0:00  
Hello, and thank you for listening to the mathematics teacher educator journal podcast. The mathematics teacher educator journal is co sponsored by the Association of mathematics teacher educators, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. My name is Eva Anheuser and I'm talking with Courtney Baker, who is an assistant professor at George Mason University in the College of Education and Human Development. And with Melinda qnap, who is a senior instructor at Oregon State University cascades in the College of Education. We will be discussing the article the decision making protocol protocol for mathematics coaching, addressing the complexity of coaching, with intentionality and reflection, published in the march 2019, issue of the mathematics teacher educator journal, we will begin by summarizing the main points of the article and discuss in more depth the lessons they shared in the article, their successes and challenges, and how these lessons relate to their other work. Courtney and Melinda, thank you for joining us.

1:01  
Thanks for having us.

1:02  
Yes, thanks for having us.

1:03  
So let's start by just giving a brief summary of the article. And if you could just state your name, when you answer the question, then we know who's talking to us.

1:13  
All right, so this is Courtney Baker, and article really summarizes planning protocol framework that Melinda and I developed to support mathematics coaches, specialists, teacher leaders, to help them purposely plan their coaching interactions, you know, often to make instructional shifts to enact principles to actions, and I think most importantly, to connect research with practice. We study three cases with coaches as specialists who are at different points in their coaching career anywhere from novice, you know, first year to experienced and our findings suggest that the use of this protocol, individuals were provided opportunity to reflect which served as professional development, they were able to advance their coaching practice through increased intentionality, goal setting and assessing the situation, as well as just the overall enhancements of enactments that might not have happened otherwise. Okay,

2:12  
thank you. And who do you think should be reading this article?

2:16  
This is one that we think the people who should be reading this article would be anybody that provides professional development to coaches, training for mathematics specialists, and that can be through programs or outside of programs, and people working to develop teacher leaders or teacher leadership in the area of mathematics. We also see the protocol or this article actually helping guide school and district mathematics coaches, or anybody working with school and district mathematics coaches, because the protocol can be used as a framework to guide their their work in schools. Thank

2:53  
you. So what is the important problem or issue that your protocol or your article addresses?

3:02  
So this is malenda, again, and what we thought the big problem that we were really trying to address and focus on is this idea of professional growth for mathematics coaches, and then need that they have to develop the knowledge necessary to do their work of coaching. Because in our in our work, we both work with coaches and the literature says that coaches have a really big job ahead of them. And to develop as coaches either at at the novice level, the beginning level, all the way through your career is really challenging, because coaches need to support students with a wide range of academic needs, coaches need to support teachers that have a wide range of experience, skill and knowledge. And they need to support the development of effective instructional practices in each and every classroom. And the other role of coaches is to support administrators and working together with administrators with school goals. And then last, the other important problem or need that we see out and with not a lot of research out there is this idea of developing or enacting leadership knowledge. So that was one of the areas that we were really trying to address is how to help coaches develop that ongoing challenge. And a lot of the studies that are out there tend to be prescriptive, or a focused on what coaches do or how they're spending their time rather than that process of learning how to coach

4:32  
Yeah, and when I'm going to add to them specialized knowledge that leadership knowledge that it's, it's something that you don't just get just because you are a great mathematics teacher or you're really good in one setting doesn't mean that that that transfers to being a great leader. up in these individuals, mathematics coaches, specialist teachers are appointed or anointed because they were great in their classroom. They had good results and what we find is these individuals, once they become leaders are often isolated. They might be the only one in a district the only one in a school system, perhaps a school, you know, maybe they have a buddy teacher or someone to support them if they're if they're fortunate. But they also because of this specialized knowledge need very specialized professional development. So going to your state mathematics conference doesn't necessarily it gives them more content and pedagogy and support for helping students in the classroom. But it might not have that support with Well, how do I relate to adults? or How can I work to move instructional shifts school wide or vertically across teams.

5:35  
So as I was listening to you talk, I was thinking about the fact that our listener ship is not just us. And I was wondering if we could say a few words of what a mathematics coach is, for those who might not be familiar with that?

5:51  
Sure. This is Courtney, a mathematics. So it's really interesting, because the definition is broad, depending on which state place that you're pulling from math teacher leader, a math coach is someone who is working, I think Melinda and I frame it as someone who's working alongside the teachers, they are in the classroom supporting instructional change, they may or may not have classroom responsibilities of their own, they may or may not have release time to do their job, they could be an elementary math specialist, or a secondary math specialist who full time is relieved of all their classroom duties. They can work with teams of teachers, individual teachers, they might be someone in our cases, we try to identify individuals who exemplify each of these. But there might be someone who is part time in the classroom, and maybe maybe you're triggered, review some release time for you know, a planning period, or two or half of a day, depending on what the budgetary allocations. Another option might be, they might be a full time classroom teacher who is taking on additional responsibility. So I'm going to jump into anyone who is really taking on this leadership role to fill this knowledgeable individuals responsibility.

