Instructional Coach Practices and School Organizational Content: A Mixed Methods Analysis

May 2025

Dr. Caitlin Kearney

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Agenda

1. Introduction & background
2. Part 1: Instructional coach time use: Factors associated with between school variation
3. Part 2: Instructional coaching for school improvement: Student achievement results from a district-wide initiative
4. Limitations
5. Recommendations/Lessons Learned

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Instructional Coaching

• Individualized, ongoing, and context specific
• Promising tool for teacher development, can boost both instructional quality and student achievement (Campbell & Malkus, 2011; Desimone & Pak, 2017; Kraft et al., 2018)
• Weakly institutionalized and rarely optimized (Wouflin 2020; Woulfin et al., 2023)
• Varies widely across organizational contexts (Hannan & Russell, 2020).
• Major barrier: coach time use (Kane & Rosenquist, 2019)

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Instructional Coaching & ESSER

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Motivation

“In my opinion, teacher coaching is as close as we will ever come to a ‘silver bullet’ in education research and policymaking. But coaching will not be a silver bullet so long as differing policy contexts inevitably lead to variation in the implementation of these programs.” (Blazar, 2020, p. 7)

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“This is not a one-size-fits-all model. It’s a one-size-fits-one model.”

-CCS coaching lead

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Qualitative Data:

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Quantitative Data:

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41 semi-structured interviews with:

• 31 elementary instructional coaches
• 5 district officials
• 5 elementary principals

19 district documents:

• Internal memos
• Professional development materials
• Annotated job descriptions

Administrative data:

• ~20,000 students
• ~1,500 teachers
• 74 schools

Achievement data:

• Student iReady growth scores, linked to homeroom teachers

Coaching data:

• Coach logs of minutes spent working with teachers
• Survey of coach working conditions

Part 1:

Instructional coach time use: Factors associated with between school variation

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1. In the context of a districtwide coaching initiative, how do instructional coaches vary in the number of minutes they spend engaged in instructional coaching with teachers?
2. How do school-level factors shape this heterogeneity in coaching minutes?

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Research Questions

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Qualitative Data:

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Quantitative Data:

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41 semi-structured interviews with:

• 31 elementary instructional coaches
• 5 district officials
• 5 elementary principals

19 district documents:

• Internal memos
• Professional development materials
• Annotated job descriptions

Administrative data:

• ~20,000 students
• ~1,500 teachers
• 74 schools

Achievement data:

• Student iReady growth scores, linked to homeroom teachers

Coaching data:

• Coach logs of minutes spent working with teachers
• Survey of coach working conditions

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Qualitative results: Common aspirations

“…my goal to actually do impact cycles with teachers. My main ‬‬focus is ‬‬‬to learn about the impact cycle and then go through it with some teachers. And that's what I've done. I'm still in the middle of some of a few impact cycles, and that's been my main goal.”

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Qualitative results: Common challenges

“... teachers don't have any time to do [impact cycle meetings] during the day, and they don't have any extended hours to do it after school, and they have a 40 min planning period every day, they have a duty, they have a lunch period, and that's it. And am I supposed to meet with all these teachers for a full period … So I think that because [the district is] so disconnected from schools… from coaching… from the teachers they think that actually will work…” ‬‬‬‬

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Qualitative results: Common challenges

“ …sometimes feel like I should be doing more impact cycle. But‬‬ I'm in a classroom helping someone who just I know needs help with like this reading thing, and these kids don't get this. And so I'm going to sit at their table with them and we're going to co-teach this lesson, but it's not an impact cycle. I think that's equally as important as an impact cycle.‬‬‬”

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Qualitative results: Variation in demands on time

• “... my administrator not placing other daily duties upon me allows for my schedule to be clear and not having those expectations, as far as like, you know, lunch duty or this duty, or covering classes allows me to get on teacher’s schedule.”

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• Other coaches described days filled with various duties, with one coach noting that her principal’s nickname for her was “ODA,” which was short for “Other Duties as Assigned.”

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Qualitative results: Variation in teachers’ willingness to engage in coaching

• “There's a lot of really positive energy. People are learners here. No one is like, ‘Don't come into my room’… they're excited about coaching… ‪They love having the coach, and I feel utilized a lot‬.”‬‬‬‬

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• “... they felt like they were constantly being watched… even though we came in with a ‘We're not here as evaluators, which we weren't, you know, but it was still just one more thing, one more so that was, I think, the biggest issue with why teachers, maybe, were not knocking on my door more frequently.”

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Integrated findings

• High demand on coach time schools
• Lower reported principal support
• Higher rates of chronic absenteeism
• Higher rates of fights per student
• Higher teacher resistance led to lower rates of coaching
• Low demand on coach time schools
• High resistance
• Lowest rates of student proficiency
• Coaches aligned with principals to navigate resistance
• Low resistance
• Highest rates of proficiency
• Teacher first mentality: teachers were willing but not as much urgency

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Conclusions

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• Wide distribution of coaching minutes per coach and teacher
• Coaches had common aspirations and faced common challenges, but there was variation in the demands on their time and the willingness of teachers in their school to engage in coaching
• Demand on time and teacher resistance framework illustrated several cases of schools

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Part 2:

Instructional coaching for school improvement: Student achievement results from a district-wide initiative

Research Questions

1. a) What is the difference in student achievement between

students whose teachers received some coaching and those who

received no coaching?

b) What is the relationship between coaching dosage and academic achievement?

