A new report probes into the teacher-coaching and student-behavior practices used in middle schools run by high-achieving charter-school-management organizations.
The report is the latest to come from a four-year study of middle schools in 22 charter-management organizations, or CMOs, by the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell and the Princeton, N.J.-based research firm Mathematica. Earlier research by the same groups found that teacher coaching and “high expectations” student-behavior policies were common to the high-performing charter networks.
For the new study, researchers zeroed in on five networks—Aspire Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation, KIPP DC, Uncommon Schools, and YES Prep Public Schools—that have better-than-average results and emphasize either high behavioral expectations for students or teacher coaching and monitoring, or both.
The report says schools in those networks set high behavior standards for students by encouraging consistency across classrooms to create clear expectations, expecting adults to model and enforce norms for student behavior, asking parents to reinforce school actions, and training teachers on those standards, among other practices.
The hallmark practices of teacher coaching in high-achieving CMOs include selecting coaches for their specific skills and their ability to form solid relationships with teachers, strategically targeting teachers’ learning needs, observing teachers frequently, and giving rapid feedback, the researchers say.
