Examples of c/Critical Coaching: An Analysis of Conversation Between Cooperating and Preservice Teachers

Context

Three cohorts of classroom teachers participated in a master’s program, focused on developing practices in mentoring, teacher leadership, and professional development, at a large university in the southwestern United States. Each participant completed coursework, including learning about the Coaching With CARE model, while also serving as a CT for the same PT across one academic year. The Coaching With CARE model revolves around cycles of reflection. While these may happen informally across the year as well, each semester, the professor leading the course asked each CT to video-record three formal coaching cycles—each including a pre-conference, the actual teaching, and a post-conference. Pre-conference conversations took place quickly, right before PTs began teaching and asked them to visualize the upcoming lesson, discuss goals for students, and outline data they wanted CTs to collect while observing. Post-conference conversations typically took place a day or two after teaching and asked PTs to reflect on their teaching. While CTs were advised to create a “road map” for facilitating these conversations, ultimately the PTs’ concerns and celebrations drove these discussions.

This article draws primarily from data collected during the third cohort’s Classroom Discourse and Teacher Research (CDTR) course in spring 2015. The course was designed as “a collaborative, critical examination of teacher research, particularly in relation to exploring classroom talk” while “inquiring into our coaching practices” (course syllabus, 2015). Reading about teacher research, discourse, and discourse analysis, the CTs used the questions “what are these texts telling us about issues of language, power, and social justice?” and “how are we better understanding the ‘everyday language practices’ of our students and ourselves?” to guide discussion (course fieldnotes, January 27, 2015). The CTs in this course collected and analyzed language samples from their classrooms (using critical discourse analysis [CDA], narrative, and multimodal analysis methods) and created a teacher-research proposal based on their discussions about disrupting patterns of classroom discourse, understanding linguistic diversity, and facilitating student talk about social issues. Positioning both discourse and teaching as explicitly political, the faculty instructor also built connections between their discussions, the CTs’ classrooms, and larger sociopolitical events such as the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

One recurring conversation focused on defining the term “critical.” Initially, some CTs aligned “critical” with analytical and evaluative thinking while others came with definitions related to critical pedagogy (e.g., Freire, 1970). The CTs and instructor drew on their understandings of p/Politics (Janks, 2010) and d/Discourse (Gee, 1996) to develop a distinction between little c, critical and big C, Critical. Just as p/Politics and d/Discourse are distinguished by scale (e.g., discourse as local use of language and Discourse as ways of being and enacting larger ideologies), c/Critical proved to be helpful in imagining a continuum from a local, interpersonal level to a global, sociopolitical level. Little c, critical, was then used to think about individual differences and disrupting power dynamics at the classroom level. This type of “critical” sparked questions like whose voices were heard or not heard in classrooms and how power could be shared among teachers and students. Big C, Critical conversations centered on differences between groups in and beyond the classroom. This type of “Critical” included questions about race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, language, and other macro-level distinctions at play within classrooms and society.

In this course, CTs were invited to use retrospective video analysis (RVA) as a tool for facilitating reflection with their PTs (Mosley Wetzel, Maloch, & Hoffman, 2017). Using videos of PTs’ teaching, RVA invited CTs to build on strengths, naming and appreciating strategies PTs were already employing while focusing on students’ responses. In an RVA post-conference, a PT’s teaching was video-recorded, the CT and PT watched the video separately and selected interesting sections, and then they sat down together to closely review portions of the video and discuss.

While not named until late in the semester, many of the CTs also began using responsive CDA as a tool for connecting the critical thinking about language, identity, and power in their course with the mentoring work they were doing with their PTs. Responsive CDA, like larger CDA traditions, primarily seeks to deconstruct the ways in which language plays a role in power and domination within social relations (Fairclough, 2004). It is based on the assumptions that the form, content, and positioning in each piece of semiotic data actively works to maintain, resist, or change hierarchical power dynamics and that through close analysis of what was said and how it was said, we can uncover how power works within an interaction. Responsive CDA—unlike traditional CDA where data are removed and analysis typically conducted long after the event—can work as a tool for teachers to examine day-to-day interactions, informing immediate teaching decisions about redistributing power in the classroom (Rogers & Mosley Wetzel, 2014a). Paired with the use of video (RVA), many CTs began using responsive CDA as a tool for looking closely at multimodal semiotic data within PTs’ teaching videos and for describing the ways that data positioned teachers and students in ways that maintained or disrupted traditional power hierarchies within and beyond the classroom.

