Teach Effectively!

Editor’s note: Kerry Hempenstall, Senior Lecturer in the Division of Psychology of the School of Health Sciences at RMIT University in Bundoora (Victoria, Australia), posted this quick summary of some research on coaching teachers in the use of effective teaching practices.–Thanks, Kerry!

“Coaching Teachers” by Ann Glang and Russell Gersten (DIRECT INSTRUCTION NEWS, WINTER, 1987 pp. 1, 4, 5, 7).

Some of the findings were:

Athough there are some conflicting findings on the effectiveness of coaching, there is evidence that coached skills are more likely to be used in the classroom. When teachers are learning new skills that are quite different from procedures they have previously used, coaching seems to beparticularly important (Showers, 1982).

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Research from the Direct Instruction Follow Through Project supports the general training methods described by Showers (1983). During this 14 year project, researchers were able to evaluate teacher training methods in the context of a comprehensive implementation effort. Teachers and instructional aides in 20 communities, previously untrained in the Direct Instruction Model, learned the highly structured teaching methods through participation in an intensive training program. This situation required teachers to make radical changes in their teaching behavior, and as a result, researchers were interested in teachers’ reactions to the training program as well as the training program’s effects on their skill levels in the classroom.

Like Showers and others reporting in the staff development literature, researchers who evaluated the teacher training procedures in the Direct Instruction Follow Through Project found that an effective training program consisted of: (a) presentation of rationale, (b) demonstrations, (c) practice and feedback, and (d) onsite coaching (called “supervision” in the Follow Through literature). However, several aspects of the Direct Instruction training program differ from the Showers model.

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Carnine and Fink (1978) used a multiple baseline design to determine if there was a functional relationship between the Direct Instruction training procedures and implementaion levels for two teaching techniques — rate of presentation and signaling.

This study demonstrated that training procedures that were effective in training hundreds of teachers involved in the Direct Instruction Follow Through program could be experimentally validated. Findings from Carnine and Fink (1978) and Gersten, et al. (1982) show that teachers and aides trained in the projects effectively used the skills they were taught in their classroom instruction. While it is impossible to determine the precise contribution of each training component, there is no doubt that coaches were instrumental in the training’s success. As Showers (1984) notes, teachers who practice new skills without receiving specific feedback tend to practise skills incorrectly and therefore fail to effectively implement skills in the classroom.