Conditions for Advancing Coaching as a Reform Lever for Systemic Instructional Change

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Instructional coaching is a popular reform tool, yet there exist many permutations of its structures, activities, and conceptualizations. While researchers have characterized coaches’ work and the influence of coaching on teacher practice, they have paid much less attention to the policies and organizational conditions shaping coaching. Furthermore, there are gaps in our understanding of how coaching systems are instituted and sustained to promote consequential and system-wide changes in instruction. This symposium brings together four papers that utilize lenses of organizational sociology to analyze the policies, structures, and organizational factors influencing coaching and the scaling-up of instructional change. The symposium’s findings advance scholarship on implementation of coaching programs and has implications for practitioners at multiple levels of the education systems.

Sub Unit

• Division L - Educational Policies and Politics / Division L - Section 9: Policy Implementation and Going to Scale

Chair

• Caitlin Farrell, University of Colorado - Boulder

Papers

• Gauging the Institutionalization of Instructional Coaching in Charter Management Organizations and Public School Districts - Sarah L. Woulfin, University of Connecticut

• Coaching in Context: Exploring Conditions That Shape Instructional Coaching Practice - Margaret Quinn Hannan, University of Pittsburgh

• Building Networks for Change: The Role of Ed-Tech Coaches in Supporting System-Wide Instructional Reform - Ayesha Hashim, University of Southern California

• How Ideas Spread: District-Level Instructional Coach Teams and Transactive Memory Systems - Sarah Hilary Galey, Michigan State University

Discussant

• Cynthia E. Coburn, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Human Development and Social Policy