Coaching’s role in improving literacy at scale: Findings from multi-country studies examining the effectiveness of instructional support

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session (English)

Proposal

Many large-scale literacy improvement programs include coaching as an essential part of program design. Teacher professional development interventions in low and middle-income countries are more effective if coaching is included (Popova et al, 2018). An ingredients analysis of what elements are essential to improve literacy and numeracy programs showed that coaching was an essential part of an effective intervention (Piper et al, 2018). It is hypothesized that coaching is essential for improving learning since it provides a scaffold for teachers implementing new interventions, and that the targeting to specific behaviors that coaching affords allows for greater levels of implementation by teachers (Kraft et al, 2017). On the other hand, Kraft et al’s (2017) meta-analysis of coaching programs shows that it is much easier to improve teacher instruction through coaching than it is to improve learning outcomes in literacy. The diffuse impact of coaching through improved teaching to improved learning outcomes in literacy means that it is essential to have efficient coaching programs that have dramatic impacts on pedagogical methods to engender improvements in learning.
The Kraft et al (2017) coaching meta-analysis leaves a significant gap in the literature on how coaching works at scale. They argue that coaching’s impact on learning is smaller with more teachers and more coaches, and the largest study they review had less than 500 teachers. This reveals a significant gap in our understanding of how effective coaching programs are at scale, given that many large scale literacy programs are supporting thousands and even tens of thousands of teachers.
This panel examines recent studies on large scale coaching efforts at scale, all focused on improving literacy outcomes. The lack of research on how and whether government coaches can be cost-effectively induced to provide effective instructional support is a glaring gap, as many programs are choosing between government coaches and privately hired coaches without clear and rigorous evidence on the relative impact, cost and sustainability of these approaches. This is an important question, since previous research suggests that while gains were larger for coaches that had a smaller number of schools than a larger number, these differences were not cost-effective, and it would have been more appropriate for the government to assign coaches to a larger number of schools (Piper & Zuilkowski, 2015).
In addition, the field of instructional improvement in low and middle-income countries remains without clear evidence as to what sort of coaching support mechanisms are more likely to create behaviors in coaches that have been shown to support teachers. The lack of understanding as to what a successful coaching program should look like has led to a multitude of coaching efforts that are expensive yet not based on previous research.
Coaching in low and middle-income countries targets a wide variety of officers. In some countries, there is a coach or instructional supervisor responsibility given to a coach assigned to a certain number of schools. This can be replaced or supplemented by school-based coaches, who may be the head teacher themselves, an academic teacher or a subject expert. The growing literature on coaching in these contexts is largely silent on the relative impacts of this wide range of coaches which differ not only because of their level, their job description but also their relationships with the actual implementing teachers.
The papers in this panel are focused on how literacy improvement efforts work at scale, and what types of coaching designs and behaviors impact teacher pedagogy more effectively than others. This panel builds on a successful CIES 2019 panel on teacher professional development that examined in depth how teacher professional development programs could be made more effective. The same organizations: Room to Read, FHI360, and RTI International are deepening their research for CIES 2020 to look at particular characteristics of coaching interventions undertaken at scale.
Room to Read’s research in South Africa examines the support structures required to help heads of department to grow into their role of instructional coach to improve literacy. This is an important research question given the proximity of these school-based officers to schools and the relative low-cost of this approach.
FHI360’s research in Ghana and Nigeria examines the impact of two different coaching systems. One is the utilization of existing education officers in the system who do not have the technical skills or mandate to do literacy coaching. The other is project-hired external coaches who report directly to the program, are more likely to have literacy coaching skills, but are less likely to be embedded in the system. This is an important analysis given the number of large scale literacy programs that are struggling to activate education officers who exist in the system but do not have technical skills or instructional mandate, as well as the number of programs that are hiring external coaches but have had difficulty in showing the sustainability of that approach.
RTI’s multi-country study examines a range of instructional support packages that include a variety of designs for coaching and communities of practice across all of RTI’s existing programs in order to determine what modes of coaching support are most effective. This includes coaches at both the school level and external to the school, as well as government officers compared with project hired coaches. In addition, RTI’s research is able to compare the relative effectiveness of coaching approaches with educational support provided by communities of practice meetings held at the school or the school cluster level. These findings have provided existing and future programs with best practices for how to more effectively implement coaching support structures at scale.

Sub Unit

• Global Literacy SIG

Chair

• Benjamin Piper, RTI International

Individual Presentations

• Sustaining coaching practices: Successes and challenges of developing a school-based coaching model - Christabel Pinto, Room to Read

• Examining “best practices” for literacy coaching and monitoring: Evidence from Northern Nigeria and Ghana - Yvonne Cao, FHI 360; Wael Moussa, FHI 360; Anne Smiley, FHI 360; Brian D. Dooley, FHI 360

• Do’s and don’ts of improving teaching through instructional support: Findings from a multi-country study of coaching and communities of practice - Benjamin Piper, RTI International; Jessica Mejia, RTI International; Kellie Betts, RTI International

Discussant

• Carol Deshano Da Silva, Save the Children