Coaching Teachers in Document-Based History Instruction: Practices That Support Teacher Facilitation of Student Discourse

Abstract

Instructional coaching is increasingly regarded as an essential feature of professional development, but no research exists on content-specific instructional coaching for history teachers. The study examines data from a coaching program in which history teacher leaders served as novice coaches for their colleagues. We found that coached teachers, as a whole, improved in discussion facilitation. Case analysis of two successful and two less successful coach–teacher pairings revealed that successful coaches were more likely to focus on eliciting students’ argumentative discourse whereas less successful coach planning sessions focused on discrete historical content knowledge and the disciplinary heuristics of historical thinking. It appears that coaching that emphasized a conceptual redirection toward inquiry and a pedagogical toolkit for fostering student discourse was more closely tied to growth in discussion facilitation and opportunities for student historical reasoning than a coaching approach more narrowly focused on historical concepts.