Coaching — one-on-one meetings between an experienced educator and a classroom teacher to discuss challenges and opportunities involving students, and to celebrate student progress — has become a standard professional development practice in early education.
Ideally, the coach serves as a partner and support, as the coach and teacher work through how best to manage the classroom and enable students to reach academic and social-emotional goals.
At the A. Sophie Rogers School for Early Learning — part of the Schoenbaum Family Center in Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology — coaching has been enhanced by:
- having access to up-to-date data on student performance
- allowing the coaching sessions to recognize early on
- when individual students may need additional support
- when changes to classroom practice might enhance the learning environment for all students
“Our work at the school in supporting these students is a collective effort,” said Samantha Peterson, the school’s assistant principal, who also serves as the coach for the school’s staff.
As an early childhood education center connected with a major research university, the A. Sophie Rogers School has long gathered data on student performance, both through testing and through observation.
But an impetus to increase the use of data to improve the coaching process started five years ago when the school was awarded a Comprehensive Literacy Development Grant from the Ohio Department of Education. The purpose of the grant was to allow the school to become a model for best practices in language and literacy instruction. Measuring students’ language and literacy skills was fundamental to that purpose.
The grant enabled the school to provide every teacher with a laptop, which made it easy to collect the data the state needed, as well as information from the student evaluations the school was already conducting.
How data are gathered and shared
With all this additional data gathered thanks to the state grant, educators at the school saw an opportunity to enhance the coaching experience by bringing that data into the discussion.
Assisting in that endeavor has been the Data Management Center (DMC) shared by the Schoenbaum Family Center and the college’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy.
The coaching sessions are digitally managed using an online-generated form with a series of questions organized into sections covering a variety of topics, including:
- whether any children are receiving additional support
- how recently students have received standardized assessments of their development
- the teacher’s classroom goals
- specific sections on reading and literacy, such as implementation of the Crane Center-developed Read It Again! curriculum supplements
“There are lots of moving pieces when it comes to evaluating a child,” Peterson said.
Data from evaluations of students — both the data required for reporting to the state as part of the grant, as well as other data used by the school to understand how a child is developing — need to be easily collected, organized and accessible. The DMC has set up processes to do just that, allowing teachers to upload the results of evaluations onto secure servers, and then download reports generated from that data.
Katie Filibeck, the DMC data manager, assists Peterson and the school.
“We work really closely with Samantha to lay out reports in the way she needs them,” Filibeck said. “As long as we have a way to get the data, we can produce reports that teachers can easily access.”
The data are available for use as soon as teachers enter the information, enabling staff and administrators to recognize quickly when additional interventions may be needed to help students, and when teachers may need to make changes to the classroom environment.
“If you submit the data this morning, they’re available promptly to create the reports you need,” Filibeck said.
The benefits of using data in coaching
This data-centered approach to coaching also allows teachers to become full partners in their own professional development. At the A. Sophie Rogers School, coaching sessions are held twice a month, with one session led by Peterson, and the next session led by the teacher.
But being the coaching leader is a bit of a misnomer, since both Peterson and the teacher have full access to classroom data and are free to bring up issues, no matter who is leading the session.
“Coaching sessions are a partnership, where we share ideas and learn from each other,” Peterson said.
“They are a continuous conversation, and the close relationship we have working together in the same space, every day, helps to focus the conversation and allows the discussion of the data to come more freely since we all know the school, the children and the assessments so well.”
Positive and productive coaching not only assists teachers in their professional growth, but it can also improve student achievement. Research has found that when students are supported by skilled teachers, their achievement rises. This improvement may be due to both more effective teaching and more timely interventions.
The A. Sophie Rogers School for Early Learning is using data to create more effective coaching, benefiting both the teachers and their students.
