The Definitive Guide To Instructional Coaching

[Athenasby Regalado]

Frommath, literacy, equity, multilingual learners, and SEL, to assessment, school counseling, and education leadership, our books are research-based and authored by experts on topics most relevant to what educators are facing today.

Instructional coaching, a research-based, job-embedded approach to instructional intervention, provides the assistance and encouragement necessary to implement new programs that improve student learning. The product of more than eight years of study, this approach to professional development has been proven to help schools respond to the pressures of accountability and reform.

Experienced trainer, developer, and researcher Jim Knight describes the "nuts and bolts" of instructional coaching and explains the essential skills that instructional coaches need, including getting teachers on board, providing model lessons, observing teachers, and engaging in reflective conversations. Each user-friendly chapter includes:

This book is perfect for coaches, aspiring coaches, as well as the staff developers, trainers, teacher leaders, principals, and other educators who work with coaches and oversee coaching programs.

Now, Jim Knight is offering his expertise in an online professional development opportunity!

Contact your Corwin Sales Manager for more information!

Dr. Jim Knight, Founder and Senior Partner of Instructional Coaching Group (ICG), is also a research associate at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. He has spent more than two decades studying professional learning and instructional coaching. Jim earned his PhD in Education from the University of Kansas and has won several university teaching, innovation, and service awards.

Even under ideal conditions, teaching is tough work. Facing unrelenting pressure from administrators and parents and caught in a race against time to improve student outcomes, educators can easily become discouraged (or worse, burn out completely) without a robust coaching system in place to support them.

For more than 20 years, perfecting such a system has been the paramount objective of best-selling author and coaching guru Jim Knight and his team of researchers at the Instructional Coaching Group (ICG). In The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching, Knight offers a blueprint for establishing, administering, and assessing an instructional coaching program laser-focused on every educator's ultimate goal: the academic success of students.

In addition, each chapter of the book contains a learning map to help orient you and a list of valuable additional resources to complement the text. Whether you're new to coaching or well versed in the practice, The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching will no doubt prove a cornerstone of your coaching library for years to come.

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The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching offers a clear philosophy, framework, and method for coaches to establish and deliver programs that make a powerfully positive impact on student learning and well-being.

Drawing on more than 20 years at the forefront of Instructional Coaching, Jim Knight guides us through the current state of the field, giving us a detailed but accessible summary and synthesis brought to life with real-world anecdotes and examples. Building on this foundation - and the work of his team at the Instructional Coaching Group (ICG) - his research-based and field-tested approach identifies seven success factors: Partnership, Communication, Leadership, The Impact Cycle (structuring coaching conversations), Data (setting realistic goals), The Instructional Playbook (choosing strategies), and System Support. Taken together these are nothing less than a comprehensive framework for Instructional Coaching.

Whether you are at the beginning of your coaching journey or an experienced coach yourself this is an essential guide to a rich and rewarding field.

'Jim truly has delivered a definitive guide'. Tom Sherrington, Teaching WalkThrus

This article seeks to support school leaders to make good implementation decisions around instructional coaching by answering some of these questions and providing specific examples of how schools have implemented coaching.

It is vital for school leaders to recognise that instructional coaching is not a stand-alone intervention to improve teaching and learning. The purpose of any instructional coaching is to train teachers in something else, using instructional coaching. This therefore means that school leaders need to think very carefully about what they want to teach their teachers. This is central to effective instructional coaching, because for coaches to model, design practice and offer precise feedback, they need to have a clear picture of what good looks like that goes beyond their knowledge gained as a classroom teacher.

The implementation of instructional coaching requires multiple complementary elements to be successful. Senior leaders therefore need to make a significant upfront and ongoing investment to implement it properly; however, the results in terms of teacher development and student learning can more than match the effort involved.

Instructional coaches also need to have a deep understanding of effective instruction, drawn from books such as those by John Hattie, Bryan Goodwin, Jon Saphier, or my own High-Impact Instruction.My colleagues and I also propose that coaches create instructional playbooks that contain one-pagers describing the evidence and components of the highest-impact teaching strategies for their school and checklists that describe the nuances of those practices. Coaches should use these one-pagers and checklists to precisely describe teaching strategies so that teachers can implement them. They should also provide opportunities for teachers to see strategies being used through modeling, visits to highly proficient teachers, and watching video of expert teachers. My colleagues and I have also written a book precisely describing the standards, rubrics, and methods for evaluating instructional coaching.

Instructional coaching involves one teacher working with another teacher, to help them take small, personalised steps to improve their practice. Instructional coaches help their teachers to get better by doing two things on a regular basis:

In the feedback phase, the instructional coach and the teacher get together for a structured meeting lasting about 30 minutes. During this time, the instructionalcoach leads the teacher through 3 activities designed to help them to improve:

During rehearsal, teachers typically try out their step multiple times, with the coach giving balanced feedback between each round. Rehearsal in this low-stakes environment allows teachers to focus all their attention on improving, so they can begin to master their step before taking it to the demanding environment of the classroom.

Sometimes, coaches provide lots of explicit guidance. Sometimes, coaches will ask lots of question to facilitate development. The best instructional coaching is responsive to the needs of the teacher being supported.

The power of instructional coaching lies heavily in the 'compounding effect' of making small improvements on an ongoing basis. This is why instructional coaching works best when it is done regularly: ideally weekly or fortnightly, integrated into school timetables.

Instructional coaching involves a more expert teacher working with a more novice teacher in an individualised, classroom-based, observation-feedback-practice cycle. Instructional coaching usually involves revisiting the same specific skills several times, with focused, bite-sized bits of feedback specifying not just what but how the coachee can improve during each cycle.

Over the last decade, we have accumulated considerable evidence supporting the effectiveness of instructional coaching. In 2011, a team of researchers published the results from a randomised controlled trial of the My Teaching Partner instructional coaching programme, showing that it improved results on Virginia state secondary school tests by an effect size of 0.22 (Allen et al, 2011). In 2015, the same team of researchers published the results from a second, larger randomised controlled trial of the My Teaching Partner programme, which found similar positive effects on test scores (Allen et al, 2015). This evidence from replicated randomised controlled trials provides strong evidence that instructional coaching can work.

In 2017, a team of researchers from Brown and Harvard published a meta-analysis of all available studies on instructional coaching (Kraft et al, 2017). They found 31 causal studies looking at the effects of instructional coaching on attainment, with an average effect size of 0.15. The average effect size was, however, slightly lower in studies with larger samples. This evidence from meta-analysis provides good evidence that evaluated instructional coaching programmes work on average.

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