SITUATED INSTRUCTIONAL COACHING: A CASE STUDY IN REFORMING UNDERGRADUATE SCIENCE EDUCATION

Progress towards reforming undergraduate STEM education has been less than ideal despite 20+ years of empirical evidence demonstrating the efficacy of reformed teaching practices in promoting positive student learning outcomes. Barriers to reforming traditional lecture-based undergraduate STEM classes are numerous and include the time commitment necessary to revise courses, lack of readily accessible training in the use of reformed teaching strategies, and instructors’ existing beliefs about teaching and learning. This study documents the use of a situated instructional coaching process as a method for overcoming these barriers. In this model, a geoscience education graduate student (the coach) assisted a faculty member seeking to reform an introductory geoscience course on dinosaurs. Every lesson for the course was rewritten with new learning objectives, student activities, feedback, and assessments. The revision process occurred in three phases, which shifted the responsibility of lesson design from the coach to the instructor by the end of course. Data on instructional practices were collected using the Reformed Teaching Observational Protocol (RTOP) and belief changes experienced by the instructor were captured using the Teacher Beliefs Interview (TBI) and Beliefs about Reformed Science Teaching and Learning (BARSTL) survey. RTOP data confirm that the instructor was able to successfully teach the reformed lessons as designed and also gained skills in designing reformed lessons. TBI and BARSTL data indicated a shift in the instructor’s beliefs toward a more student-centered perspective. Situated instructional coaching presents an alternative to the more traditional professional development models such as workshops.