Rate your coach: exploring ratings of coaching skills throughout teacher induction

ABSTRACTThis quantitative study explores novice teacher and coach ratings on coaching skills. Annual surveys were collected from respondents throughout a two-year programme to learn more about their induction experiences. We run a series of t-tests to identify differences between respondent groups and over time as well as multiple linear regressions to predict for characteristics that are associated with respondent ratings of coaching skills. Results from this study indicate that novice teachers’ belief that they were well matched with their coaches as well as coaches’ beliefs about induction complimenting surrounding support separately predicted for higher ratings of coaching skills. Additionally, novice teachers rated their coaches’ skills higher than the coaches did and all ratings increased over time. The findings have implications for creating more nuanced induction programme curricula to better support coaching interactions for novice teacher development.KEYWORDS: Teacher inductioncoachingteacher beliefsteacher development AcknowledgmentsWe first want to thank Tonya Almeida, Barbara Howard, and the CTI programme staff for their willingness to share their invaluable work with the community at large. We want to thank Linda Sanada for her technical expertise and guidance throughout this research. Finally, we would like to thank all Candidates and Coaches for their tireless work in the classrooms.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Pseudonym.2. CTI coaches are termed capital ‘Coach’ from here forward. CTI specifically uses the term Coach instead of mentor. That is the only terminology used throughout communications and surveys, and thus, the only term we refer to throughout this manuscript.3. Survey items not incorporated into analyses include respondent satisfaction with technological resources, which were not relevant to this study, and coaching activities and strategies used, which were not a part of both surveys. Survey is available upon request.4. All analyses described below were also performed with the full sample of 762 individuals. However, we believe more reliable results stem from the current analytic sample of paired individuals, in which we can see truer effects of change of beliefs over time.5. We acknowledge that running multiple t-tests increases the potential for family-wise errors. While correction tests could have accounted for these errors, there is some argument that correction for these errors comes at the expense of increasing Type II errors (Armstrong, Citation2014). Additionally, this analytical technique was exploratory in nature to identify whether there are differences in means. It helps to establish the use of regression, a more precise method that controls for other variables to explore differences in coaching skills by respondent group, described next.6. We recognise the study limitation in the differences between conducting t-tests on individual survey items and then factoring these items towards one holistic construct. However, because of the near consistent significant differences across all t-tests, we believe that the Coaching Skills construct represents these beliefs and is justifiably similar for study purposes.Additional informationFundingThis material is based on work supported by Riverside County Superintendent of Schools under C-1006110 and The Regents of the University of California. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Riverside County Superintendent of Schools or The Regents of the University of California.