Three Essays on Coaching for School Improvement

Instructional coaching, through the provision of individualized and contextualized professional development for teachers, has emerged as a promising strategy for school improvement. However, expanding coaching programs districtwide poses challenges, as the weak institutionalization of coaching makes the reform susceptible to heterogenous implementation. This dissertation investigates the efficacy of instructional coaching as a tool to boost student achievement gains and explores the complex dynamics between policy actors (district officials, school principals, and instructional coaches), organizations, and institutional logics. I leverage student-level achievement data, administrative data on students and teachers, survey data from coaches about their working conditions, district documents, and interviews with 31 elementary instructional coaches, five principals, and five district officials. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, this study finds a positive association between instructional coaching — especially one-on-one coaching (0.05 SD) — and student achievement gains. I find that despite the study district’s use of structural, informational and persuasive techniques to implement a common coaching model (dialogic coaching which emphasized individual interactions between coaches and teachers), the enactment of the coach role varied by school contexts. Furthermore, I find that conflicting institutional logics of teacher autonomy and accountability were inherent to the district’s coaching initiative and recommend that districts consider how the tension between these two logics could influence policy implementation.