Making Instructional Coaching a Worthwhile Investment BY ANDREW J. WAYNE AND JANE G. COGGSHALL/School Administrator, December 2021

Andrew Wayne and colleagues at the American Institutes for Research studied instructional coaching in school districts in Maryland, Texas and Virginia. PHOTO COURTESY OF ANDREW WAYNE

Instructional coaching is a big-ticket item, at least compared to other investments in the professional learning of teachers. So you have to ask yourself: Is it really worth the money, time and organizational attention that it takes?

Researchers don’t have a complete answer. If you look across the relevant studies, you can discern a positive impact on student achievement, on average (see “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement” in the February 2018 issue of Review of Educational Research). But those studies focus on programs that researchers developed, which may not look much like yours or those developed by school districts.

Plus, it’s hard for central-office leaders to know what coaches are really doing. Even the best coaches can struggle to connect with particular teachers, get overwhelmed or ignore important priorities.

For an investment in instructional coaching to make sense, you need a way to ensure coaching is high-quality districtwide. But how?
A Partnership’s Lessons

Those of us in educational research who develop and test new approaches to instructional coaching spend a lot of time thinking about how to shape what really happens between coaches and teachers.

We recently drew lessons about ensuring the quality of instructional coaching from a partnership project that spanned three districts: Garland Independent School District in Texas, Hanover County Public Schools in Virginia and Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland. Coaches local to each district received training and support from a vendor, Teachstone, to implement the vendor’s coaching program known as MyTeachingPartner-Secondary in a sample of middle and high schools.

Before COVID-19 prematurely halted the project, the 12 coaches and 51 teachers completed 250 instructional coaching cycles with near perfect fidelity. They did so despite having just been trained in fall 2019 and being completely new to the coaching program.

So what did it take to make that happen? After watching it play out, we identified four strategies that could ensure the quality of instructional coaching districtwide.

»Strategy 1: Make climbing the learning curve easy with clear expectations and guidance.

A common problem with coaching programs is lofty expectations without commensurate guidance. This can set coaches up to flounder.

The coaching cycle our partners focused on is procedurally simple. The coach watches a video uploaded by the teacher and selects three short video clips. For each clip, the coach writes a question for the teacher to reflect on. The teacher writes a response to each be-fore a short 1-to-1 meeting.

Though procedurally simple, there is a specific way to complete each step. Coaches spend two days learning to interpret classroom video. They learn to isolate interactions among teachers and students that drive student engagement, which is the focus of the program.

Similarly, coaches get specific guidance on how to write the reflective questions for each clip. The manual they receive contains sample questions that they can ask in response to different teaching scenarios. Coaches can use these sample questions word-for-word or adapt them for a given situation.

The training takes five days, plus another day or so to complete an assessment and practice cycle. Coaches can turn to the manual for reminders or additional guidance.

»Strategy 2: Individually support coaches as they learn the model and get better at coaching.

Even with clear expectations and guidance up front, anyone learning to help others improve requires some ongoing support. Without it, some coaches will never do well, and others will do OK.

It’s typical to convene coaches for a monthly meeting, to allow for shared reflection and problem solving. But a monthly meeting isn’t enough to surface and address individual needs.

For additional support, each coach in our project had a monthly 1-to-1 videoconference with a specialist from Teachstone. The specialist followed an intentional routine in these meetings, reviewing the coach’s work products (such as the reflective questions written to teachers) and using them as the starting point for discussion.

This ongoing individualized support, based on what coaches are actually doing with teachers, was not something that coaches were used to. Several coaches spoke of confidence and new insights into their practice.

»Strategy 3: Use technology to help manage evidence for coaching reflection, support and supervision.

Technology creates new possibilities and inevitably brings some complications (such as a dead laptop battery, a poor digital connection or a software glitch). But those are trivial compared to the challenge of making sure coaching is high quality across the district.

The coaching program we focused on used an app to serve two parallel functions. First, the app facilitated the video sharing and asynchronous dialogue between the coach and teacher. Second, the app allowed the specialist from Teachstone to monitor and support the quality and fidelity of the coaching.

For example, the app captured the questions crafted by the coach for the teacher, which allowed the specialist to monitor the number of coaching cycles that each coach completed and review the reflective questions more closely to understand the extent to which the coaches were meeting program expectations. The coach specialist then used a rubric to assess coaching fidelity and offered additional supports if a coach missed the mark.

»Strategy 4: Talk about the time commitment needed from coaches.

The most basic problem we encounter working with instructional coaches is securing and protecting the time they need to do the job properly. As obvious as that is, we commonly hear that coaches have unrealistic caseloads or get tapped for random tasks. If you can’t ensure coaches have time to do their work, then they won’t do it.

We created detailed guidance on the amount of time coaches would need. The guidance specified the number of coaching hours required per assigned teacher over a fixed period of seven months, so leaders and coaches could plan caseloads correctly. The guidance also accounted for the time needed for coaches’ initial training and their monthly support meetings.

Positive Evidence

Using these strategies, we received favorable results. Across a random sample of the 250 coaching cycles recorded in the online platform, the average fidelity score was 21.5 of 23, based on our independent analysis using a 23-item checklist aligned to the one used by specialists at Teachstone.

That result suggests the coaching was effective, though we don’t really know what the impact was. The pandemic stopped us before we could collect outcome data.

Two randomized controlled trials of Teachstone’s program have taken place with both finding positive impacts on student achievement. In those studies, specialists delivered the coaching to teachers directly. The new project showed that local coaches could deliver the program with high fidelity, when supported by specialists.

Keeping It Real

It’s difficult to say whether instructional coaching is really worth the money, time and organizational attention. A school district needs both an approach that really works and a way to support it effectively.

The latter piece may be the most difficult. In fact, looking across impact studies, the reported effectiveness of coaching programs declines as the number of teachers involved in a study increases.

But even if it’s hard to scale up good coaching, it can be done. The strategies here seem to work.

ANDREW WAYNE is a managing researcher with the American Institutes for Research in Arlington, Va. JANE COGGSHALL is a principal researcher with the American Institutes for Research. The article does not reflect opinions of the research’s fun-der, the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education.

Additional Resources

The authors point to these studies of instructional coaching for school leaders seeking to learn more about its efficacy.

»“The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence” by Matthew Kraft, David Blazar and Dylan Hogan, in Review of Educational Research, February 2018

»“Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement: Replication and Extension of the My Teaching Partner-Secondary Intervention” by J.P. Allen, C.A. Hafen, A.C. Gregory, A.Y. Mikami and R.C. Pianta, in Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, October 2015

»“An Interaction-Based Approach to Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement” by J.P. Allen, R.C. Pianta, A.C. Gregory, A.Y. Mikami and J. Lun, in Science, August 2011