Diane Stephens

The Impact of Literacy Coaches on Teachers' Beliefs and Practices

The field of literacy education has long been concerned with the question of how to help classroom teachers improve their practices so that students will improve as readers. Although there is consensus on what characterizes effective professional development, the reading research on which this consensus is based most often is small scale and involves direct support provided by university faculty. The South Carolina Reading Initiative is an exception: It is a statewide, site-based, large-scale staff development effort led by site-selected literacy coaches. Although university faculty provide long-term staff development to the coaches, the faculty are not directly involved with the professional development provided to teachers. In this study we sought to understand whether site-based, site-chosen literacy coaches could help teachers’ beliefs and practices become more consistent with what the field considers to be best practices. To understand teacher change, we used two surveys (Theoretical Orientation to Reading Profile, n = 817; South Carolina Reading Profile, n = 1,005) and case study research (n = 39) to document teachers’ beliefs and practices. We also had access to a state department survey (n = 1,428). Across these data, we found that teachers’ beliefs and practices became increasingly consistent with best practices as defined by standards set by the South Carolina State Department of Education, standards that were consistent with national standards. This suggests that large-scale staff development can affect teachers when the providers are site-based, site-selected literacy coaches.

Coaching as Inquiry: The South Carolina Reading Initiative

Embedded within traditional notions of coaching are unstated expectations that (a) the coach is an expert and knows what it is that the other person should be doing and (b) based on his or her expertise, the coach should take actions to achieve his or her vision for the other person. Within the South Carolina Reading Initiative, however, literacy coaching was not about moving another person in a particular direction, but instead literacy coaching was a collaborative inquiry into literacy theory, research, practice, and learning. As members of the teaching team, our primary responsibility was to help coaches learn to coach and teachers improve their practices via inquiry, thus providing all participants (students, teachers, coaches, teaching team members, State Department of Education staff), the opportunity to “outgrow their former selves.”