7:07  
And I think just I'll add on because this does relate to our protocol, is that because there is such a wide range of what this math coach could look like, we really wanted to think about in our protocol, what would be the different ways that these different roles might enact this leadership? So is it with a team of teachers? Is it with one on one with individual teachers? And so that those are some of the pieces we were looking at? Because that that variety of responsibilities, you know, it's so different depending on your where you are, what state what school, etc.

7:44  
And if I summarize correctly, there is no education that makes you a coach, right? He said, appointed or anointed. So sometimes there is some leadership education they have, but sometimes they don't.

7:58  
Yeah, correct. Absolutely. And that's, I think, one of the greatest challenges. So I'll speak to Virginia a little bit, Virginia has an extra endorsement that you can get from your state licensure, says, here's some content, just like a classroom teacher, here's some competencies, you can obtain these competencies through a master's program in Virginia, it's 30 credits, no matter what university you go to, and you will end up with a master's degree and a math specialist endorsement. Some states only have content classes that their individuals need to take to get this endorsement. Some states have, you know, a combination, but maybe not as many, when you can speak to Oregon a little bit, I think,

8:44  
definitely less structured. And I think that we have, I think the majority of people, though, really come to coaching through classroom teaching. You know, they have taught for some amount of time interested in leadership and interested in coaching and very informal in a lot of ways.

9:02  
Yeah, and I'll say to a lot of times, people will have these positions, and then seek out the educational experiences. And so the program that I work with, we get a lot of people who are already doing the job who are already a math leader formally or informally within their school, and they're, they're realizing how complex and all the variances that exist.

9:24  
So I'm gonna try to go back to question here was, what's the important problem? And summarizing, one is that there isn't like a set curriculum or something that all coaches went through that you can build on, and that they're often very isolated. So they don't really have groups of people to talk to. Yeah, definitely. How does this article builds on existing work in the field and what particular theories or previous articles Do you ground your work in?

9:56  
All right, this is Courtney, the literature that we pulled from the golden We created this protocol was, as mentioned before, we are trying to bridge research and practice. Like Melinda said, there's a lot of practitioner support out there books for how to make change within a school. And there's not as many, even though it's been around for a couple decades, it's there's not as much mathematics coaching literature. It's not as heavy as literacy, where the initiatives were were much earlier in the policy world. So we wanted to think about how can we merge research and practice? How can we help individuals to make make a collective change in the school, there's a lot of ways a math teacher leader, a math coach, and a specialist can work in their school, they can work with one on one individuals, co teaching modeling, they can work with teams, maybe in team meetings, or professional learning communities, they could work with administrators doing professional development. And as we talked about, how did we know my students often asked, How did you know what to do? When you were a math coach, Linda and I were both math coaches, and prior to entering into higher education, and as we, as we thought about what knowledge and skills we had, and how did we gain it, we also pulled from the thinking through a lesson protocol by Smith and Stein. And we thought, Well, why isn't there something like that for math coaching, when we came at this idea that there was a lot of complexity? And again, we thought about why is there this complexity, there's no one definition people are on their own different from state to state. We also felt that another core piece of literature he pulled from was it had to relate to practice. So principles to action had just come out, I think, a year or so into when Melinda and I really started these conversations. And we wanted to ground our protocol on principles to action, because one, it came from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. So here's a national organization, there's a book readily puts research based practices for mathematics education that have been around for over two decades, in the hand of every teacher, it calls on in the back, it says, Hey, if you're a principal or math coach or a specialist, we want you to take action, we want you to support the teachers and implementing these math practices. But beyond that, at the end, it doesn't give a lot it didn't give a lot of detail. So we started looking into Well, what frameworks can we pull into there and we landed on Lindsey Givens and Paul Cobbs 2017, potentially productive coaching activities. And they kind of summarize the what we've shared, there's, there's not a lot of research out there on some of these activities to say that they're they are highly effective. But we really think based on how we're seeing these specific activities used in literature, activities, like modeling with teachers, or for teachers, co teaching Lesson Study, or studio, or lesson Lesson Study or math studio, we think these, these activities are potentially productive. And when and I really wanted to see those put into action, let's take these high leverage or potentially high leverage practices for coaches, let's take these potentially high leverage practices for teachers, because there's these layers of knowledge as a math teacher leader that you need to know to be able to and act, you know, instructional shifts successfully.