The CTs read about and discussed both RVA and responsive CDA (e.g., Mosley Wetzel, Hoffman, & Maloch, 2015; Rogers & Mosley Wetzel, 2014a, 2014b) during the course and were asked to engage in RVA as part of their three recorded post-conferences. After each recorded RVA post-conference, the CTs brought their videos in to share, reflecting together on what moves they were making as coaches that stimulated PT reflection. Before the final coaching cycle, the professor entreated all of the CTs to “move into critical conversations [with PTs]…about race and linguistic diversity and about the aspects of teaching we all think are important but are very hard to think about” (course fieldnotes, March 31, 2015). After seeing and reflecting on the CTs’ final post-conference videos, the course instructor later named what many of them were doing as responsive CDA (course fieldnotes, April 29, 2015).

Participants

The 10 CTs in this cohort were all female; three identified as Latinas while the other seven were White. They worked full-time as elementary teachers, with between 3 and 18 years of experience, and ranged from working with their first PTs to having worked with multiple student teachers across their careers. The CTs came into the program with varying experience discussing c/Critical issues related to schooling and larger social systems. Mia, for example, was comfortable talking about issues of race, class, and gender from the beginning of class. Many other CTs seemed less eager to engage in these discussions—both in the course and/or in their interactions with PTs.

The PTs paired with these CTs were all students in the university’s undergraduate elementary certification program. Across the program, PTs and CTs took classes, where they read about and discussed sociocultural influences on learning and developed instructional approaches for drawing on all students’ linguistic and cultural resources, with the same faculty. As with the CTs, PTs in this cohort came into this semester with different levels of comfort in talking about c/Critical issues. Renee and Jasmine, for example, actively engaged in these topics in classes or coaching conversations from the beginning of the semester.

Data Collection

Data collected in the course and analyzed for this article included class fieldnotes and audio-recordings, interviews, and video-recordings both of coaching conversations and CTs’ reflections on those videos during class meetings. Detailed fieldnotes were taken by a research team member during each CDTR course meeting. Audio-recordings of each class were also available for consultation when attention to specific language in a particular conversation was needed for analysis (e.g., discussions where c/Critical was brought up in class). Interviews with each participant took place at the beginning, middle, and end of the 2014-2015 school year. Each lasting between 20 and 55 min, these audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews focused on teaching contexts and histories with mentoring, their evolving philosophies and practices as a coach and in building relationships with their PTs, and factors influencing those philosophies and practices. Final interviews also included questions about using RVA and having critical conversations. Of the 10 CTs, eight made all videos they collected for the course available to the research team for analysis. Additional data included video-recordings of CTs watching and discussing their coaching videos during their class meetings. Using CDA for my own analysis, I used data from the course and interviews with CTs as context for grounding the coaching conversations. Because I was most interested in what conversations looked like when CTs and PTs engaged in c/Critical reflection, the video-recordings of RVA post-conferences between CTs and PTs were the main data source for this analysis.

Data Analysis

After taking descriptive fieldnotes on each post-conference video to create a written record of verbal and nonverbal content (Erickson, 2006), I used first cycle, descriptive coding (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014) to locate parts of post-conferences where teachers attempted to have conversations around power in or beyond the classroom. In this first phase, I relied on the aforementioned a priori definitions developed within the spring CDTR course to identify examples, examining data for instances of both classroom-level, “critical” and macro-level, “Critical” topics within their coaching. While explicit examples of these c/Critical conversations were marked through direct naming, implicit discussions about power were sometimes more ambiguous. For example, in one post-conference, the CT pauses the video and asks the PT to rehearse other possibilities for her language: “When Isabella said that, what could we have told her in that moment to help you get an idea of where she is coming from?” When the PT responded that she did not hear Isabella’s comment because she was focused on “the kids who were rolling around on the floor,” the CT talked to her about general ways to facilitate discussion to limit her own voice and include more students rather than framing this incident in terms of hierarchical classroom discourse patterns. After discussing this example with a critical peer group, including research team members and those unfamiliar with the data, this example was included in the bounded cases because while not explicit, the conversation was implicitly about decentering the teacher’s voice and paying attention to whose voices are heard and whose are silenced in the classroom.

