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Teachers' Experiences with Literacy Coaching: Instructional Spaces to Teach Third and Fourth Grade Reading Comprehension

The purpose of the study was to understand teachers’ knowledge and experiences associated with teachers’ sense-making of their literacy coaching experiences. The researcher used qualitative research methods in the form of interview data and classroom observations to examine teachers’ sense-making experiences informed through sociocultural theories. The researcher collected data from 5 teacher participants, mostly African Americans, who taught students who were also predominantly African American. Teachers’ years of teaching experience ranged from 9 years to 40 years. The study found that literacy coaching may improve teachers’ abilities to scaffold students’ cognitive reasoning. The study suggested that more, in-depth learning of subject-matter content, an understanding of students’ instructional tasks, and an increase of duration in literacy coaching may be required before teachers can implement literacy instruction above literal comprehension. In contrast, the findingssuggested that additional efforts in literacy coaching may be required to improve teachers’ scaffolding of students’ background knowledge.The findings revealed that few teachers may understand the influences of students’ cultural backgrounds upon students’ learning. The present study implied that additional and closer examination of how teachers scaffold cultural background knowledge during reading instruction may provide insight related to the role of knowledge about teachers’ metacognition while engaged in literacy coaching. Moreover, the results of the present study suggested that literacy coaching may promote teacher and student learning over extended periods of time. The study found that 4thgrade students showed small achievement gains among individual students moving from 3rd grade to 4thgrade during the year of the intervention. Finding of small gains occurring during the year that the intervention was provided may suggest an expectant growth projection over time. Nonetheless, the present study did not find that literacy coaching conclusively impacted gains in literacy achievement.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MSSTATE/oai:scholarsjunction.msstate.edu:td-5217
Date15 August 2014
CreatorsLiddell, Peggie Joice
PublisherScholars Junction
Source SetsMississippi State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceTheses and Dissertations

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