Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Xu, Jianzhong

Committee Member

Brocato, Kay D.

Committee Member

Coats, Linda T.

Committee Member

Morse, Linda W.

Date of Degree

8-15-2014

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Major

Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Education Administration

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

College

College of Education

Department

Department of Leadership and Foundations

Abstract

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.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/20169

Comments

literacy coaching||teachers' cognition||reading comprehension

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