From Coaching Conversations to Instructional Change: Analyzing Coaching Discourse, Emotion, and Equity-Oriented Teacher Learning
This project examines how instructional coaching conversations support teachers in responding to student needs, reflecting on their own practices, and developing inclusive instructional strategies.
High-quality professional learning can help teachers create classroom environments that support learning, equity, and belonging. However, many professional development models rely on one-size-fits-all approaches that fail to account for the specific needs of individual teachers. This project—an extension of Dr. Jamaal Matthews’ Cultivate Belonging Collaborative—studies how sustained, equity-oriented instructional coaching can support teachers in responding to student needs, reflecting on their own practices, and developing inclusive instructional strategies.
The Cultivate Belonging Collaborative (CBC) is a 24-week coaching program designed to strengthen teachers’ equity-oriented beliefs and instruction through structured cycles of classroom video analysis, 1-on-1 coaching, and collaborative self-reflection. At present, the collective works with secondary math teachers in districts across the U.S. that serve predominantly Black and Brown students. In mathematics education, the enduring myth that the discipline is culture-free often obscures how racialized assumptions, normative ideas of ability, and broader logics of white supremacy shape everyday teaching and learning. CBC coaches are therefore tasked with helping teachers recognize and interrupt these dynamics while also building new forms of practice that support racially marginalized youth.
While the CBC model has demonstrated positive effects on teacher practice and student outcomes, less is known about the coaching conversations that help produce these changes. This project examines the patterns of discourse, emotion, reflection, and resistance that emerge in coach-teacher interactions. By studying these conversations closely, the research team aims to better understand how coaching supports teacher learning and whether teachers are able to translate equity-oriented feedback into meaningful changes in belief and practice.
The project will generate practical resources for instructional coaches and teacher educators, as well as scholarly products that advance research on equity-oriented teacher learning.
External project participants include Nia Nixon (UC Irvine), Amin Samadi (UC Irvine), and Joey Wu (Indiana University - Bloomington).
Project Participants
