Coaching to Support Teachers' Collective Improvement of Practice and Systemic Change

• In Event: 67.067 - MTCC Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: 67.067-12 - Investigating How Instructional Coaching Supports Teacher Learning and Development Across Disciplines Using Core Practices

Abstract

Objectives: How can coaching be designed to support the learning and development of teachers across an entire school? This paper proposes an empirically grounded theory of action for instructional coaching where coaches’ work is organized around supporting teachers’ collective ongoing learning, thereby creating communities that continually strive to improve instruction and student learning opportunities.

Perspectives: The prevailing frame of instructional coaching casts it as a largely responsive and individually focused role, where coaches respond to invitations from individual teachers to support their learning (Mangin & Dunsmore, 2015). However, the literature on instructional improvement states that support for change must also attend to the system as a whole and build collective capacity (Cohen, 1995; Kruse & Zimmerman, 2012). For coaching to be considered as a tool for broader school-wide reform to be useful, we need to understand how they can provide learning opportunities to teachers across the system. In this paper, we examine the case of a “failing” school in which an elementary school-based mathematics coach helped to counter a recent history of poor performance and deficit narratives. She did so by helping to build a school community in which teachers’ professional work lives and instructional practices were reorganized, producing dramatic improvements in instruction and learning school-wide. This case analysis addresses how organizational conditions and routines were integrated into a system and enacted in relation to each other to aid the coach’s work to support all teachers’ ongoing learning.

Methods and Data Sources: The data for this analysis comes from a three-year collaboration with Hilltop Elementary. Data included observations of over 40 events in which the coach led or attended, including: leadership meetings; faculty meetings; grade-level full-day professional development sessions; coach-led weekly grade-level team meetings; and in- classroom coaching support. After every observation, we interviewed the coach. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with the principal and assistant principal. We used qualitative methods of analysis to look for patterns pertaining to how the coach assisted the collective learning of teachers, and to identify organizational contexts and tools that supported the coach’s work.

Results: The theory of action for the coach’s role in improving mathematics teaching
across a school encompasses five key components: 1) a common set of shared principles (e.g., making teaching public) and practices for teaching (e.g., responding to students’ thinking); 2) the development of an intellectual culture that encourages collective experimentation; 3) the development of a common instructional framework; 4) sustained time for inquiry into teaching and learning across settings, 5) and accountability for instructional innovation and improvement. In the paper we further explain the processes by which the coach uses each of the components to support teachers’ learning, through describing how the tools and organizational routines enabled growth across the system.

Significance of the study or work: In this paper, we proposed an empirically grounded theory of action for how coaching can improve the quality of instruction across an entire school. Findings from this analysis can help to inform coaching policies and consider supports necessary to support coaches.

Authors

• Lynsey K. Gibbons, Boston University

• Elham Kazemi, University of Washington