story by Claire Miller
Coaching has become a popular approach for supporting educators’ knowledge and skills when implementing new instructional approaches.
But what coaching strategies are most effective and what do teacher-coach relationship look like in an online, asynchronous format?
To find out, Gary Bingham, the Hettie Floyd Lee Professor of Young Learners in Urban Settings, worked with colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Texas A&M University to conduct a case study of two coaches supporting teachers participating in iWRITE, an online program that helps preschool teachers create high-quality writing opportunities for students.
The online program includes eight interactive training modules and an online coaching platform where teachers upload photos, videos and written descriptions of how they’re using what they’re learning from iWRITE in their classrooms.
The research team recruited two coaches (“Amber” and “Jenny”) and 26 lead teachers from Head Start early learning programs in Georgia and Michigan to participate in the study. At the outset, coaches attended training on coaching practices and young children’s writing development. The 26 teachers participated in an in-person workshop where they were given an iPad to use for the academic year, learned to use iWRITE, and completed the first module.
From there, the two coaches were randomly assigned a set of teachers to interact with on the iWRITE platform, where they could review the photos, videos and text teachers submitted, send written feedback, ask teachers to answer follow-up questions and remind them to complete their remaining iWRITE modules.
The coaches’ online interactions with their assigned teachers showed that both Amber and Jenny often engaged in general pleasantries. These included “gratitude and praise for what the teacher had uploaded, showing anticipation for what the teacher would upload next,” Bingham and his colleagues noted. They also gave their teachers some reflection questions to answer.
However, Jenny’s messages often included a detailed description of each teacher’s lesson and more specific feedback on the teaching practice they used compared to Amber’s, and Jenny’s teachers were more likely to respond to her messages. This led to Jenny’s 12 teachers completing 58.33 percent of the iWRITE modules versus Amber’s 11 teachers completing 48.95 percent of the modules.
“Jenny’s deeper relationship-building strategies that included detailed descriptions of their teaching practices may have helped teachers feel validated or seen in their work and have their efforts recognized,” the researchers wrote. “The way that Jenny posted her follow-up reflection questions were directly connected back to this practice.”
Both coaches also had to follow up with their teachers about completing the iWRITE modules. The researchers noted that this role as monitor may have hindered some of their progress in developing meaningful relationships with their assigned teachers.
These findings suggest that coaches who give personalized, thoughtful feedback to individual teachers can create meaningful learning experiences for educators in online spaces, if given the right tools and training.
“As coaching continues as a ubiquitous format for professional learning and as asynchronous learning becomes more commonplace in early childhood teacher education, the field needs examples of what works in asynchronous coaching – particularly where building relationships is more challenging due to the lack of in-person contact, and common coaching processes like modeling and demonstration are not possible,” Bingham and his colleagues wrote. “Researchers and interventionists can implement more humanizing practices to asynchronous coaching to increase the opportunities for teachers and coaches to interact, such as video and audio feedback, plus some synchronous interactions, even if over video conferencing software.”