematical ideas the teachers are working on. The teachers are within 2 lessons of each other and in this unit, the instructional activity choral counting is used to support students to see the relationship between the written and verbal number that expresses a fraction. Tara is also familiar with the fourth-grade students and their mathematical thinking. She spends a lot of time in classrooms, across all grade levels in her school.
Tara’s Classroom Visits
Tara has a clear objective for the 4th grade team for the day: helping the 3 fourth-grade teachers to support students to develop their faction understanding. As an instructional coach, her work is “on-the-ground,” characterized by sitting on the rug among students to better hear their thinking, offering quiet signals to teachers, and calling for “Teacher Time Outs” to pause the instruction in order to think with teachers about their instructional decisions in real-time.
In Tonya’s Room: Navigating the “Landmines”
In Tonya’s classroom, Tara sits on the rug among the students, observing a teacher who is new to the school but quick to adopt the talk moves already in place across the school. The class is performing a choral count by fourths, starting at 1/4. Seeing Tonya prepare to label the area model, Tara quietly steps in to help her avoid a common landmine. She suggests that Tonya write the fractional values underneath the boxes rather than inside them, as labeling the boxes themselves doesn’t represent individual the quantity. Tonya quickly adjusts, telling the class, “Ms. Tara just helped me think about how we’re going to record it”. As Tonya adjusted her recording, Tara was also learning. She could see how Tonya was making sense of the relationship between the visual representation and the written fraction, reflecting on how a small instructional decision could shape what students would come to understand. These moments helped Tara better understand what supports would be useful as teachers made sense of the curriculum and anticipated how students would make sense of the mathematics.
As the students count up to 12/4, Tara calls a Teacher Time Out to focus on the goal of identifying wholes. She whispers a question to Tonya to pose to the students: “How many fourths in ten wholes?” The students, whom Tara later praises as “model mathematicians” for their respectful wait time and flexibility, grapple with the question and conclude that there are 40 fourths in 10 wholes. Tara smiled at Tonya and waved at the students as she left; she stayed for a total of 12 minutes.
In Anna’s Room: Bridging the Gap
Tara then moves to Anna’s room. Though a veteran at the school, Anna moved from 1st grade to 4th grade this year and is new to teaching 4th grade mathematics. Here, the walls are covered with anchor charts showing circles divided into fourths and thirds, highlighting that fractions must be “the same size.” During a choral count of thirds, a student named Isaiah notices a pattern: “Nine-thirds equals three wholes”. Tara watches as Anna facilitates the discussion, then calls a Teacher Time Out to check on the wording of a question. They decide to push the students to see the connection between multiplication and fractions. When the class moves to sixths, Tara thinks carefully about a question to ask the class and asks the students directly, “How many sixths are in two-wholes?”. The instructional decision to let students struggle with this question pays off. One student, Joslyn, explains an important idea: “The denominator doesn’t change because it’s the size of the piece. And the numerator changes because it’s the number of the pieces”. Tara works with Anna to get out the critical mathematical ideas that tie to their learning goals for that instructional activity: understand a fraction a/b with a > 1 as a sum of fractions 1/b.
Tara was learning alongside Anna, too. Watching the interaction, she saw how Anna’s decision to give Joslyn time and agency created space for mathematical thinking that might otherwise have remained hidden. The moment gave Tara another example of how the ideas teachers explored in weekly collaborative meetings were becoming visible in classroom practice.
Tara ends her time in Anna’s room by huddling on the floor in the back of the room with a student who is needing additional help; Tara asks the student a series of questions. This student is new to the school. While talking with the student, Tara wonders how many students who might be new to their school might need some additional support partitioning and naming fractions and makes a note to bring this up in the grade-level team meeting later this week. Tara stayed for 14 minutes.
