Peer Coaching to Enrich Professional Practice, School Culture, and Student Learning

Pam Robbins

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781416620242
• eBook ISBN: 9781416620273
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How can educators work together more effectively to improve professional practice in a way that enhances student performance? The answer, says author Pam Robbins, involves combining collaborative activities and peer coaching—teachers supporting teachers. This book describes how any school can implement these proven practices and experience positive changes in teaching, school culture, and learning.

Robbins explains how to develop a collaborative, learning-focused culture and build trust among colleagues; offers strategies for participating in difficult conversations that yield useful feedback; clarifies how to develop, sustain, and evaluate peer coaching efforts; and showcases exemplary peer coaching practices used in real schools. She also includes coaching tools, scenarios, process guidelines, and reflection questions that make it easier to transfer these ideas into a school setting.

Peer coaching offers a job-embedded learning strategy; it's a valuable structure for supporting schoolwide and districtwide priorities such as analyzing data, improving instruction, integrating technology, and implementing standards. In short, it creates an effective way to support the growth of every teacher and enrich learning processes in any school.

Pam Robbins is a former teacher, coach, director of professional development, and school leader. She consults with high-performing and low-performing districts and designs and conducts workshops on leadership, school culture, organizational change, mentoring, and peer coaching.

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Chapter 1

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Establishing the Need for Peer Coaching

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Peer Coaching is a great tool for colleagues to use to help sharpen each other's skills. It is a way to get teachers out of the isolation of their classrooms and to really benefit from observing their colleagues in action. Not only does the process help the teacher being observed, but it also gives you a chance to learn a new style of teaching or to reinforce what you do with your students.
—Alison Howells, Spanish Teacher Lower School, Sewickley Academy

Day in and day out, dedicated teachers work tirelessly in individual classrooms, many of them unassisted by coteachers or other professionals, focused on making a difference in the academic achievement and social-emotional learning of every child. More often than not, their students represent a wide array of learning differences in terms of skills, content knowledge, background experiences, interests, parental support, learning challenges, and self-confidence. They come from a variety of cultures and consequently view and speak about the world differently. Each one is trying to find his or her unique place in the world, and in school. Isolated in their classrooms, teachers often wonder, Did I use the best lesson strategy today to teach this standard? How would my colleague across the hall do it?

At the same time, most of the schools where these classrooms are located are reeling with changes in response to local, state, or federal initiatives, all with the expressed intent of enhancing teaching and learning: accountability, teacher evaluation, Common Core or state standards or benchmarks for performance, 21st century skills, preparing students to be college or career ready, new technologies, school improvement. The list is daunting. Within those same schools, principals, assistant principals, and other school leaders find themselves juggling these multiple initiatives while sensing the new classroom demands teachers are experiencing as a consequence. They want to support the work of individual teachers, yet they come up short when it comes to time. One suburban New Jersey principal shared this reflection:

I am very much aware of the initiatives that face us. This reality is juxtaposed with the fact that our school population changed dramatically this year as a result of redistricting. Our new boundary lines have brought a significant number of students to our school from war-torn nations, some of them never having attended school before. We also have a growing number of students who are homeless. Our entire faculty is scrambling to discover the practices we need to address the new composition of our student body. We can't do it alone; we need each other. To some extent, we will be able to use our existing grade-level and subject-area-specific professional learning communities to find answers to the new challenges, but I also want to be able to increase the opportunity each faculty member has to receive feedback about their teaching practices and student learning, as well as have the opportunity to grow professionally. That is why we are developing a Peer Coaching program. (Personal communication, August 2014)

Peer Coaching offers several vibrant structures for collegial interactions to address important initiatives. It also fosters meaningful, personalized, professional growth opportunities for staff; increases the influence of exemplary teaching; and magnifies the collective propensity of schools to be able to provide responsive, high-quality learning experiences to ensure that every student succeeds.

