Where have all of the probing questions gone?

Having wrapped up another successful semester of online coaching labs, I wanted to take a minute to reflect on an emerging pattern in my notes. As most of our participants are just beginning their work in student-centered coaching cycles, they are just testing out the process. And for many of them, the central goal of this work is to help guide the process by: (1) balancing talk time and control; (2) to allow teachers to drive decision-making; (3) based on evidence of student learning. Most often, the selected focus for coaching labs is using reflective dialogue, which inherently sets the focus on the types of questions coaches pose during goal setting, planning, and analyzing student evidence. 

What became clear, was that at this stage in developing coaching practice, many coaches are focused on guiding the process by using paraphrasing and clarifying questions organized around open-ended questions that give direction to the conversation. These prompts are akin to sentence-stems and similar to many of the ones we share with our participants:

• What are the learning targets connected to this standard?
• How will we know what students understand and can do?
• What will that evidence look or sound like?
• What criteria are you using to sort student work?
• How would you support that with students?
• Do you see any follow-up instruction needed?

For the most part, these are almost interchangeable across participants and cycles as they move through the process. However, questioning rarely went beyond this level. As I constructed ideas for potential next steps to move questioning forward, I found myself asking where are the probing questions? 

I think one challenge to prompting probing questions is the need for them to be responsive to contexts and partnerships, so sentence stems aren't as easy to design. In general, these can push into justifying decision-making, connecting reflections to action, and attending to dimensions of equity in planning and analyzing evidence.
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I'm wondering... can this process begin by creating a thinking scaffold through writing? Could participants analyze transcripts or even videos to identify opportunities to insert probing questions? Is it possible to design a meaningful scaffold to address probing questions at each stage of the coaching cycle? (1. Identifying a learning goal; 2. Determining the evidence needed and the pre-assessments that will demonstrate that evidence AND drawing on knowledge of students in relation to their experiences as learners and individuals; 3. Aligning instructional choices based on student evidence; 4. Sorting student evidence; 5. Making new instructional choices). Finally, I also wonder if this is the focus for advanced coaching labs, as in after we build familiarity to asking questions to direct the process, can we then move into asking questions to deepen inquiry?

On a final note, this also has implications for supervision as I think about how to balance questioning--and to do so in a way that illuminates the thinking process to transfer to new teaching situations moving forward.

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