Enquiring into online teaching practice: using coaching dimensions as a metacognitive tool

Coaching Dimensions (Lofthouse et al., 2010; Lofthouse & Hall, 2014) were developed to provide a language and mechanism for teachers to describe, analyse and improve the quality of their face-to-face coaching and mentoring conversations.This paper summarises a self-study by an experienced classroom teacher but inexperienced online tutor who was unsure how well she was supporting teacher learning in a virtual environment. In the self-study the Coaching Dimensions framework was used to analyse tutor comments (n=213) on reflective blog posts written by participants on a teacher leadership programme (n=28). Contextualisation of the framework to the virtual TLP environmentwas required before application. Though the online interactions were asynchronous and not face-to-face, five of the seven dimensions were explicitly evident and another was implicit in the data set. Dimensions of stimulus, scale and time were defined bythe demands of the programme task. Typically, each comment featured more than one Interaction Functionand all seventeen aspects of the Interaction Function dimension were identified across the data set. Given the inexperience of the tutor-coach, this was surprising and encouraging. While the Co-creation (of learning) dimension is difficult to explicitly identify in coaching interactions, it was notable that instances of challenge-dissonance-defence interactions seems to imply that co-creation and learning did occur via these blog based interactions.As such, the Coaching Dimensions framework is a useful metacognitive tool for exploring and improving coaching interactions in online as well as face-to-face situations.