Quality support for quality outcomes: building the evidence-base for teacher and coach professional development models

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Historically, a “100-year gap” has persisted in education levels between the developed and developing world, most acutely affecting children from the poorest countries (Winthrop & McGivney, 2015). As key facilitators of the classroom experience, teachers are commonly acknowledged as a critical component to addressing this education gap. However, it has become increasingly clear that many teachers around the globe who need the most professional development often receive the least; this is particularly true in rural, hard-to-reach areas where even the availability of educated and/or professionally trained teachers can be a challenge (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2008; World Bank, 2018). Where teacher professional development (TPD) is available, there is often a lack of coherent infrastructure (Brown, 2019) and merely what Wilson & Berne (1999) call a “patchwork of opportunities” (p. 174).

While we urgently need to improve the practice of teachers, professional development systems needed to support teachers often fail to provide an instrumental component to improving teachers’ practices – systematic, rigorous feedback (Seidman, 2012). Models for TPD as an alternative to school “inspection,” which can often function in a high-stakes manner, is an urgent priority. A recent systematic review found that traditional forms of inspection had limited impact on school and system-level outcomes, in part due to the attributes of inspection feedback including a disrespectful tone of voice, a lack of credibility of the inspectors, and recommendations outside of the school or teacher’s control (Eddy-Spicer et. al, 2016). If we want to see sustainable and meaningful changes in our classrooms, then continuous improvement and ongoing teacher support will be required (Kim et al., 2019).
An imperative challenge remains in how to culturally attune core teacher instructional practices and classroom processes to help improve teacher's practices in the most effective way possible (Robinson and Winthrop, 2016).
Coaching models of TPD that make use of systematic and rigorous feedback have shown great promise to improve classroom-level practices and child outcomes (Kraft & Blazar, 2017; Kraft et al., 2018). In some circumstances, coaches have the potential to influence various levels of the education system beyond the classroom (see Raza et al., 2019).

Several promising models of coaching as TPD have begun to emerge from around the world. However, as a relatively nascent area of research, this panel seeks to highlight both developing and existing coaching models in order to contribute to the evidence-base around best practices as well as emerging impacts in the field. The panel will cover various regions of the world, including Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East.

Panelists will be asked to focus on the following sets of questions, and these same questions will structure the audiences’ discussion:

1. How can we efficiently and effectively feedback information learned from rigorous observations to improve teacher and classroom quality?
a. What forums maximize the power of this form of feedback?
b. What are culturally meaningful distinctions that support such feedback?
c. Can technology play a role, and if so, how?

2. How can coaching interventions be designed in order to better align with existing government structures and TPD systems? And relatedly, how can we reduce competing priorities for coaches in order to create more effective and scalable coaching systems?

3. Are there approaches and/or dimensions of effective coaching that appear to be common across cultural contexts and which are unique to specific cultural contexts?

Structure:
The moderator will provide a brief five-to-seven minute introduction and overview to the panelists and the different types of coaching models and their use in international settings. A member of each of the five teams will provide a 10-minute overview of their respective models in the light of differential resources, developmental and cultural contexts, and findings from their studies. Following the five presentations, the panelists will be asked by the moderator to address the preceding sets of questions during a 20-minute question period. During the remaining time, (approximately 15) minutes, the audience will be invited to engaged with this same set of questions and/or introduce any others. The overall discussion will be directed toward a comparative review of best practices and guidance on the strengths and utility of each coaching model.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Individual Presentations

• Brazil: low-cost virtual coaching to improve classroom practice - Barbara Bruns, Georgetown University, Center for Global Development; Nina Cunha, FHI 360

• Accompaniement, not inspection: the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (SAT) - Diana Patricia Pacheco Montoya, University of California, Berkeley; Sharon Kim, New York University / Global TIES; Erin Murphy-Graham, University of California, Berkeley; Mahjabeen Raza, New York University; Bita Correa, University of Toronto

• Using observations to illuminate teaching and learning practices: evidence from government classrooms in Pakistan - Rabea Malik, Lahore University of Management Sciences; Nidhi Singal, University of Cambridge

• The Best Things Come in No Packages: Continuous teacher professional development for scale and integration in Lebanon - Lindsay Brown, Global TIES for Children, New York University; Alonso Sanchez, World Bank