During a second phase, I transcribed (see the appendix for conventions) examples and analyzed them turn by turn. Through multiple and iterative passes through the data, I used Fairclough’s (2004) framework of genre, discourse, and style to guide my analysis. This framework is a useful tool for examining all the elements of semiosis—focusing on not only what is said but also how it is said. Throughout this analysis, several patterns emerged, showcasing similarities and differences across examples of c/Critical discussion. Despite substantial overlap between categories and levels of analysis, overall, codes that came up in the genre analysis category (about cohesion, intertextuality, and coaching moves) were similar across all examples. Interactions between PTs and CTs featured collaborative talk (Mercer, 2000) and highlighted how they used language in ways that built on or maintained their relationships. All CTs and PTs strategically used video to support their reflection and analysis, each conversation kindled by attention to teachers’ and students’ specific language, body positioning, and/or movement. For example, in one post-conference, a CT and PT paused the video multiple times, paying close attention to students’ body positioning, control of materials, and talk to think about the power dynamics between students as they worked together in pairs.

Codes that came up in the discourse (about content and word choice) and style (about positioning, tense, and evaluation) categories set the c/Critical discussions apart. Some conversations were categorized as implicitly c/Critical: still about power—either within the classroom or within larger society—but without directly naming those aspects. In addition, implicit examples were sometimes characterized by not connecting classroom interactions to issues of local or global power dynamics. In other examples, participants explicitly named power or social issues connected to global Discourses about groups and power (e.g., race, class, gender, etc.). A clear link between what was happening in classrooms to ways of thinking about power also was important in this type of talk: just mentioning the word “Latinx” or “heterosexual” did not inherently make a conversation explicit.

Across c/Critical conversations, differences emerged among how CTs and PTs positioned themselves and each other. Some examples, coded as shared inquiry, included using language to build meaning together. Cues signaling this positioning included markers of content coherence (like picking up and using words or an idea the other has used) and matching footing (like both as vulnerable or both working toward understanding rather than one having a ready answer). In the remaining examples, marked as uneven, one participant appeared to be more invested in the conversation. This sometimes looked like one speaker offering her own vulnerability without being reciprocated. Uneven conversations were also often marked by attempts by one party to stop at easy answers or to leave the issue as unanswerable.

After this round of coding, I went back through all 24 post-conferences, identifying any additional examples or counter-examples. I recorded a description of the 13 identified c/Critical conversations (see Table 1). In describing these examples, several patterns appeared as continuums rather than binaries, so I also plotted examples on two axes (based on their c/Critical and explicit/implicit nature). Figure 1 provides this visual analysis of the examples in relation to each other and these main distinctions that emerged.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Description of 13 c/Critical Discussions Found Within 24 Total Coaching Conversations.

