The Echo

Coaching of Teachers Found to Boost Student Reading

By Debra Viadero

Denver

An innovative study of 17 schools along the East Coast 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 developed by researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus. 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.
Value-Added Approach

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.

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