The story of instructional coaching begins during my first year of teaching at Humber College in Toronto. As luck would have it, I was teaching an introductory communications class that the current students had failed at least three times already. I desperately wanted the students to succeed, but I didn’t know how to help them.
Dee La France was an expert on learning disabilities at Humber. She showed me how to teach my students how to learn, and as part of the process helped me implement the learning strategies curriculum developed for students with learning disabilities by researchers at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. As it turned out, Dee served as my coach before the term “coach” was widely used in such a context. She helped translate the learning strategies curriculum into action by planning lessons, co-teaching, or doing anything else she could think of to help me and my students succeed. And the exciting thing was that as my students became more confident writers, they also became more confident about themselves as individuals.
After seeing my students succeed, I was so excited about the learning strategies curriculum that I decided to fly to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, to attend the training on how to become a certified Strategic Instruction Model Professional Developer offered by the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning so I could teach other teachers what Dee had taught me. I returned to Toronto, eager to spread the word about research on how to teach students how to learn. Unfortunately, each workshop I gave was an abysmal failure.
The workshops failed for many reasons, but largely because the nature of workshops by themselves rarely leads to implementation, the attitude or “way of being” I brought to my work seemed to turn off my audience, and I hadn’t yet learned the art and craft of presenting. Because I had studied the research and seen successful implementation of the practices, in my excitement about sharing this with others, I assumed that everyone would be as excited as I was and would adopt the practices seamlessly. Soon, I discovered the complexity of sharing knowledge.
I began to wrestle with the question that has driven the past three decades of my research: What is the best way to share proven practices with teachers so that their students experience better learning and better lives?
To learn more about change, I took a course from arguably the world’s leading expert on educational change, Michael Fullan, at the University of Toronto. After the course, he agreed to further guide me through an independent study of his work. After I had read all of Fullan’s own work, he introduced me to other writers, who subsequently have shaped how I understand change. Among others, he encouraged me to read Peter Block, Margaret Wheatley, Seymour Sarason, Susan Rosenholtz, and Peter Senge.
To deepen my understanding of educational change, I enrolled as a PhD student at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. In my first research study, “Another Damn Thing We’ve Got to Do: Teacher Perceptions of Professional Development,” I examined why a nasty conflict had erupted between teachers in a workshop after I asked an otherwise simple question: “What might keep you from implementing these practices?” To come up with an answer, I interviewed teachers after the workshop, and identified the following key themes as interfering with each individual’s ability to learn:
- interpersonal issues
- their history of professional development
- teachers’ low expectations for workshops the school district’s culture
- my way of being as a presenter
One of my most important findings didn’t make it into my paper—the one-to-one conversations I had with teachers changed the way they saw me. After a second workshop with the same teachers (after I had met them one-on-one), their openness to my presentation was completely different. This discovery would lead me to write a paper on the power of one-on-one conversations.
Of course, this was just the beginning.
My educational journey changed me from being a struggling teacher to becoming a researcher looking for the best way to share proven practices with teachers so their students could experience better learning and better lives. To do this, I decided to study the “way of being” of professional developers.
I presented my first study of way of being at The American Educational Research Association Conference (AERA) in Montreal in 1999. In the study, I compared a partnership approach to professional development (grounded in what I would later call the Partnership Principles) with a traditional approach (based on direct instruction emphasizing fidelity of implementation). Findings showed that participants achieved higher test scores and described themselves as significantly more engaged, happier, and more likely to implement the strategy using a partnership approach than a traditional one.
Around this time, I became the coordinator of a study known as Strategic Advantage funded by the U.S. Department of Special Education and directed by Don Deshler and Jean Schumaker at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. The objective of the study was to assess whether inclusive teaching practices helped high school students with learning disabilities learn in technology classrooms.
While planning how to ensure teachers implemented the strategies in the study, someone said, “If we just do workshops, we won’t get implementation. We need to co-plan with teachers, model in their classrooms, and have follow-up conversations to ensure teachers have the support they need to implement.” Then another said, “If we know that is true for this project, why don’t we do it for all of our professional development?”
This was the day my research into coaching truly began.
Part II of The Evolving Story of Instructional Coaching: A Summary of Our Research describes the evolution of our work into what it is now. Stay tuned!
Read ICG’s 20+ years of research here.