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2. To what extent is the relationship between coaching dosage and

student achievement moderated by teacher experience?

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3. To what extent is the relationship between coaching dosage and

student achievement vary with coaching structure teachers receive?

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Qualitative Data:

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Quantitative Data:

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41 semi-structured interviews with:

• 31 elementary instructional coaches
• 5 district officials
• 5 elementary principals

19 district documents:

• Internal memos
• Professional development materials
• Annotated job descriptions

Administrative data:

• ~20,000 students
• ~1,500 teachers
• 74 schools

Achievement data:

• Student iReady growth scores, linked to homeroom teachers

Coaching data:

• Coach logs of minutes spent working with teachers
• Survey of coach working conditions

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Analytic Approach

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RQ2:

• Beginning teacher indicator

School (& Coach) Fixed Effects

RQ1:

• No coaching indicator
• Continuous minutes
• Continuous minutes squared

RQ3:

• One-on-one coaching
• Group coaching

iReady predicted growth

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Ω

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Limitations

• Can’t account for teacher predisposition to coaching, especially of concern if we believe openness to coaching is associated with teacher quality
• Can’t account for coaches giving more attention to struggling teachers
• Results separated by ELA and math but aren’t able to categorize coaching minutes by subject
• Reliant on fidelity of coaches in logging coaching

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Conclusions

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• A student’s teacher receiving some coaching, compared to no coaching, is associated with an ~0.04 SD increase in ELA achievement; ~0.05 SD for one-on-one meetings
• Districts should consider not only the coaching model (i.e., practices) and protecting coach time, but also providing guidance to coaches on how to allocate their time between teachers

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Conclusions

1. Instructional coaching is associated with improved student achievement
2. School context significantly shapes coaching implementation

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Recommendations

Protect and prioritize one-on-one coaching time:

• Continue the structural approach of centralizing coach supervision to buffer coaches from administrative tasks
• Set clear expectations that coaches should prioritize moderate amounts of one-on-one coaching (approximately 250 minutes per teacher) rather than intensive coaching with a few teachers
• Consider reducing group coaching in favor of one-on-one sessions

Differentiate support based on school context:

• Provide targeted support for coaches in high-resistance/high-demand schools, possibly including additional professional development on building teacher trust
• Develop strategies to reduce administrative demands on coaches in high-demand schools, potentially by reassigning some tasks to other staff
• Help principals in high-resistance schools understand how their leadership approach affects coaching implementation

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Recommendations

Address the tension between accountability and autonomy:

• Clarify with principals and district leaders when coaches should and should not be involved in accountability processes
• Develop clear protocols for handling situations where coaches observe struggling teachers
• Help coaches develop language and strategies for maintaining teacher trust while still advancing district goals

Enhance coach professional development:

• Continue regular professional development for coaches, with increased focus on navigating school-specific challenges
• Provide coaches with strategies for successful one-on-one coaching in time-constrained environments
• Create opportunities for coaches to learn from each other across different school contexts

Build principal support for the coaching model:

• Continue joint professional development for principals and coaches
• Share evidence on the relationship between coaching and student achievement to build buy-in
• Help principals understand how their support for coaching impacts implementation

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Lessons Learned

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• School contexts significantly mediate reform implementation: Even with strong central office support, school-level conditions dramatically shape how reforms are enacted.
• Social relationships matter for personnel-heavy reforms: The relationships between coaches, principals, and teachers profoundly influence implementation.
• Structural changes can support but not guarantee implementation: The district's structural approach of changing coach supervision helped but didn't fully overcome school-level barriers.
• Light-to-moderate coaching shows promise for scalability: Rather than intensive coaching for a few teachers, a lighter-touch approach with more teachers appears more effective for achievement gains.
• Align coaching with concurrent district initiatives: The impact of coaching on ELA but not math achievement suggests the importance of aligning coaching with other district priorities (in this case, Science of Reading implementation).
• Build for sustainability from the start: As ESSER funding ends, the district should consider how to maintain the most effective elements of coaching even with potentially reduced resources.

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Limitations

Single district context: The findings are specific to HSD's context and may not generalize to all districts, particularly those without strong teacher unions or different organizational cultures.

First-year implementation: The research captures only the first year of the district-wide expansion, when the program was still developing and coaches were still learning the dialogic coaching model.

Self-reported coaching data: Reliance on coach-logged coaching minutes may reflect variation in logging practices rather than actual coaching time.

Concurrent reforms: The district was simultaneously implementing a new reading curriculum and LETRS training, which likely influenced coaching practices and outcomes.

Correlational design: While the study establishes associations between coaching and student achievement, it cannot establish causal relationships or fully account for teacher self-selection into coaching.

Limited teacher perspectives: The research primarily captures coach and administrator perspectives rather than teacher experiences of coaching.

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Thank you!

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For questions, please reach out to Dr. Caitlin Kearney at cekearne@purdue.edu