Amplifying teachers’ voices in the coaching partnership: An inductive exploration of teacher motivation and perceived learning

Abstract

To date, much of the research on coaching has been coach-centered as coaches' actions, behaviors and beliefs have been the focus of the extant research base. The current study seeks to amplify the voices of teachers in the coaching partnership by exploring what motivates teachers to engage in coaching, as well as what they perceive they learn from their engagement in coaching. As coaching is assumed to be a responsive professional learning structure in which a teacher's learning interests shape the focus and goals of coach-teacher interactions, our exploration of motivation and perceived learning seems critical. As part of the current study, we partnered with nine elementary teachers who were engaged in coaching cycles with their school-based coach and conducted 16 semi-structured interviews to better understand why they were motivated to engage in coaching, what they reported learning from the experience, and the extent to which there was parity between teachers' motivating reasons and their perceived learning. Qualitative analyses indicate that teachers were primarily motivated to engage in coaching and reported learning about content and pedagogy. Furthermore, analyses showed three overarching trends when exploring motivation and perceived learning parity and illustrative teacher cases are provided to demonstrate two of these overarching trends. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.