Customary practice in schools is that educators work in silos, often neglecting the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues to truly meet all students' needs. As students transition from middle school to high school, a clear bridging process is vital to set students up for success. Conventional parameters will need to be dismantled, and…

The purpose of this action research study was to understand and develop school-wide critical literacy practices with middle school teachers. During Cycle 1, students, teachers, and administrators from one school within an urbanized district spoke with the researcher in either interviews or focus groups. Results indicated that in order to implement…

This quantitative action research explored the impact of instructional coaching on students' performance on middle school reading assessments. Students' performance was measured in this study by examining students' percentiles scores on pre and post-tests on standardized reading assessments. The study included a treatment group that consisted of…

Education reform is the driver for changes in principal leadership practices. Instructional coaching is a common lever used to meet reform mandates but has had inconsistent results. The problem in practice is little is known about how principals use leadership practices to establish effective instructional coaching in their school building. The…

The purpose of this study was to explore how literacy coaches can provide job-embedded professional development for content-area teachers to support their efforts in the implementation of disciplinary literacy practices. In order to achieve this overall objective, the following research questions framed this qualitative methods study: 1) How do…

We examined effects of hybrid coaching delivered face-to-face and via smartphone to train middle school general educators to use a simultaneous prompting procedure during instruction on academic core content with sixth-grade students with intellectual disability in general education classrooms. We also measured student outcomes. We used a…

This observational case study employed a qualitative design to investigate the impact of student-centered instructional coaching and self-determined professional development on student engagement in middle school mathematics. Research demonstrates that engaging students in the learning process increases their attention and motivates them to engage…

Recent research has examined the influential role coaches may play in supporting teachers' collective capacity building for instructional improvement. While emerging research is promising, much remains to be learned about collaborative approaches to coaching, particularly in schools with the greatest opportunity gaps. We draw on extensive…

Robotics competitions boosts the development of STEM education, but gender disparity in this field remains rarely addressed by researchers. This study focused on the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) and tried to explore the gender differences through investigation method. The research questions are as follows: RQ1, what is the tendency of girls'…

Despite the long-time call for change in mathematics instruction, there are several barriers to change, and instruction has remained stagnant overall, taking the form of traditional lecture. Instructional coaching has many of the attributes of effective professional development from the literature and could be a major support for instructional…

While there is evidence that rehearsing instruction with groups of teachers can support their learning, whether this is the case in one-on-one coaching settings remains largely unexplored. In this exploratory selfstudy, I examined my coaching work with a cadre of mathematics teachers to determine whether and how rehearsing instruction in…

This study aimed to investigate the influences instructional coaching had on middle school math teachers. Accountability demands have impacted teaching and learning, and the push to use high stakes tests to measure teacher quality and effectiveness has limited teacher autonomy, agency, and efficacy. Teachers need professional learning that…

U.S. Department of Education research indicates that early warning indicator systems are being used in at least half of high schools in the United States. Previous findings from an efficacy study of one early warning indicator and response system, the Early Warning Indicator (EWI) team model, indicated that ninth grade students in schools using…

This study examined the effectiveness of an eight-week Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) coaching cycle on improving instructional strategies for English Learners (ELs) in seventh-grade classrooms. The goal was to enhance the literacy performance of ELs by 15% on the LAS Links literacy subtest. The coaching cycle aimed to integrate…

Secondary teachers benefit from ongoing coaching to support their implementation of evidence-based literacy practices across content areas. However, several factors may facilitate or impede literacy coaching at the secondary level. We conducted an exploratory survey study to investigate 141 middle school teachers' and 64 instructional coaches'…