A Definition of Peer Coaching

Peer Coaching is a powerful, confidential, nonevaluative process through which two or more colleagues work together to do the following:

• Reflect upon and analyze teaching practices and their consequences
• Develop and articulate curriculum
• Create informal assessments to measure student learning
• Implement new instructional strategies, including the integrated use of technology
• Plan lessons collaboratively
• Discuss student assessment data and plan for future learning experiences
• Expand, refine, and build new skills
• Share ideas and resources
• Teach one another
• Conduct classroom research
• Solve classroom problems or address workplace challenges
• Examine and study student learning with the goal of improving professional practice to maximize student success

Purposes and Forms of Peer Coaching

Schools around the world have implemented Peer Coaching programs for a variety of purposes. For example, Peer Coaching has been used to augment the availability of feedback to teachers about teaching and learning; to increase problem-solving capabilities; to build teachers' capacity to address new standards, benchmarks, or CCSS; to support teachers in planning instructional time within a block schedule; to expand the integrated use of technology; to develop teachers' content-area expertise; to design challenging student work; to refine teachers' instructional repertoire and competencies in an instructional framework; and to personalize professional learning. It is essential that the purpose of Peer Coaching reflect the needs and aspirations of the individuals who will be engaged in it.

Trust must be present in order to have meaningful conversations about practice. Trusting relationships among professional colleagues are often the missing ingredient needed to sustain Peer Coaching success. For instance, in the United States and abroad, many literacy and math coaches are failing in their efforts to change instructional practice and promote learning because, although they have exceptional content-area knowledge, they are not taking the time to focus on the meaningful underpinnings (relationship building and trust) that are a requisite part of results-oriented coaching.

Peer Coaching activities are as individual and unique as the people who participate in them. As noted in the Introduction, Peer Coaching activities fall into two broad categories. The first category, collaborative work, engages professional colleagues in using collaborative structures to increase their capacity to promote learning; these structures are not tied to classroom observations. The second category, formal coaching, occurs within a classroom and usually includes a pre-conference, an observation, and a post-conference. For instance, multiple colleagues from one department may be engaged in collaborative work focused on aligning curriculum with CCSS, developing common assessments, or analyzing student work. In another context, two colleagues may be involved with formal coaching that includes a conversation about a lesson plan, an observation of that lesson, and reflecting on the lesson and the student work it produced.

As these examples illustrate, the variety of forms Peer Coaching can take are limitless. Generally speaking, Peer Coaching activities change in form and structure as relationships among colleagues grow more trusting and comfortable, and as need dictates. If trust is just beginning to develop, staff members may initially prefer to work collegially outside the classroom. For example, teachers may study "mathematical shifts" related to CCSS in a small forum led by a math coach or facilitated by another teacher. Then groups of colleagues may view online videos of exemplary CCSS math lessons and dialogue about the teaching practices they observed and the resulting student performance. Next, as trust develops, professional colleagues may draw from these prior learning experiences and create math lessons together, incorporating the mathematical shifts, teaching strategies, assignments for student work, and assessments that are appropriate, given the instructional outcomes, performance data, and levels of student achievement and understanding in a class. Finally, teachers may form pairs or trios so that one teacher can teach the lesson they helped develop, while the others observe. Following the lesson, the teacher and observers may reflect and analyze what led to desirable student performance and what they might do differently. Under some circumstances, the teacher and observers may revise the lesson. One of the observers then teaches the revised lesson to a different group of students, while the teacher who taught the previous lesson becomes an observer. At the conclusion of the lesson, teacher and observers meet to reflect on the teaching experiences from both lessons, as well as student performance, and generate recommendations for practices that have a high probability of fostering student learning. Over time, these types of activities create job-embedded professional learning experiences that fuel the staff's capacity to serve students as they simultaneously implement challenging initiatives.

Using Peer Coaching to Address Challenges and Opportunities

Peer Coaching has the potential to bring opportunities, as well as the potential to address many of the challenges that educators face, including some related to the widespread use of technology. One teacher described the situation in this way:

We are at the "island stage." Because our faculty room was moved to a different floor, we often text or e-mail each other rather than make the trip upstairs—especially in a time crunch. So we have become isolated from face-to-face interactions. Peer Coaching will afford an opportunity to have another set of eyes in our classrooms.