13:24  
Plus, I'm going to add on this is Melinda, I think it helped give a focus to a coach can work on a lot of different things. And there are a lot of things. But we felt that really, putting those teaching practices and coaching practices together gave those coaches a place to start, and to really work and refine their practice around those ideas. So that was one of our, one of the goals that we really had is that, you know, in practice, we see these as being potentially productive, and we just want to explore that more. So putting them into action.

13:57  
So that's a really nice lead into the next question, where we're gonna ask you to tell us a little more about the innovation, the decision making protocol for mathematics coaching, what is it and how does it address the problems that you stated.

14:12  
So the decision making protocol for mathematics coaches is really a cycle much like a cycle, what you would have with as a teacher to think about understanding your learners. So understanding the situation, you know, setting goals for learning. So as a coach, I need to set goals for the teachers that I'm going to be working with. And then I need to consider Well, how am I going to work with those things so that that I might say the teachers are working on particular teaching practices. So facilitating mathematics discourse might be a goal that we choose, and then I'm going to have a particular way of working on that as a coach. And so that's that phase three in thinking through So again, it's thinking through in a way like a lesson plan as a coach, so I'm thinking about the goals. What do I want teachers Learn, what do they need to learn? What? How am I being reflective as a coach? So that phase four. So again, it's a cycle the, what naturally happened with the teachers, and then the coach being reflective about that. So so the innovation really is just creating this planning protocol for coaches to think about not just working with teachers one on one, but really thinking about, maybe I do work with teachers one on one, but each and every interaction that I have with teachers, what is it that I want them to learn, so that the protocol really takes you through that process that gives questions, so it really asks questions to the coach to consider. So questions for consideration. And so again, you may not scribe or write down all of the answers to these questions, but it's a it's a process to get coaches thinking about their own planning. And reflecting on that planning.

15:55  
And Milena, I'm going to add into that, in addition to this idea that there's parallel planning structures that mathematics coaches or teacher leaders need to engage in similar to classroom teachers engaging with their students. We also wanted to emphasize a balance of content, mathematics content, and the context or the situation in which you work. We wanted to recognize with the context that the map the complexity that we had previously shared with you, there's a variety of settings, there's a variety of ways that we can interact with people, there's a variety of structures, we can we can pull from, whether it's Lesson Study, or analyzing student video or student work. We also wanted to make sure that mathematics content was just play just as important a role as the context because so much what is out there talks about the importance of relationships, and it is extremely important to have knowledge on relationships as a mathematics coach or teacher leader. But it's really inequitable to only focus on the relationships, because if we as an example, if a mathematics coach only worked with those individuals that they connected with, or that came to them, not every teacher in the school would have access to that mathematics coach. And so we thought are necessarily our way of pushing back. But we really wanted to share with everyone that we can't just focus on relationships in these roles in which we're being asked to make instructional shifts, we also need to focus on the mathematics content. And it's this balance of, I think the protocol we try to do is capture this balance of content and context, to start these constructive conversations to, for coaches to have at the at the forefront of their practice as they support teachers growth.

17:49  
So when I was reading this article, I'm just going to describe the visual, there's this circle that has a coaching cycle on the outside and a teaching cycle on the inside. And then there comes a table in the appendix with all kinds of like the lesson planning framework, right? But it's a coaching framework questions to ask yourself. And I thought it was really powerful that one of the things that you worked on with the coaches is to understand the school and the teacher goal, because there's no point in coaching somebody on something that they don't want to be coached on. Right. So that's part of your I think that's a really important point. And so if somebody is listening now, and they're really interested in using this, there is all the materials are provided in the article online. And there's also this beautiful multicolored circle, that shows how to things align. Okay, so the motivation for creating this came, I'm assuming out of your needs, you were coaches, you worked with coaches, and you thought this would be a helpful tool. What were your research questions?

18:57  
This is Melinda, and really for our for this? Because Courtney and I created this protocol, we really wanted to just try this out with some coaches. So our research question revolved around that. And it was how does the use of the decision making protocol for mathematics coaches in planning a coaching interaction, impact mathematics coaches practice? So the goal was really just to you know, we had this case study with three different coaches. And we wanted to see how that may have impacted the interaction that they had with the teacher. And so that was really our idea here is getting started with this.

