New research calls into question whether teacher coaching—one of the fastest-growing models for teacher development—can truly succeed at scale.
The largest evaluation of an instructional coaching program to date, published this month in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, found no benefits to either teacher retention or student test scores from an intensive, expensive teacher-coaching model used in hundreds of schools.
It is the latest research showing that common professional development models often fall flat, a frustrating finding for a field that has struggled to prove its connection to improved student achievement.
Instructional coaching takes top educators out of the classroom, at least part time, to share their expertise with colleagues. Teachers often historically have considered it one of the more helpful kinds of professional development, and proponents argue the models can boost student achievement and teacher retention by helping struggling teachers improve and giving mentor teachers opportunities for extra pay and status.
The findings are less an indictment of instructional coaching itself, and more a statement about the difficulty of scaling and sustaining education innovation, said Jessica Garner, the senior director of innovative learning at the International Society for Transforming Education (ISTE), which works with districts to improve teacher professional development.
“Oftentimes, once something becomes part of the DNA or the fabric of an organization, we assume that it’s running as intended,” Garner said. “But it’s as if you have an airplane flying in a certain direction; if you shift that by one degree, you’re going to end up way off course.”
Growing pains hamstring improvements
Researchers led by Michelle Doughty, a postdoctoral fellow at the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, tracked the rollout of the Instructor Coaching Program in a large urban district serving a majority of students of color. The program grew rapidly between 2014 and 2022, eventually costing $1 billion annually and including nearly 1,000 mentor teachers and more than 6,000 teachers receiving support.
Because schools adopted the program in five different waves, researchers could track the changes in teacher retention and student math and reading achievement on state tests before and after participating schools joined, along with the progress of similar schools that had not participated.
The coaching showed early promise, but as the program expanded to new schools each year, parts of the intensive model broke down, researchers found.
Schools in the ICP developed new coaching and other teacher-leadership positions. Teachers with a principal recommendation and at least two years of having been scored effective on their evaluations could be given thousands of dollars in bonus pay to become instructional coaches. While still teaching half of their time, they spent the other half coaching and sometimes evaluating other teachers.
For schools that joined the program in early years, this mentoring was intense, Doughty said. Mentee teachers received five to six instructional observations each year: “You’re very frequently in a teacher’s classroom and then giving them feedback, and then you’re right back in the classroom seeing how they implemented that,” she said.
But as the program scaled up to more and more teachers, the number of teachers needing coaches outstripped the available mentors. The coaches faced a time crunch, cutting back to one to two classroom observations per teacher each year.
“As a program gets bigger, you require more and more high-quality coaches, and it’s very hard to get people who are both excellent at teaching children in the classroom and excellent at coaching other adults,” Doughty said. “Especially if you have a part-time coach who also has classroom teaching responsibilities, asking them to work with a large number of teachers can be a lot to put on someone’s plate.”
Planning and sustainability key
Though the study only looks at one program, ICP’s model of coaching mirrors that used in many districts nationwide, said David Blazar, a professor of urban education policy of the University of Maryland.
He said he wasn’t surprised that mentor teachers could not improve other teachers’ stability or their students’ learning at scale. Blazar’s own 2018 meta-analysis of 60 teacher-coaching studies found the effects of instructional coaching tended to shrink as programs took on more and more teachers.
“Just because we know that coaching works or tutoring works doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to roll it out districtwide,” Blazar said. “You’re taking your most effective teachers out of classroom time with students, but you’re also making an assumption that the teachers who are most skilled at improving, say, student test scores, are also going to be the most skilled instructors of other adults. And I don’t know that that’s necessarily true.”
Leaders need to “think very carefully about how you roll out a program to those most in need of it, then learn from it as it’s going,” Blazar said.
Two-thirds of districts have invested in instructional coaching, backed in part by federal and state investment over the last decade. Both the Biden administration and the Trump administration have urged districts to shift professional development from short-term training workshops to more individual, sustained professional development such as coaching.
Coaching has also been a key component in many states’ efforts to shift literacy practice toward the science of reading, although those efforts also tended to supply training in evidence-based methods for educators and coaches.
Leaders also need to consider how they sustain and pay for intensive coaching after grants or startup money runs out. For example, Doughty and her colleagues found ICP cost about $270 per student in a participating school, an amount that included $52,000 per mentee teacher and $52,500 per instructional coach.
“When you are flush with cash, you can staff [a coaching program] better,” Garner said, by using grant funding to provide incentives for mentors and mentees and pay for substitute teachers to take over a class while mentor and mentee teachers meet. “When those incentives and that funding go away, sometimes the motivation to keep the program isn’t as tight.”
To ensure programs help teachers in the long term, Doughty said school and district leaders who have or are planning instructional coaching should consider these questions:
- How are instructional coaches chosen and trained?
- What specific skills and subjects will mentors focus on?
- How does instructional coaching fit into overall staffing and teachers’ career options?
- How will administrators protect mentor teachers’ time?
