A coaching experience to assist the teaching and learning process of reading and writing in the school context

This study corresponds to the second phase of a project started in 2009, aiming at analyzing the process of teaching and learning reading and writing in a public school from the Colombian Caribbean region and designing and evaluating a process of coaching an L1 teacher. We report here the results of a process whose purpose was to positively influence the teaching and learning of reading and writing through a methodology based on a socio constructivist theory and a genre based pedagogy. In this participatory action research project, the data were collected through classroom observations and interviews to the teacher, complemented with joint reflections. The results showed that a genre based pedagogy can be successfully applied in schools where children have reading and writing difficulties and that it is important to coach teachers through the implementation of this approach in order to achieve qualitative transformations.