19:37  
So let's move into what you found and what evidence you have for those findings. This is Melinda

19:45  
again, what we found we had, like we said, the three case studies,

19:49  
do you want to tell us a little bit about each of the case studies just like your sentences,

19:54  
so yeah, what you're about as much of the gesture, so we had three coaches, the first coach, we refer to to Charlotte, and Charlotte was a what we would call a regional mathematics coach. So she was responsible for many schools. In fact, she had 12 schools across hundreds of miles. So big distances between her schools very spread out. middle school and high school, she was a brand new coach. So the first year as a coach was when we, we included her in the study. The second coach that we worked with was a she was a part time coach. So half teaching half coaching at a middle school. And it was she had one year of experience, and this is Jordan. And then the third coach, it was Michaela. And she was a full time coach, very experienced. So she had six years of experience as a coach, she had worked in this school, that she was a coach when she was teaching. So very different cases, what we found across our interviews, we collected data, we had three different interviews prior to the interaction. So just as they were getting to know the protocol, and then their second interview was while they were planning their interaction, so after they had chosen the teacher they were going to work with and then the third interview was after the interaction had happened. So that was sort of how that played out. And what we found our evidence, our findings that came out with Charlotte, who was the brand new coach, two of the findings that came out themes that came out was the importance of assessing the coaching situation, because she was so spread out, it was really hard for her to get to know the teachers, but the guiding questions in the protocol helped her see how important it was to kind of quickly understand each of those different contexts that she was going to work in it. Also, she got because of her situation, she got really stuck in collecting data about those classroom teachers and really didn't have an opportunity to do a lot of coaching because she just didn't have enough time with the teachers. And so the protocol, one of the findings around her idea was around her interviews was this idea of moving beyond envisioning because she kept talking about, well, I will or I hope to be able to, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever she said. But she needed to move beyond this, like, this is what I'm going to do into and you can cut the blah, blah, blah, needed to, to, to move beyond the like, this is what I hope to do on what to do to actually having some intentional action. And so we saw that really clearly with her, she had a very challenging situation. But the protocol helped her see what it would take for her to move forward, if that makes sense.

22:44  
So Jordan and Michaela also found that they were through planning with the protocol, they were able to move beyond this envisioning towards the actions. And another key finding with them was the importance of setting goals to determine their impact. Early on Jordan's administrator, it came out in the first interview with her Jordan's administrator had recently asked her, I'm specifically making this position for you, you are halftime middle school teacher and halftime mathematics coach, how are you going to know that what you're doing is effective? and Jordan is really stumped. You know, she hadn't really thought about, well, what am I going to do to show my administrator that I'm effective. So at the time of our interviews, and her looking at during the first interview and reading the protocol, she immediately focused on, I think it's phase two and phase four with goal setting and analyzing, you know, your effectiveness, looking at the evidence. And she really connected to that that was a piece that during the planning of our coaching interaction, she was able to share with both myself and then a teacher she chose to work with the goal for her was to facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse. And she recognized in planning with this teacher, she needed to bring some sort of evidence of well, how will we both know that you as a teacher facilitated meaningful mathematical discourse, or that I supported you with that because her coaching practice that she identified was co teaching. So she and the teacher came up with examples of what that would sound like what it would look like, and a way for them to keep track of that. So that was evidence that she was able to bring to the concluding reflection at the end of the cycle, and really reflect with the teacher on and instead of it being personal, where a math coach might say, well, I saw this, she was able to turn it around and say, Well, here's what the evidence says. And it was very it was she wasn't emotionally as emotionally attached to it. Because there was also and mckaela felt this too. There was also a fear for Gosh, I'm in these interactions and I have to share with a classroom teacher, something that you know, I know they're knowledgeable, but maybe this practice is new. I feel uncomfortable. sharing some suggestions with them. For the instance of Jordan Jordan was coaching a teacher who had a lot more years of experience in the grade level than she had and was a colleague of hers at the school since she was part time teacher, part time coach. So she was really trying to balance that that collegiality with, how do I get feedback in a meaningful way that's not going to be confrontational, or having an avoidance mckaela was similar in those same kind of ideas. Michaela was the veteran math coach who had been in the school before, and most of her co teaching experiences before looking at this protocol had been Poppins, she gets pulled in, Hey, mckaela, come check out this mapping I'm doing today. Oh, hey, mckaela, you shared this at PLC, I'm doing it tomorrow Do you want to come in her role was really structured around these team meetings, these professional learning communities that she would help facilitate and bring mathematical ideas and content into. She also had different relationships as one does different relationships with different teachers. So the fourth grade team that she identified, she had a good relationship with them. But she also felt they kind of knew what they were doing and didn't really interact with them at the same extent, they weren't actively inviting her into their classrooms. And so Kayla didn't push into their classrooms. By engaging them this fourth grade team and mathematics and using red and yellow counters to models and fractional ideas. She really situated herself in a way that at the end of his interaction, the teachers, each of those teachers invited them invited Michaela into their classrooms. So she was able to through this purposeful planning and this coaching interaction, make more gains and a bigger impact with her instruction. By purposely planning something that may, like Jordan may have seemed confrontational, or may have been, they may have been apprehensive about or it may have just been a team that they wasn't on their radar. Those are some of the big ideas from those cases and how they connected with Charlotte.

