School & District Management

Coaching of Teachers Found to Boost Student Reading

Scholars examining the Literacy Collaborative approach to reading.
By Debra Viadero — May 04, 2010 5 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Includes updates and/or revisions.

An innovative study of 17 schools across the country suggests that putting literacy coaches in schools can help boost students’ reading skills by as much as 32 percent over three years.

The study, which was presented here on May 1 during the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, is as notable for its methods as for its results. It’s among the first of what many scholars hope will be a new generation of studies that offer solid clues not only to what works but also when, under what conditions, and to some extent, why.

The study finds that reading gains are greatest in schools where teachers receive a larger amount of coaching. It also finds that the amount of coaching that teachers receive varies widely and is influenced by an array of factors, including relationships among staff members and how teachers envision their roles.

“This shows that this initiative can build networks and build social capacity in schools, and you can actually measure these things,” said Anthony S. Bryk, who led the four-year study with current and former Stanford University graduate students. He is currently the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which is located on the university’s campus in California.

The study, which was paid for by the federal Institute of Education Sciences, focused on the Literacy Collaborative, a program jointly developed by researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus and Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., with assistance from researchers from the University of Chicago.

Value-Added Approach

Used in more than 700 schools nationwide, the program trains teachers to become literacy coaches, who then work one-on-one with their colleagues on a half-time basis to spread a set of teaching routines drawn from principles of cognitive science.

Teachers in Literacy Collaborative classrooms might, for example, help walk students through decoding processes as they read aloud or lead children in groups as they read progressively more-difficult texts.

The researchers tracked the implementation of the program in K-2 classroom in 17 schools. The total number of 8,520 students included in the study represented a mix of social and economic characteristics. For example, even though 45 percent of the students in the total sample came from low-income families, the percentages of students in each school who qualified for federally subsidized school meals—a commonly used indicator of family poverty—ranged from a low of 19 percent to a high of 86 percent.

To calculate the program’s learning impact, the researchers used value-added techniques to compare students’ progress on various reading-related tests and tasks with how much students would have been expected to gain on those measures with more-typical instruction.

They found that students’ reading skills grew 16 percent beyond predicted levels the first year, 28 percent more than expected by the second year, and 32 percent more than predicted by the third year.

But, as with many school improvement measures, the results varied widely from school to school, and even more from teacher to teacher within the same schools, said Gina Biancarosa, an assistant professor of education at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, who co-authored the study with Mr. Bryk, along with Allison C. Atteberry and Heather J. Hough, both doctoral students at Stanford University.

One explanation for that variation, the researchers learned, was coaching. Teachers and schools that experienced more coaching sessions tended to spur bigger learning gains in their students. Some teachers received no coaching over the course of the study, while others had as many as 43 sessions.

The teachers who got the most coaching were new teachers, teachers committed to the school and the reform model, and those who were found, through baseline surveys, to be more likely to initiate work-related interactions with other teachers. “So in some ways, coaching is a voluntary activity,” Ms. Atteberry said.

Faster Teacher Learning?

The schools where the most coaching took place were smaller, possibly because coaches were stretched more thinly in larger schools. They were also places where teachers felt they had a voice in what went on in their building and where professional networks among teachers were already strong. (Those network connections also grew over the course of the study, one of the papers found.)

And, likewise, teachers who had had more coaching were using the targeted teaching routines more often in their classes by the end of the study. The rate at which teachers picked up the new practices was highest for new teachers and those who came to their schools in the later years of the study, which spanned from the 2004-05 school year to 2007-08.

Across the board, teachers went from using Literacy Collaborative practices an average of 2.88 times a week to 3.36 times a week over three years, according to the study.

“I think there’s good reason to believe that having this instructional system in place is accelerating the process of teacher learning,” said Mr. Bryk.

Jennifer Sloan McComb, a policy researcher in the Washington office of the RAND Corp., a think tank with headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., said the new study adds to a sparse body of research on literacy coaching, a practice that was one of the foundations of the federal Reading First program and is widely used in other school improvement programs.

The only two randomized controlled studies of the technique so far found that it yielded only small or no gains in students’ learning. Ms. McComb said the new study is important because it tracks progress over a long period, drills deep, links students to their teachers, and focuses on a high-quality coaching program.

“You do have quite a bit of coaching going on in this study,” she noted, in commenting on the new research at the AERA conference. Yet, she added, on average only about half the amount of coaching that the model called for actually took place in the schools included in the study.

Despite the findings of positive results from the Literacy Collaborative, half the schools in the study have since withdrawn from the program. Mr. Bryk said the program’s expense was a factor in those decisions.

A report on the study is due out later this year in The Elementary School Journal.

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the May 12, 2010 edition of Education Week as Coaching of Teachers Linked to Stronger Gains in Reading

Events

Jobs Virtual Career Fair for Teachers and K-12 Staff
Find teaching jobs and other jobs in K-12 education at the EdWeek Top School Jobs virtual career fair.
Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School & District Management Q&A When This Principal Talks About Mental Health, People Listen. Here's Why
The NASSP Advocacy Champion of the year said he used stories from his school and community to speak with his state’s legislators.
6 min read
Chris Young, a principal from Vermont, poses for a photo in front of a Senate office building in Washington, D.C.
Chris Young, a principal from Vermont, stands in front of a Senate office building in Washington on March 13, 2024. Young was among the secondary principals to meet with legislators urging them to keep federal funding for schools stable.
Olina Banerji/Education Week
School & District Management Teacher Layoffs Are Mounting. How Districts Can Soften the Blow
Layoffs are coming in districts large and small. Here's how district leaders can handle them.
8 min read
Pencil Eraser Erasing Drawn Figure
AndreyPopov/iStock/Getty
School & District Management Opinion 5 Strategies to Combat Student Disengagement
When principals get serious about building a more inclusive school community, it doesn’t just benefit students, but teachers as well.
Michelle Singh
5 min read
Illustration of a bright vibrant school where students feel welcomed. In the background the sky is filled with enthusiastic raised hands.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva
School & District Management Advocacy or Electioneering? Education Leaders Walk Fine Line in School Voucher Debate
Texas is cracking down on district leaders' allegedly political speech—in what others see as a pretext for quashing anti-voucher sentiment.
5 min read
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton walks away after announcing Texas' lawsuit to challenge President Obama's transgender bathroom order during a news conference in Austin, Texas, on May 25, 2016.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton walks away following a news conference in Austin, Texas, on May 25, 2016. Paxton recently sued several Texas school districts for allegedly engaging in electioneering before the March 5 primaries.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP