Coaching and peer-collaboration as a means for improving teaching: action research in an international school in Serbia

My research interest emerges from my observation that teachers in the international school in Serbia, where I worked during the research, seemed to be alienated in their classrooms and resistant to change agents. I, therefore, wanted to find out how coaching and peer-collaboration might affect teachers’ beliefs about their classroom practice, values they cherish about teaching, new knowledge constructed through collaboration and emerging attitudes towards reinvented pedagogies.

Having applied a mixed method approach, I gathered two sets of comparable data: quantitative data, collected through the Questionnaire of Teacher Interaction (QTI), and qualitative data, generated from the coaching sessions. Once interpreted using thematic analysis, these sets produced teachers’ profiles as well as three themes: (1) resistance to change and reconciliation, (2) reflection about teaching, and (3) collaborative teaching through peer-collaboration. The findings showed how coaching and peer-collaboration situate in the context depending on the teachers’ career age, their openness to reculturing and preparedness to adapt to international education requirements. Finally, this study illuminates how the changes, which coaching and peer-collaboration bring about, take distinctive yet interdependent forms: (1) changes in the self, related to the innermost processes of the teachers, their personality traits and core values; (2) changes in the classroom, that is in the pedagogical practice and instructional designs with the students; (3) changes in communication within a school, not only with the students and other teachers, but also with the parents; (4) change in professional lives, which concern teachers’ understanding of their immediate context, collaborative culture and learning community.

This research resulted in a process of reculturing of the school as an institution (Fullan, 1999), which allowed the teachers to voice their most pressing concerns, examine prior knowledge in the light of new understandings and construct new knowledge through processes of reflection, dialogue and enquiry (McCormack et al., 2006).