Coaching
Coaching provides a reflective experience for practitioners to think about their work with families and address biases and assumptions.
What It Is
Coaching is a relationship-based process, led by an expert, to support an educator’s learning, skill development, and on-the-job growth. It offers individualized and often on-site support for practitioners. Although many different models of coaching exist, the goals in education focus on improving teacher practice and student outcomes. Coaching to improve practice can be broad, as in the overall quality of an early childhood setting, but it can also be specific, as in improving early literacy or changing teacher attitudes about family engagement.
How It Works
Coaching is often part of a larger professional learning effort that accompanies initial classroom training or workshops. It consists of a series of practices that begin with:
- building a relationship between the coach and practitioner
- conducting observations
- carrying out a needs assessment to identify the specific focus of coaching
As coaching progresses, it can involve:
- reflection
- guidance
- problem solving
- modeling
- performance feedback
- goal-setting with action steps
Technology plays an important role in coaching through the use of videos of teacher practice as a mechanism for problem solving and reflection on cases by providing feedback to taped actual teacher practice, and by showing exemplary practice.
When coaching is part of organization-wide adoption of a model or a shift toward evidence-based practice, it supplements the above team-building experiences. Coaches also support practitioners’ efforts to implement programs with fidelity and to understand the value of evidence and create buy-in for reporting requirements.¹
What Changes
The four coaching practices of relationship building, observation, modeling, and performance feedback have the strongest evidence of improving teacher practice and student outcomes.² Coaching is an important strategy in early childhood and is included in the 2016 Head Start Program Performance Standards. Although family engagement is part of quality early childhood programs, little documentation exists about it as a focus of coaching efforts.
Coaching improves the quality of the early childhood program and its practices with children. It has a positive impact on young children’s literacy and language outcomes, especially when coaching has a specific focus on enhancing practice in these areas.³ This is an important finding, because coaching initiatives are often effective among teachers serving children who are low income and who are culturally and linguistically diverse. The research suggests that coaching promotes equitable quality learning experiences for underserved children.
At the organizational level, a formative evaluation of the Children, Youth, and Families at Risk initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that coaches provided projects with services that were otherwise unavailable. Projects also increased data collection and reporting, which are steps to using data for quality improvement.⁴
Approach In Action
The Incredible Years® Teacher Classroom Management (IYTCM) program is a group-delivered, video-modeling training program that addresses teacher attitudes and biases rooted in negative stereotypes of parent involvement.⁵ Training is conducted in groups of 15–25 teachers over four to six full days and interspersed with on-site coaching during the year. Each training and coaching session includes content and strategies aimed at improving relationships with parents, who are regarded as partners for effective classroom management. Through videos of teacher-student and teacher-parent interactions, reflection exercises, and mini-plans for how to promote greater parent involvement for students with behavioral problems, teachers are made aware of their own biases and attitudes toward parent involvement. Coaches guide teachers in creating strategies to improve communication and cooperation with parents. Teachers practice these skills through small-group role play, and as needed with an on-site coach.
The IYTCM is one of the few programs with a randomized study design to examine the relationship between teachers and parent involvement. Findings from the IYTCM study among kindergarten children showed that at baseline, teachers with negative attitudes toward low-income and multi-ethnic parents were more likely to rate students with more disruptive behaviors and less academic competence. Compared to a control group, teachers who participated in training and coaching improved their perceptions of bonding with parents and parent involvement in the home and school. The study concludes that comprehensive training and coaching can change teacher attitudes, a first step to changing teacher behaviors.
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Endnotes
¹ Olson, J. R., McCarthy, K. J., Perkins, D. F., & Borden, L. M. (2018). A formative evaluation of a coach-based technical assistance model for youth-and family-focused programming. Evaluation and Program Planning, 67, 20–37 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2017.11.002
² WestEd. National Center for Systemic Improvement. (n.d.). Effective coaching: Improving teacher practice and outcomes for all learners. San Francisco, CA: Author.
³ Isner, T., Tout, K., Zaslow, M., Quinn, K., Rothenberg, L., Burkhauser, M., & Soli, M. (2011). Coaching in early care and education programs and quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS): Identifying promising features. Washington, DC: Child Trends.
⁴ Olson et al. (2018).
⁵ Thompson, A. M., Herman, K. C., Stormont, M.A., Reinke, W. M., & Webster-Sratton, C. (2017). Impact of Incredible Years® on teacher perceptions of parental involvement: A latent transition analysis. Journal of School Psychology, 62, 51–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2017.03.003
