Six Pillars Help Schools Create Coaching Roles that Achieve Their Potential

By Cathy Gassenheimer

“We must give every teacher access to effective coaching. Whether teachers need help developing content and pedagogical knowledge in their subject, planning lessons and assessments, analyzing student progress and changing their instruction, applying new instructional strategies, personalizing learning for diverse students, or developing leadership skills, every teacher can benefit from effective coaching” (p. 5).

These are words of wisdom from a new report titled Coaching for Impact: Six Pillars to Create Coaching Roles that Achieve Their Potential to Improve Teaching and Learning, jointly issued by Learning Forward, Public Impact, and the Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida.

Currently, this concept is more vision than reality. According to the report, less than half of current teachers received ANY coaching in the past year. And that statistic applies to ALL coaching, not just the coaching considered to be high quality.

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What makes for a high quality coaching program? The report underscores the importance of many key factors to which the Alabama Instructional Partners Network also subscribes, including:

  • Coaching should be available to all teachers, not just new and struggling teacher;
  • Instructional coaches should become a key improvement strategy of states, districts, and schools;
  • Coaching needs to be tied to a specific improvement goal jointly developed by the teacher and coach, and its impact should be measured;
  • Coaching should not be episodic; it should be intentional and scheduled so that the teacher receives the desired support;
  • Not all teachers can be effective coaches; care must be put into the identification and development of coaches based on specific criteria and performance;
  • Instructional coaching provides an important career pathway for effective educators who don’t want to leave teaching.

The report identifies six pillars that can create coaching for impact:

  1. System Vision and Commitment
  2. Recruitment and Selectivity
  3. Shared Responsibility
  4. Development and Support
  5. Role Clarity, Time, and Culture
  6. Compensation and Sustainability

Embedded in the report are mentions of several resources created by the authoring organizations. For example, Public Impact has developed a two-page guide to selecting teacher leaders who can serve in a “multi-classroom leadership” role.

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Public Impact has also developed a comprehensive toolkit that schools and districts could use (or adapt) as they establish criteria for school-based coaches, peer coaches, or what Public Impact calls “multi-classroom leaders.”

Concise and packed with resources

The 20-page report is very reader-friendly, packed full of useful information and data, and a quick read. It concludes by encouraging readers to heighten their sense of urgency and not wait for others to make high-quality coaching the norm:

“Experience and emergent studies have illustrated that coaching roles can be a powerful mechanism to achieve an array of coaches: meaningful career paths to retain top performers, job-embedded professional learning that creates a cycle of continuous improvement in schools, and instructional practice that raises outcomes for students. When educators and leaders take care to build coaching roles on the six pillars outlined here, they will be building the schools of the future that they have imagined for so long” (p. 21).

The report is part of Learning Forward’s PDRedesign initiative.

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