Abstract:

Abstract The outbreak of the pandemic caught educators unprepared for non-traditional ways of learning and teaching. Since remote teaching aggravated already existing challenges of the classroom, teachers and teacher educators began looking for alternative professional development (PD) arrangements that could address their teaching-related needs. Peer coaching is a collaborative, non-hierarchical PD model that involves two or more colleagues reflecting on their practices, resolving instructional issues, and learning together new instructional techniques. This phenomenological study aimed to investigate how online peer coaching could support PD of teacher educators from English Language Education Program by exploring their lived experiences. Data were collected through lesson observations, reflective reports and focus group interviews. Following the HILDA model for peer coaching, the participants held online discussions to get to know each other, identified strong and weak instructional strategies through observations, looked together at the possibilities to overcome barriers to remote teaching, decided on the actions for improvement and analysed the impact of their actions on learners. Data analysis revealed that the participants' perceptions of online peer coaching for their PD included improved instructional practice, self-reflection, and an increased feeling of well-being. Hardships of providing effective feedback to a colleague and collecting sufficient evidence for student learning were among the reported challenges experienced by the participants. Finally, the participants provided some suggestions for improving online peer coaching procedure in the future.

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