In this case, technology can also be a helpful tool, by capturing—visually and auditorily—teachers' interactions with students and providing a medium through which they can examine those interactions and their consequences with a trusted colleague. For example, Videre (Manthey & Cash, 2014) is an iPad application that teachers have used to record teaching episodes. Colleagues review and categorize what they have recorded, labeling sections that they want to revisit and discuss. Describing her experience, one Northern California teacher reflected,

I was interested in how I incorporate questions that require critical or creative thinking throughout a lesson, and I wondered which students I called on to answer these questions. My coach used Videre to record my interactions and labeled selected portions "critical thinking," "creative thinking," and "student responses." When we conferenced after the lesson, we were able to go right to these lesson segments to discuss them. It was a real time-saver.

Technology has also played a significant role, answering needs as schools face reduced budgets for release time using substitute teachers and as a way to accommodate the many teachers who have after-school commitments or demands at home. For example, when schedules or budgets prohibit releasing teachers to observe colleagues, many teachers have used digital video cameras and smartphones to record themselves, and then they meet with colleagues via Skype in the evenings, from their homes.

Peer coaches can also focus observations on the classroom use of technology to increase student engagement. By focusing an observation on the use of technology, teachers have the opportunity to review the desired lesson outcomes during the pre-conference and talk about how technology will be used as a medium for students' active involvement. During the observation, the observer collects data about what students are doing and how technology played a part in facilitating active participation. In the post-conference, the teacher is invited to reflect on what happened during the lesson, converse about what modifications might be made, and analyze whether the use of technology helped students to master the intended outcomes.

Preparing students to be college or career ready is another challenge that can engage Peer Coaches. In one Wisconsin district, Peer Coaching partners studied the research on the skills necessary to succeed. After compiling the data, they examined both curriculum areas and classroom processes in which they could meaningfully and authentically embed these skills. Then they developed lessons together in which they embedded the skills, taught the lessons, analyzed the resulting student work, and used the data to inform future lessons. One teacher reflected on the coaching work this focus entailed as follows:

Critical and creative thinking were 21st century skills we sought to impart to our students. We actually had to think critically and creatively to accomplish this goal. Hence, we had the opportunity to strengthen our capacity as professional colleagues in the quest to serve students. Peer Coaching provided the medium to accomplish this.

Today's classrooms are more diverse and more inclusive with respect to language, cultures, skills, and knowledge than ever before. Teachers find themselves pressured to help every student meet rigorous, standardized learning targets within a specified length of time. At one middle school in Ohio, Peer Coaching colleagues decided to address the challenges of diversity by forming a book club and reading The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners by Carol Ann Tomlinson (2014). One teacher explained how the book inspired colleagues to design differentiated lessons for their students:

Resources in the book gave us the strategies we needed to coplan lessons for diverse learners. Using the lessons we had developed, one of us taught, while the other observed. Then we conferenced about the impact of the use of these strategies on student learning. This coaching work increased our skill sets and the facility with which we delivered instruction and generated treasured results—student learning!

As schools seek to reinvent themselves so that they can prepare students to thrive, many are reorganizing their use of time. In a Connecticut high school that transitioned to a block schedule consisting of 90-minute periods, teachers used Peer Coaching activities to examine effective teaching strategies for the block schedule and to coplan interdisciplinary lessons. Following a workshop based on Thinking Inside the Block Schedule: Strategies for Teaching in Extended Periods of Time (Robbins, Gregory, & Herndon, 2000), teachers organized Peer Coaching cadres by departments and began "chunking the curriculum." Then they began coplanning lessons in which they integrated instructional strategies they had learned in the workshop, as well as interdisciplinary concepts. After working together to develop the lessons, one teacher committed to functioning as coach, while the other served as teacher. Together, they participated in a pre-conference, a lesson observation, and a post-conference. Afterward, one of the department heads noted,

Peer Coaching allowed us to build our repertoire of teaching strategies for the block schedule, enhanced our collaboration as department members, and increased our work across departments. Collectively, this helped us grow as professional colleagues and ultimately resulted in raising student achievement.