In Bella’s Room: The Experienced Pivot
Finally, Tara visits Bella, an experienced fourth year 4th grade teacher at the school. The students are working through multiple equal sharing problems, such as “12 children sharing 4 bags of chips”. Bella’s students are already proficient with additive strategies, using boxes and letters to denote sharing one item at a time. Recognizing that the students have a firm grasp, Tara utilizes a Teacher Time Out to suggest that Bella highlight more sophisticated strategies in the whole class discussion, sharing groups of items and using knowledge of repeated halving. This decision reflects Tara’s coaching philosophy: differentiating support not just for the students, but for the teachers based on their experience level and the immediate needs of the classroom. Tara stayed for 9 minutes.
Tara’s Reflections at the end
Throughout the day, Tara spends a few minutes in multiple classrooms. Her presence and decisions to make coaching moves blends high-level goals she has for teachers combined with supporting small, granular instructional shifts. Whether she is giving a “turn and talk” sign from the rug or suggesting alternative wordings for a question, her objective remains the same: to support teachers in moments of uncertainty, to help them enact teaching in ambitious and rigorous ways, and be responsive to the students’ needs.
We asked Tara to reflect on her co-learning coaching moves with the fourth grade team. Tara explained that she differentiates her approach based on teacher experience, noting the difference between supporting a teacher like Tonya, who is new to the instructional practices that have been adopted across the school, versus Anna who is new to the mathematical ideas of the grade level but has developed the school-wide instructional practices. A significant part of what Tara thinks about involves anticipating “landmines” or instructional missteps before they become habits. She is also checking to see how teachers, as learners, are taking up their new learning from weekly collaborative meetings into their classrooms. Key insights from her summary of the day include:
- Instructional Pivots and Representations: Tara reflected her intervention in Tonya’s room regarding a choral count by fourths. She was concerned that Tonya would label an area model internally (e.g., writing “1/4” inside a box), which does not represent the quantity as well as a linear model or writing the values underneath. She summarizes this as a “heads up” to the teacher based on mistakes seen in previous years.
- The Learning Goal of Identifying Wholes: She reflected on using the Teacher Time Out to refocus instruction when a teacher is unsure of the next step. In Tonya’s room, she used this moment to ensure the lesson stayed focused on the primary learning goal: helping students correlate the wholes with fractional amounts within the fraction count.
- Teacher Patience and Student Agency: In Anna’s room, Tara summarized a “beautiful” moment where the teacher allowed a student to continue explaining her thinking even when it was difficult. She praised how Anna offered the student a choice (asking if she wanted support or wanted to keep looking through the problem) which allowed the student to persist without frustration. Tara views students as capable sensemakers, and because this stands in contrast to dominant societal narratives about math learners, she actively seeks opportunities to support teachers in developing this perspective.
- Monitoring Student Thinking: Tara observes sometimes students rely on equations without fully grasping the meaning. She sees her role as helping teachers tie representations from in the curriculum to equations to ensure students are making the connections needed to deeply understand the mathematics.
- Long-term Planning: Beyond the immediate classroom moments, Tara says that an important part of her role as “picturing the direction” the instruction should go in the coming weeks. This involves checking in with teachers to launch new problems, reflecting on how the tasks support learning goals, and coordinating with weekly collaborative meetings across grade levels.
Tara emphasizes that instructional missteps can happen, and her presence in the classroom with a co-learning orientation to coaching is intended to catch these moments and support teachers in real-time.
Tara also reflected on her own learning, sharing how these visits provide an understanding of the grade-level learning landscape. As she moved among classrooms, she was building a picture of what students understood, where they were encountering difficulties, and what patterns might warrant collective attention. What she noticed with one student prompted her to wonder whether other students new to the school might benefit from additional opportunities to partition and name fractions. She carried that question with her as she thought about the team’s upcoming weekly collaborative meeting.
What are the affordances of co-learning? In our next series of posts about co-learning, we’ll continue to explore this orientation toward coaching and hear from teachers, coaches and principals who have implemented this design.
The ideas in this post are influenced by the following scholars: Becca Lewis, Elham Kazemi, and Hannah Neiman
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