CT/PT	Classroom context	Cycle	Duration	Total post-conference duration	Initiated by	Positioning	Explicit or implicit	Critical or critical	c/Critical issue
Mia/Jasmine	Dual-Language 4th Grade; Math	RVA Post 1	6 min 11 s	27 min 30 s	PT	Shared inquiry	Explicit	Critical	Gender; student/student power
Helen/Renee	1st Grade; Morning Meeting	RVA Post 1	7 min 25 s	36 min 33 s	PT	Shared inquiry	Implicit	Critical	Teacher/student power
Claudia/Kaitlyn	Dual-Language 3rd Grade; ELA	RVA Post 1a	1 min 9 s	22 min 8 s	CT	Uneven positions	Explicit	Critical	Race
Claudia/Kaitlyn	Dual-Language 3rd Grade; ELA	RVA Post 1b	1 min 31 s	22 min 8 s	CT	Uneven positions	Implicit	Critical	Teacher/student power
Mia/Jasmine	Dual-Language 4th Grade; ELA	RVA Post 2	3 min 54 s	19 min 49 s	PT	Shared inquiry	Explicit	Critical	Race; teacher/student power
Francine/Erica	5th Grade; Math	RVA Post 3	11 min 59 s	17 min 26 s	CT	Uneven positions	Explicit	Critical	Race; teacher/student power
Angela/Erica	5th Grade; Social Studies	RVA Post 3	21 min 39 s	43 min 51 s	CT	Shared inquiry	Explicit	Critical	Teacher/student power
Claudia/Kaitlyn	Dual-Language 3rd Grade; ELA	RVA Post 3	5 min 5 s	13 min 53 s	CT	Uneven positions	Implicit	Critical	Teacher/student power
Jenna/Liz	5th Grade; ELA	RVA Post 3	3 min 10 s	13 min 3 s	CT	Uneven positions	Implicit	Critical	Gender
Nicki/Andrea	3rd-4th Grade; ELA	RVA Post 3	6 min 32 s	32 min 48 s	PT	Uneven positions	Explicit	Critical	Teacher/student power
Mia/Jasmine	Dual-Language 4th Grade; ELA	RVA Post 3	7 min 57 s	23 min 48 s	PT	Shared inquiry	Explicit	Critical	Race; student/student power
Helen/Renee	1st Grade; ELA	RVA Post 3	14 min 48 s	42 min 24 s	PT	Shared inquiry	Explicit	Critical	Teacher/student power; student/student power; student/text power
Mia/Jasmine	Dual-Language 4th Grade; ELA	RVA Post 4	41 min 27 s	41 min 59 s	PT	Shared inquiry	Explicit	Critical	Immigrants, gender, class; student/student power

Note. CT = cooperating teacher; PT = preservice teachers; RVA = retrospective video analysis; ELA = English Language Arts.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Map of 13 examples of c/Critical conversations found within RVA post-conferences.

“They Have the Power”: A Critical, Explicit, Shared Conversation

Helen (CT) and Renee (PT), both White female teachers, taught first grade in a public school that primarily served a working-class, Latinx community. In her beginning of the year interview, Helen described how, after reading Freire (1970) the previous summer, she was thinking a lot about oppression in schools and questioning how her decisions in that space were related to power and oppression. Helen later explained she and Renee both held social justice as a major aim in their classroom teaching, helping them feel “comfortable having those critical conversations” (end-of-year interview, June 5, 2015). She went on to describe multiple curricular units focused on issues ranging from communities to racial inequality to the environment.

Going into their third RVA post-conference, Helen explained that she and Renee agreed to focus on “balancing power” between teachers and students in writing conferences and between student writing partners during their pre-conference (class video, April 21, 2015). Helen’s open-ended prompt to start (“. . .what have you been thinking about. . .?”) opened space for Renee to lead the conversation; Renee then continues their discussion about “balancing power” as she begins reflecting on this particular teaching event.

In this part of the conversation, Renee looked at the video closely for seemingly small details, like who is physically controlling the learning materials, as evidence of hierarchical positioning and power between teachers and students in the classroom. Helen built on Renee’s explicit use of “power,” but prompted Renee to explain what she meant by “doing good.” This move, along with Helen’s later question about the students’ response to the teaching move, kept their discussion close to the actual discourse and physical positioning in the video and what those specific multimodal data revealed about the balance of power between Renee and the students.

As they continued, Renee provided details about the work Makayla and Desi did. In their research, the two students had come across a diagram showing the moons’ phases and were initially confused. On their own, they ended up finding and comparing another resource to answer their question, “Why are there eight moons?”

As Renee replayed student data in response to Helen’s earlier question (“And how did they handle the conversation when you gave them the power?”), she reinforced reflection based on student data rather than her opinion about the teaching. In this way, both were positioned as fellow inquirers, digging into Renee’s language (“So what are you thinking about, like where did you look. . .” and “you didn’t say. . . ”) and the students’ physical, verbal, and written responses to uncover who had power. Helen’s coaching moves here—paraphrasing Renee’s retelling, questioning, and focusing on student data—all supported Renee first describing and then analyzing how her language and positioning shifted the balance of power to be more student-led rather than teacher-controlled.