27:11  
Okay, so let's kind of summarize back into our last question, what are the new contributions that your article is making? And how can people use the innovation

27:24  
but the mpmc, the decision making protocol for math coaching is a tool, a framework that can provide mathematics teacher educators with a structure for supporting mathematics teachers, who are leaders or coaches, and in a variety of contexts, for instance, connecting to the case of Charlotte, what a great opportunity to connect reflective protocol to individuals who may be isolated, or serving multiple schools, and maybe a tool that helps to recruit aspiring teacher leaders by providing them with a structure to give them an idea of a starting place? Where do they start, they in terms of a veteran coach, or someone who perhaps is already doing the job as Michaela was, this protocol, many of the questions seem to make sense, but also allow individuals to focus on perhaps a part of the cycle or a phase. I think thing that Melinda and I really feel passionately about is that this is not a rigid protocol. We want people math teacher, educators, math coaches to take this protocol and use it flexibly, we want them to if there's a specific phase, you want to work on, focus on that phase, if you notice, while you're looking at the coaching practices, that you're very familiar with four of them, but there's this one you've never heard of, maybe that's an opportunity for you, as a math coach or teacher, leader or educator to self assess and engage in learning about another way you can grow your practice, we really want to focus on this idea of proactive coaching, as well, instead of being reactive, there are parts of just like any teacher, any teachers role, that our jobs are going to be reactive, we have to meet student needs, we need to meet teacher needs, we need to, you know, maybe your administrator pulls you out and a certain need that they have. But there also needs to be a part of your practice, just like teaching, where you are purposefully planning and reflecting so that you can advance your own professional learning and your own practice. And so I think that a big piece of how I see other people using this innovation is, you know, taking it and realizing it's not a static tool, take it and tweak it as educators, teachers are fantastic about seeing something, reading something, exploring it and then saying I can totally make that better. Whether you find it at that coffee machine or in an article. I think for me, those are that the greatest takeaways that I want to hear back from others.

30:02  
And I'm just going to add kind of just an interesting piece. So as we have shared this protocol with coaches and people who are out in the field doing this work, one of the things that has been really interesting, and we hope that this continues to be used is this idea of exploring further exploring the coaching activities. That seems to be a piece of this, that's really interesting for coaches to think about the ways that they do their work in schools, often we hear lots of coaches engaged in the coaching cycle. So that that may be not even co teaching. And so as they think about the different ways that they might coach, I think that has been really interesting for coaches to see, oh, we have, we can do math together, we can watch a video together, we can engage and you know, in a bigger structure, like mathematics studio, maybe as a grade level role school or math labs, think those are some really interesting ideas that I hope and we hope that coaches pick up on as ways to work with teachers, and not just have one on one individual work with teachers is how do we develop this collective learning. And I think some of the structures in the coaching activities will help support these kind of larger school wide innovations, as well as merging it with like our goal as teachers using those teaching practices, because as Courtney said, early on, those are very widespread and becoming very well known through nctm. And the work is those eight mathematics teaching practices. So really, I think that's a piece of this, that can be pretty powerful, because that's something that's becoming more common with teachers. And then as coaches, we can pick up on that and leverage that through the ways that we do our work. And for those interested in using this, you have the teaching practices, as well as the coaching practices as a pendency to your article, as well as the tool and your interview protocol questions. So somebody could actually replicate your whole study if they were interested in doing so we also have a website I'll just I don't know if you want it Yeah, this but that has planning tools on there for coaches. So each phase has we've just set up a planning tool so

32:22  
they can actually record and is there a link to the website in the article

32:26  
there isn't linked to the website and the article as Okay,

32:29  
so perfect so people can find the website. Okay, well, thank you so much. For further information on this topic, you can find the article and the mathematics teacher educator website. This has been your host, Eva Anheuser. Thanks for listening and goodbye.