How Context Shapes Coaching: Implications From a Study of Coaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Poster 7)

• In Event: Exploring the Influence of Organizational and Leadership Contexts on the Work of Coaching

Abstract

Instructional coaching has traditionally been framed narrowly as an individual-level support for teachers, with coaches working primarily one-on-one with teachers, classroom by classroom. Recently, though, researchers have begun to question this one-on-one framing of coaching and instead have insisted that we consider how larger school, district, and community contextual factors impact coaching work (Authors, 2023a; 2023d; Hannan & Russell, 2020; Kraft et al., 2018). While context certainly influenced coaching prior to the rise of the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic, our research team was curious to understand the specific ways in which school- and community-level contextual factors may have supported or subverted coaches’ work during the height of the pandemic (from the spring of 2020 to the winter of 2021). We assumed that it might be easier to see the influences of context on coaching work during a time of great upheaval in schools, when coaches, teachers, and leaders might be more aware of the ways in which fundamental shifts in community and school routines influence coaching programs and processes.

Therefore, this survey and focus group study shares findings from 27 elementary literacy coaches across four U.S. states that have historically invested in coaching work (Florida, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania). Study participants were recruited as part of a purposeful sampling strategy (Creswell, 2014) by contacting district-level coaching mentors and coordinators who we, as researchers, knew had been working with cohorts of elementary literacy coaches for many years before the pandemic struck. The purpose was not to cast the widest net possible across all states, or even across all districts in the four identified states. Instead, we chose to utilize a survey and focus group methodology to collect in-depth, nuanced qualitative data from coaching networks that were deemed robust before the pandemic spread across the U.S. We were most curious to learn how these previously strong coaching networks responded as coaches shifted roles, responsibilities, and routines across the first year of pandemic schooling.

Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data suggest three major ways that coaches’ work was impacted by pandemic-related shifts in school and community context. Their work was impacted by shifts in coaching role and responsibility demands, including the need for coaches to suddenly operate simultaneously as leaders, coaches, and interventionists; by shifts in relationships with administrators; and by the narrowing and focusing of the curriculum. Implications for practice include ways that schools and districts might better support coaching efforts moving forward by carefully designing and communicating school and community contextual supports. Future research implications include the continued need to consider coaching from a systems perspective, to understand more about how coaching is both influenced by and influences school, district, and community contexts.

Authors

• Jacy Ippolito, Salem State University

• Rita M. Bean, University of Pittsburgh

• Allison Dagen, West Virginia University