Renee and Helen then analyzed writing the students produced during the video-recorded lesson after learning there were not eight moons, but instead eight different ways the moon appears from Earth.

Through this close analysis of students’ language, Renee exposed another power relationship, beyond teacher-to-student and student-to-student dynamics. Here, Renee saw evidence of the students’ recognition that the book itself was not some all-knowing authority, but a product of a fellow writer/illustrator’s design choices. While perhaps a small move in the first graders’ writing, this way of thinking about text is important for critical literacy. Helen’s coaching moves earlier in the post-conference—pointing Renee to look back at students’ actual responses (“what were their responses?” and “how did they handle. . .?”), paraphrasing and naming teaching work Renee did (“So instead of saying. . .”) and prompting Renee to think about her power within these interactions based on her talk and movement (“elaborate more when you said. . .” and “what does that make you think of in terms. . .”)—created spaces for Renee to reflect on how she was disrupting traditional power hierarchies in this moment of teaching and how that affected her students.

While this example does not explicitly move beyond the classroom level to connect with larger sociocultural Discourses that may be at play, Helen and Renee used RVA and elements of responsive CDA as tools to support their re-thinking of restrictive classroom structures and discourse patterns and moves toward “agency-inciting pedagogies” (Dyches & Boyd, 2017) with their working-class, Latinx and African American students. As other studies have shown (e.g., Adair, Colegrove, & McManus, 2017), schools serving working-class communities of color often do not assume instructional approaches that support student agency and autonomy, instead relying on teacher-centered, banking-model (Freire, 1970) approaches to instruction and enforcing traditional hierarchies between students, teachers, and institutionalized knowledge. Using RVA and responsive CDA provided a context for analyzing and naming how power was circulating in their classroom and helped Helen support Renee in deconstructing a moment to think about how they were enacting critical, socially just teaching.

“Some Really Deep Dark Places of Being Racist”: A Critical, Explicit, Uneven Conversation

Francine (CT) and Erica (PT), both White female teachers, taught math and science in a departmentalized fifth grade. Francine described the school where she worked as “a more middle- to upper-socioeconomic class” where “almost 80-90% of the students are White” (beginning-of-year interview, September 11, 2014). Francine spoke a lot in class and in interviews about how this master’s program was opening up lots of questions about her own “whiteness and white privilege” and “about myself as someone who has a race and what kind of implications that has.” She also noted that she did not think that Erica was in the same place as her in regard to doing this kind of critical self-reflection, explaining “when we enter into these conversations, we’re all maybe coming at it from a different place and having done different types of work” (end-of-year interview, June 02, 2015). Taking advantage of the instructor’s charge to engage in c/Critical discussions during their third RVA post-conference, Francine turned their conversation to one explicitly about race and its impact on their teaching.

Specifically, Francine attempted to think with Erica about how their Whiteness may be affecting how they responded to an African American boy based on their normalized, assumed expectations for behavior. Erica initiated the discussion by stopping the teaching video to point to the student who, lip-syncing and dancing at that moment, appeared to be distracted by music playing during that part of the lesson. Notably, while it does not come up in their post-conference conversation, when discussing this video in class, Francine mentioned Gabriel was not the only student who seemed distracted by the music at different times during the lesson; he happened to be seated directly in front of the camera early in the video, and he was also the only African American student in the class. Erica framed this discussion with what she called the “big question”: “At what point do you take [the music/the fun activity] away from the rest of the class” “to help that one student”?

Viewing and then stopping to think about this particular moment in the teaching, Erica and Francine had concrete classroom data to analyze and reflect on. Francine attempted to model the type of analysis responsive CDA asks researchers to do, to dig below the surface to reveal how the PT’s and the students’ language and actions might reproduce or resist power inequalities within the classroom and larger social disparities connected to race and identity.

