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Francie Holland, a teacher at Calabasas Elementary School in Watsonville, California, had confidently led staff development workshops for teachers for years. However, when she became a literacy coach at her school, charged with helping to guide teachers toward implementing new instructional methods, she discovered she needed a new set of skills. |
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Holland is lucky: Her school has adopted the America's Choice School Design, which provides extensive training for school-based coaches and a network to help them.
The challenge Holland faced is becoming increasingly prevalent as hundreds of schools have embraced the school-based coaching strategy as a method of strengthening teachers' professional development. These schools have created a new demand for professional development to help the coaches themselves learn what they need to know.
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| The Rise in Coaching |
| Across disciplines, coaching is increasingly used to support "job-embedded" professional growth and improve performance. Research in the training and development field shows that this type of one-on-one interaction increases retention of new knowledge and one's ability to apply it to work situations. In the education arena, researchers have found that professional development is most effective when it is focused on the content that teachers teach; when it is sustained; and when it is closely tied to classroom practices. |
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Instructional coaching is an effort to apply these lessons. Ideally, coaches provide support and feedback, encourage a deeper understanding of classroom practices, promote the modification of instruction to meet students' needs, and facilitate the practice of new methods. Although their roles vary somewhat from school to school, coaches generally provide one-on-one and group instruction to teachers, co-teach along with a classroom teacher, and model effective practices.
The "half-life" of traditional "stand and deliver" professional development — even where expertly designed — is relatively short. On the other hand, research has found that teachers involved in a coaching relationship employ new skills and strategies more frequently and apply them more appropriately than teachers who work alone. Joan Warrick, who helps oversee elementary-school-based coaches for the Duval County, Florida, public schools, agrees. "For years and years and years, we attended professional development," she says. "We got information, and if we wanted to implement it, we could. But when we got back to school, we had a pile of things to clean up from the sub, calls to make to parents, and we got into the rut of doing everyday things. What we learned went into the pile for someday."
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| What Coaches Need to Know |
| The knowledge and skills that coaches need to be effective differ from those needed by someone who conducts traditional professional development workshops in group or team settings. Coaches not only need to have mastered instructional content, they need to be adept in coaching best practices (processes and skills). Then they can work effectively in a one-on-one setting and quickly respond to an individual's particular needs with the appropriate mix of encouragement, modeling, and constructive feedback. |
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A study by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) identified several factors that add to a coach's success. CPRE found that while coaches need to know their content well, a critical factor is the coach's set of "human relations skills" including communication, effective questioning techniques, flexibility of approach, and a willingness to make teachers feel like part of a team.
A coach relies on strategies for overcoming resistance in working with peers, who may question his or her expertise. Some teachers resist learning from someone who may have taught in the adjacent classroom the previous year. "Coaches have to have people skills," says Warrick. "They need to be able to put themselves in the place of the people they're supporting."
And, just as teachers' professional development has to vary depending on their level of experience, coaches in schools at different stages of implementing new instructional strategies require different knowledge and skills. "Initially, they need to be there to get the conversation going and answer questions, help teachers put the structure in place, and help teachers 'pick low-hanging fruit,' " says Faye Ogilvie, the principal of Honaunau School in Hawaii. "As teachers become more comfortable with the structures, the coaches' role changes. They engage teachers in deeper conversation. They work with them to look at the quality of student work and what it means for instruction."
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| Training and Support |
| To help coaches develop the requisite knowledge and skills, some school districts and national organizations have developed extensive training programs. For years, America's Choice has successfully trained its own trainers through a rigorous certification process that includes an intensive "boot camp," a year-long apprenticeship, and a demanding final assessment. America's Choice is now supporting districts and states in building the capacity of their coaches. Coaches are trained in coaching processes as well as techniques for supporting standards-based literacy and mathematics instruction. |
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It is also important that coaches have ongoing support. Coaches in Duval County, for example, meet monthly as a group, and more frequently on a regional level. And at national meetings, coaches have met peers who provide support during the year. "The coach trainings help me to network," says Stephanie Beulow, a literacy coach at Ewa Beach Elementary School in Hawaii. "If I have a question, there are certain schools I can turn to."
Ultimately, the goal is to create a learning community in a school where all teachers are continually visiting one another's classes and learning from one another, Ogilvie says. "Unless teachers are learners too, there will be no improvement in the school."
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