Examining the Impact of Professional Development on Cooperating Teacher Coaching and Preservice Candidates' Readiness to Teach

• In Event: How Cooperating Teachers Matter: Investigating Their Modeling and Coaching Functions

Abstract

A number of recent experiments appear to confirm the long-held belief that cooperating teachers (CTs) have a significant influence on the future effectiveness of the pre-service teachers (PSTs) whom they mentor (Goldhaber et al., 2020; Authors, 2018; Authors, 2020). Though CTs’ instructional effectiveness with their own P-12 students seems to play an important role in PST development, another avenue along which this influence travels may involve CTs’ capacity to coach and support adult learners – namely, the PSTs placed in their classrooms. Much qualitative literature has hypothesized that CTs who are effective coaches tend to use techniques like providing structured feedback, asking reflective questions, collaboratively engaging in planning or instruction, and creating a supportive yet independent environment for practice (Feiman-Nemser, 2001; Glenn, 2006; Guyton & McIntyre, 1990; Schwille, 2008; Yendell-Hoppey, 2007). Furthermore, the aforementioned recent experiments take up and test for these hypotheses, finding that the quality and frequency of CTs’ coaching predict PSTs’ self-reported preparedness to teach as well as PSTs’ own initial effectiveness once hired.

Despite the apparent importance of their role as instructional coaches, few CTs receive any professional development on how to best mentor and support PSTs (Authors, under review). Motivated by both this absence and increasing evidence of the impacts of CTs, the Tennessee Department of Education has designed and implemented a training for CTs targeting the development of high-quality coaching practices. This training has evolved over three years into a combination of in-person sessions, online webinars, and asynchronous practice assignments, focusing on two instructional practices found to be historically challenging across the state—questioning and providing feedback. The training provided opportunities for CTs to learn and practice how to not only engage in these skills when observing and debriefing their PSTs but also foster them in their PSTs’ interactions with students as well.

We evaluated the training’s impact, with six participating teacher education programs, by randomly assigning half of CTs to be invited to the training. We then surveyed all PSTs - at the beginning and end of their clinical experiences - as well as all CTs throughout the placement. Surveys asked participants about (1) their feelings of preparedness to independently engage in specific instructional practices, (2) the kinds and frequency of coaching provided/received, and (3) their satisfaction with their clinical placements.

Our analyses reveal that treatment PSTs (i.e., those with CTs invited to training) reported receiving more frequent coaching than their peers in a business-as-usual control condition, particularly with regard to feedback, formal observations, and data-driven practices like reflective questioning and specifying next steps. However, these PSTs did not necessarily indicate feeling more prepared to teach or more satisfied with the mentoring they received. As we receive a new year of evaluation data, we plan to examine whether the training impacts a variety of workforce outcomes, including PSTs’ employment rates and early career performance, as well as the instructional effectiveness of the CTs themselves.

Authors

• Matthew Truwit, University of Michigan

• Matthew Ronfeldt, University of Michigan

• Emanuele Bardelli, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Kevin Schaaf, Tennessee Department of Education