Yet as soon as Francine offered up an alternative question focused on Gabriel’s race, Erica continued legitimizing her original question, resisting Francine’s reframing. Before Francine could move into the specific semiotic data in the video, Erica took a defensive position, moving quickly to show her concern with care and equal treatment, with statements like “I don’t want him to feel like I’m picking on him” and “I think Gabriel’s great.” Erica also repeated the word “hard” (“It’s a hard question.” “It’s just so hard.” “It’s a hard line.” “It’s just so hard to know.”). This move, along with what she offered up as alternatives she had already thought about (“Do you say no? Do you put him outside?”), implied assurance that she had also thought about all possibilities while providing a pessimistic, but easy out for both her and Francine to leave it as “just hard” and move on. During this part of the conversation, Francine yielded to Erica’s talk, extending polite affirmations (e.g., “exactly,” “right,” and “sure”), signaling agreement, and preserving a level of comfort.

Later, Francine continued to push Erica to think with her about how race may be affecting their work in the classroom.

Unlike earlier, Francine acted more assertively, interrupting Erica’s further attempt to end the talk by naming it “just hard” and bringing race back into the conversation. Francine also switched to using plural pronouns (“. . .as like a critical issue for us as teachers. . .what do we do. . .”) including Erica as a subject and inviting Erica to think with her. Erica responded with questions that may show evidence of this invited thinking. However, her moves in the last turns (“It’s a hard balance” and “I think that’ll be in any classroom. . .”) seemed to function as an attempt to end the conversation, reiterating the difficulty of this work and shifting the topic from the present to future.

Francine, again, sidestepped Erica’s attempt to end the conversation, this time switching back to the singular pronoun, “I,” to share a personal example of her own struggle with Gabriel.

In this segment, Francine further positioned herself as a vulnerable teacher, attempting to grapple with how her own race may be affecting how she viewed and responded to this student’s behavior “not really looking like how we expect it to look like.” In introducing an example from her teaching, Francine used the emphatic verb “do” (“I do notice. . .” and “I do feel. . .”) which further stressed her strong, active, and current location in this work. She not only offered up this clear example of her inappropriate response to Gabriel’s behavior, but she went even further, confessing this reaction could be related to race or deep-seated racism.

Through this present-tense, active positioning (“being racist”), Francine also offered this as an available subject position for her PT; however, Erica did not choose to take it. Erica’s affirmations overlapping Francine’s talk seemed to be an attempt to magnify her alignment without actually having to take up any of the difficult thinking or talk. For example, throughout the entire conversation, not just this segment of the transcript, Erica never said the words “race,” “racism,” or “African American.” Instead, Erica continued to agree on a purely general level.

While Erica’s comments in response to Francine’s admission (“You’re not alone” and “anybody saying that doesn’t exist in them is lying” and “everybody has a little piece in them—somewhere. And they don’t want to admit it”) seemed to show some uptake of Francine’s confession, the lack of first person pronouns distances her from the same kind of vulnerable positioning. At the end, in line with Coaching With CARE’s model and the responsive part of responsive CDA, Francine invited Erica to think forward to concrete solutions. Here Francine shifted back to the plural “we” in the end of this last turn (“I mean. . .what can we do. . .”) to position herself alongside Erica in this work. Francine continued that positioning as they co-constructed some ideas and tried out potential language for working with this particular student in their classroom.

Learning about RVA and responsive CDA gave Francine tools and confidence for trying to bring her thinking about critical, socially just teaching into her work with Erica. In her final interview, Francine described this discussion and the professor’s invitation into it:

. . .it provided us a very specific time and place to have that conversation. . .[which] can be uncomfortable and difficult and emotional. And it’s hard in your busy day-to-day to make time for that. . . And even an excuse for myself, right? I taught this kid for ten months, and I didn’t talk to any of my colleagues about this uneasy feeling that, “Hey, I’m wondering what we need to be doing differently with this kiddo knowing that he is up against some serious prejudices in our all white school.” (end-of-year interview, June 2, 2015).

Throughout this conversation, Erica did not engage in responsive CDA with Francine to critically reflect on her language and actions in this specific interaction and the ways that discourse may reproduce the “negative stereotypes” and other societal Discourses about African American boys in particular, instead deflecting to easier questions that her current understandings of race and teaching allowed her to engage with. Yet, Francine attempted to provide a model for the critical reflection Erica may hopefully take up later in her practice.