Role of Coaching and Reflection

Personalized professional learning incorporating coaching, modeling, and reflection, facilitates internal capacity building and increases self-efficacy, which are important elements to supporting school change. Coaching has been shown to improve teachers' abilities to adopt and implement new teaching practices. Also, through reflection, or purposeful thinking, and a sustained collaborative culture, educators have indicated stronger feelings of support, greater personal investment, and increased motivation to enrich teaching and positively affect student growth. However, despite research indicating the value of personalized, embedded, and sustained professional development, rooted in project-based activities with coaching and reflection, one-shot workshops are still, often the norm. This chapter is dedicated to sharing research related to coaching, reflection, and collaboration as it applies toward improving instruction and supporting school change.