The 30,000 Foot View: Mapping the Institutional Landscape of Coaching

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 4:20 pm
  In Roundtable Session: A Roundtable Discussion to Examine a Synthesis of Micro- to Macro-Level Coaching Research (Table 5)

Abstract

Coaching programs–and coaches as instructional leaders–are nested within the U.S. education policy system. Notably, Reading First, a branch of No Child Left Behind, accelerated the proliferation of coaching. A segment of the coaching literature attends to the policies and political dynamics of coaching (Author, 2012; Galey, 2016; Mangin et al., 2015). And some scholars have begun portraying the recursive relationship between policies and coaching. That is, policies shape coaching, and simultaneously, coaches–and their coaching–shape reform efforts. It is evident that funding and various rules, or guidance, influence coaching (Knight, 2012; Author, 2016, 2020). Researchers, however, have also illuminated how coaches mediate or promote various reform efforts (Author, 2021). That is, coaches can accelerate reform efforts, or they can buffer teachers from the stipulations of reform. As such, scholars are considering how institutional and organizational factors shape coaching. We assert that, to more fully understand the affordances of and barriers to effective coaching, it is necessary to zoom even further out; this would enable mapping the broader field of coaching.

Institutional theory offers lenses for characterizing how macro-level structures, including resources, regulations, and deep-seated conceptualizations, define and steer institutions (Scott, 2013). Following tenets of institutional theory, our roundtable group would begin characterizing the macro-level structures, including resources, regulations, and logics, steer the implementation of coaching. Yet we will also pay attention to the role of coaching in reshaping certain institutional conditions, such as increasing the dominance of particular logics.

Specifically, this working group roundtable session will review findings from studies applying institutional theory and then develop a research agenda that can expose and interrogate macro-level factors shaping coaching. As part of this, we will step back, generating ideas on possible institutional elements in the field of coaching. We will then consider how scholars, in the future, could investigate funding issues, instructional policies, and rules and norms related to coaching that ultimately affect the design and implementation of coaching inside districts and schools. Our session will end by generating ideas regarding how state and district educational administrators could map the terrain of coaching and use this information to continuously improve their coaching model as well as supports for coaches and coaching.

Authors

• Sarah L. Woulfin, University of Texas at Austin

• Jennifer Lin Russell, Vanderbilt University