Why coaching?

At Foundations we are constantly asking ourselves how to increase learning not only for children, but for the adults who work with children. We believe that we can broaden and deepen our impact by transitioning much of our energy from running programs for kids to providing excellent professional development for adults who work with children and youth. This practice has already allowed our Center for Afterschool Education to touch hundreds of thousands of students each year as they work to improve the practice of afterschool educators and program directors.

We have faced challenges in the schools we manage and have heard time and again from our charter and district school partners about the difficulty in finding customized professional development, particularly professional development that meets the needs of individual educators. Foundations’ Office of Learning and Development is planning to launch our Center for Coaching. The Center for Coaching will provide relevant professional development that truly impacts teachers by taking into account their needs and the context in which they work. Every community is different; some communities need better support for teachers working with ESL populations while others need support in learning how to mediate conflicts that arise in the classroom. Every teacher can benefit from instructional strategies that cross content areas, but content area teachers often crave professional development that is relevant to their particular subject matter. While many state and national organizations are in the process of developing standards for instructional coaching, there is no uniform set of evidence-based guidelines for successful coaches. Foundations’ Center for Coaching anticipates building the field of instructional coaching by contributing to the body of knowledge about successful coaching practices and advocating for instructional coaching as an effective professional development model.

Now that the school year has started, we need to consider effective and efficient ways to ensure that all teachers are getting the resources they need to translate lessons into student achievement. Foundations’ Center for Coaching intends to do just that.