Instructional Coaches: Roles and Titles
Richard T. Hezel, Ph.D.
President
Steve Grossman, Ed.D.
Senior Manager, Evaluation Operations
Following on five years of successful delivery of online professional
development courses to thousands of teachers, PBS TeacherLine has a new
initiative toward the alignment of online resources with instructional
coaches’ needs. Under a Ready to Teach grant from the U.S.
Education Department, PBS TeacherLine is developing resources designed
to make instructional coaches more effective and productive. In the
process of conducting early developmental research, Hezel Associates, the
project evaluator, reviewed the literature about coaches and coaching to
inform the development process. We also conducted a national sampling
survey of schools on aspects of coaching and mentoring.
We learned that schools have varied titles and roles assigned to individuals who actually perform the coaching and mentoring tasks. In fact, numerous people in districts conduct “coaching.” Staff developers, curriculum supervisors, coordinators, professional development specialists, assistant principals and many other individuals at the district and building levels hold responsibilities for formal and informal coaching. The existing literature offered no clarity, so at least for our research, we developed a new operational definition of a coach: any provider of professional development at the school-building level.
What constitutes professional development? For better or worse, most teachers experience PD in a large group presentation after school. Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) describes PD more broadly as a set of activities that include individual development, continuing education, in-service education, curriculum writing, peer collaboration, study groups, peer coaching and mentoring.
The best PD providers at the building level work in proximity with teachers, and they create structures and practices that interact closely with teachers’ current activities. Through our research we found that PD providers most frequently:
- demonstrate and model instructional practices and lessons
- observe instruction followed by reflection with the teacher
- help teachers plan lessons
- analyze students’ work and progress
- conduct study groups
- provide large and small group workshops
- organize and broker instructional materials
Now that we have identified the variety of roles and titles PD providers use, our next stage of research will take up the issue of the needs that those individuals, especially those who consider themselves coaches, in their co-instructional mission. Stay tuned.
Adapted from Instructional Coaching Key Themes from the Literature
Jennifer Borman and Stephanie Feger.