Abstract
As part of the work of the Mathematics Education Outreach Team in the Center for Professional Development and Education Reform, we have engaged in content-focused coaching with hundreds of K-12 teachers seeking to deepen their understanding of mathematics and the teaching and learning of mathematics. Content-focused coaching is a job-embedded form of professional learning that has shown to support teachers in implementing ambitious instructional practices and strengthen both teacher and student content knowledge (e.g., Campbell & Malkus, 2011; Ellington et al., 2017). Building on over 15 years of in-person content-focused coaching experience, we recently designed, implemented, and researched a fully online content-focused coaching model that provided mathematics teachers across the country with new and innovative opportunities for professional learning. This paper shares our work with in-person and online content-focused coaching. We begin with a brief overview of coaching, then provide a description of our in-person content-focused coaching model grounded in the work of Lucy West, Fritz Staub, Antonia Cameron, and the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. This is followed by a description of our fully online content-focused coaching model. We discuss our guiding principle and how it has informed our design choices and then explain the affordances online content-focused coaching provides.