Nested Learning Systems for the Thinking Curriculum

FIGURE 9. Coaching enhances key enablers and is constrained by district policies and practices.policies, often mean that coaches are selected from the teachingranks by seniority or preference of principals rather than by demonstratedcapacity to increase student learning. Coaches’ jobdescriptions are often only vaguely specified. And, reporting usuallyto individual principals who do not have a developed understandingof what to expect from coaches, they are assigned to amyriad of tasks (ranging from supervising testing, serving as substituteteachers, or providing personal teaching to underperformingstudents) and do not have the opportunity to develop asystematic coaching relationship with teachers. Figure 9 alsoillustrates how the quality of coaching in a school district isdependent on a large set of policies and practices (those to the leftof the coaching diamond in Figure 9) that are heavily influencedby the district central office.In our study of CFC, we enacted a carefully focused programof coaching in upper elementary classrooms teaching readingcomprehension (Matsumura, Sartoris, Bickel, & Garnier, 2009).The program used to train coaches had been developed overseveral years at the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute forLearning (Bickel & Artz, 2001). We worked with district administratorsto select demonstrably successful reading teachers to betrained as coaches. We also worked with school principals todevelop agreements that would make it probable that coachesassigned to their schools would be scheduled for regular meetingswith subgroups of teachers, would be allowed to make classroomvisits to individual teachers, and would not have competing workassignments (Matsumura et al., 2009).Twenty-nine of the lowest performing elementary schools, allwith high proportions of English language learners, were randomlyassigned to either the CFC or a comparison condition.Teachers and principals in both sets of schools responded to periodicsurveys and interviews. There were systematic observationsof classroom text discussions and recording of the complexity ofthe texts being used in instruction. Students’ reading test scoreson the state accountability tests were tracked over several years.Teachers in the CFC intervention schools significantlyincreased participation in coaching focused directly on classroompractice. The quality of the text discussions in their classroomsimproved: The classes read more difficult texts, theyactively referred to the texts as they discussed them, and theteachers used accountable talk (Resnick, Michaels, et al., in press)classroom discourse strategies. Students in the CFC schoolsshowed significantly higher reading test scores (effect size = .25after 2 years). The effect was strongest for English language learners(Matsumura, Garnier, & Resnick, in press; see Figure 10).Combining Social Capital and Instructional Tools andRoutines in High SchoolsMany scholars of education practice and reform suggest that thequality of professional community in schools is tightly associatedwith student achievement. Considerable work has been done todevelop ways of managing schools that are likely to build andsustain professional communities (Loeb, Darling-Hammond, &Luczak, 2005; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). Indeed, it is possiblethat the successes of curriculum-based whole-school modelsare in part due to the professional community commitments thatare evoked by the forms of training and support that are part ofthe implementation packages that the sponsoring organizationsbuild into their programs.In 2001, the Institute for Learning began designing and pilotingan intervention program that explicitly combined instructionaltools and routines with professional development strategiesFIGURE 10. Content-Focused Coaching (CFC) schools showedimproved reading test scores.Downloaded from http://er.aera.net at UNIV OF PITTSBURGH on March 30, 2012april 2010 193