Developing a Critical Stance Through Teacher Candidate Coaching

Abstract

This chapter seeks to illustrate how one field-based professor used her instructional coaching knowledge and applied it in a field-based course to develop reflection and ultimately encourage teacher candidates to challenge themselves and take risks in their clinical placements. It reveals how approaches to teacher candidate coaching differ from traditional instructional coaching, which is focused on student outcomes, and how this coaching encourages teacher candidates to push themselves and think deeply about their emerging practice. Through an analysis of five coaching sessions, the use of effective coaching strategies that foster growth for the candidate were examined. The analysis of coaching as critical pedagogy is important to understand not only how the characteristics of dialogical conversations shape teacher candidates' goal choices, but also to situate the place of skilled feedback in the context of learning to teach.