Chapter 5: When Interest is not Enough: Participant Anxieties in the Peer Coaching Process

This chapter discusses the fears and hesitations that two professors grappled with as they started and worked through the peer coaching process. Extant literature often focuses on two limiting factors—time and interest—but these two instructors had neither of those; instead, they dealt more with anxieties around being observed, being judged, being unprepared, being able to provide feedback, and being able to do those things for another person. In discussing these anxieties, the chapter discusses how the structure of the program and the leaders’ decisions about the structure—including watching the coaching process in action, demonstrating the feedback process, and coaching us through the four-part post-observation conference—can help peer coaches understand and engage with these anxieties. While these strategies and structures of the peer coaching program might not eliminate the anxiety barrier for all instructors, the decisions made in implementing the pilot peer coaching program at our university certainly helped assuage some of our initial hesitations.