Reexamining the Evidence on Coaching in Teacher Education

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

Abstract

Overview
In this paper, we present a series of six experimental replication studies that evaluate the benefits of coaching on participants’ pedagogical skills in “mixed reality” simulation settings. The simulations are considered “mixed reality” because the interface is a virtual classroom, but student avatars are remotely controlled by a trained actor (Dieker et al., 2014). We examine the pooled cross-study impact of coaching on participants’ performance in the simulation setting, as well as the replicability of coaching effects across systematic sources of variation. Combined, results from this study can answer questions about “what works” in promoting teacher learning in simulation settings, as well as help us understand under what conditions and for whom coaching interventions are most effective.

Sample
Our samples include multiple cohorts from a teacher preparation program in a large, public university that enrolls approximately 100 candidates each year, as well as a sample of undergraduate students who were enrolled in an introduction to teaching course (but were not in a teacher training program). On average, teacher candidates were mostly white (77%), female (66%), and middle class (65%), which resembles the population of individuals entering the teaching profession (AACTE, 2013). In contrast, the undergraduate sample was less white (56%), almost equally female and male (50%) and predominantly middle class (57%). Approximately 43% of the undergraduate sample reported an interest in teaching as a possible profession.

Research Design
Within each replication study, half of the participants were randomly assigned to receive feedback from an expert coach during a practice session, while the other half completed a self-reflection protocol designed by the research team. Across the six studies, participants engaged in different instructional tasks in the simulation setting. In four of the six replication studies, participants practiced setting classroom norms while redirecting off-task student behaviors, and in two of the six studies, participants practiced providing high quality feedback while teaching a text. We examined coaching effects (compared to self-reflection) on the quality of participants’ pedagogical practice in the simulation setting across both sets of instructional tasks.

Analysis
We began by estimating pooled cross-study coaching effects on participants’ pedagogical skills using meta-analytic techniques (Hedges & Schauer, 2018). We then used the causal replication framework (Authors, 2018) to explore whether coaching effects varied across systematic sources of variation, including participant characteristics, type of pedagogical task, and contexts under which the simulation setting was delivered.

Preliminary Results
Preliminary results suggest that coaching effects are replicated in magnitude and statistical significance across both sets of instructional tasks, and across multiple cohorts of teacher candidates. Although there were positive coaching effects for undergraduates enrolled in an introductory teaching course, the magnitude of these effects was not replicated. Taken together, these results suggest that while coaching does improve pedagogical practice in the simulation setting, it may be of most benefit for participants who have already committed to the teaching profession by enrolling in a training program and have participated in instructional methods classes.

Authors

• Anandita Krishnamachari, University of Virginia

• Vivian Wong, University of Virginia

• Julie Jackson Cohen, University of Virginia