Teacher accountability is another trend. Charlotte Danielson writes,

Virtually every state requires observations of teaching as a significant contributor to high-stakes judgments about teacher quality. To be defensible, the systems that yield these observations must have clear standards of practice, instruments and procedures through which teachers can demonstrate their skill, and trained and certified observers who can make accurate and consistent judgments based on evidence.

In addition, it's possible to design approaches to classroom observation that yield important learning for teachers by incorporating practices associated with professional learning—namely, self-assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversation. When these practices are put in place, classroom observation can make a dramatic contribution to the culture of a school. (2012, p. 37)

Many districts are seizing the opportunity to implement Peer Coaching in response to this movement—not as an extension of evaluation, but rather as a tool for professional learning, focused on developing a vision of effective instruction, creating a common language of practice, constructing an avenue for building competence in specific domains, and, in the process of doing this, generating norms of continuous improvement within a culture committed to fostering learning for every one of its members.

Kolia O'Connor, Head of School at Sewickley Academy, astutely explains how Peer Coaching enriches the professional practice of teachers and the quality of learning experiences that students encounter, while informing and strengthening the collegial and student-focused community that characterizes exemplary schools. His valuable insights can be found in Appendix A.

As these examples illustrate, Peer Coaching can accelerate the implementation of initiatives designed to enhance the use of technology, address challenges associated with CCSS, differentiate instruction, support implementation of new schedules, boost teacher effectiveness, deepen subject-area expertise, improve staff relationships, build a more learning-focused, collaborative culture, and enhance student learning.

Voluntary or Mandatory?

Ideally, Peer Coaching activities are voluntary. However, in some settings, principals and other school leaders have decided that they would like all staff members to be exposed to coaching so that they may experience its benefits. In some schools, principals have chosen to support Peer Coaching because of its value in providing nonjudgmental feedback to teachers who were not going to be formally evaluated, and because it serves as an additional source of feedback to those who were going to be formally evaluated. Although in many cases the "exposure" to coaching was initially a source of stress and was often accompanied by doubt, most teachers came to warmly embrace Peer Coaching. Carol McCormish, a 5th grade teacher at Sewickley Academy in Pennsylvania reflects as follows:

When I was first approached to participate in a Peer Coaching workshop, I had my doubts about its effectiveness. My initial thought was "we are now going to be evaluating our colleagues and our observations are going to be used for compensation purposes." As I learned more about the program, I realized Peer Coaching was a method to enhance my teaching and to direct my observers to the areas that I wished to have more information about. From observing my movements in the room, to watching the behaviors of one or two of my students, to documenting the progression of my lesson, the feedback was not only eye-opening but helped me to redirect my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Establishing the Need for Peer Coaching
• Chapter 2. Exploring the Forms of Peer Coaching
• Chapter 3. Building a Foundation for Collegial Dialogue: Structures for Collaborative Work
• Chapter 4. Investigating the Components of Formal Coaching
• Chapter 5. Creating the Effective Pre-Conference
• Chapter 6. Ensuring a Skillful Observation
• Chapter 7. Inviting Reflection Through the Post-Conference
• Chapter 8. Cultivating the Context for Peer Coaching
• Chapter 9. Guiding the Implementation of a Peer Coaching Program
• Chapter 10. Keeping the Momentum Going for Peer Coaching Success
• Appendix A. Reflections from School Leaders
• Appendix B. Sample Pre-Conference and Post-Conference Questions
• Appendix C. Topics for Peer Coaching Sessions
• References
• About the Author
• An ASCD Study Guide for Peer Coaching to Enrich Professional Practice, School Culture, and Student Learning
• Related ASCD Resources: Coaching and Collaboration
• Copyright