The role of coaches in supporting professional development of teachers social emotional competencies to create enabling environments in the classroom

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Sustainable and holistic teacher professional development in crisis contexts: challenges and solutions

Proposal

Children and adolescents have the right to an education that supports them to meet their full potential.
Building the knowledge and practice of teachers is essential to ensure that reforms in teaching and learning reach the classroom and are sustained. Whilst traditional workshop-based opportunities may build knowledge, taken alone they are unlikely to translate into a change in teacher practice, and subsequently student achievement. (Wei, Darling-Hammond, & Adamson 2010; Goldenberg, Galimore 2009). This emphasises the need to move towards engaging teachers in professional development to support the translation of improved knowledge into practice in the classroom (Darling 2006; Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin 1995; Leu et al. 2005).

There is a growing body of research on the impact of social emotional learning (SEL) on enabling environments and subsequently learning outcomes in students. As the driving force on the building of SEL in the classroom, the social and emotional competency level, including wellbeing of teachers strongly influence students. Indeed, the scoping study led to the conclusion that teachers who master social emotional learning (SEL) and have improved wellbeing and stronger classroom management strategies are better equipped to create an effective and supportive learning environment. (Jennings and Greenberg 2009; Jones, Bouffard and Weissbourd 2013; Schonert-Reichl 2017).

With a gap in the knowledge of what is effective TPD and how can we make it sustainable, this presentation will outline the two year development process of a multi-dimensional TPD intervention that works to build a cohort of trained coaches to provide individual, real time and direct support to teachers With a focus on improving teachers’ social and emotional competencies, wellbeing and classroom management skills the presentation will explore the findings from practice based formative work around the acceptability, feasibility and fidelity of training experienced by the teachers, school administration, coaches and trainers and discuss the implications of this on this intervention but also other TPD methodologies.

Authors

• April Coetzee, War Child Holland

• Noemi Gerber, War Child Holland