A new brief from Education Resource Strategies (ERS), “Sustaining High-Quality Instructional Coaching in a Challenging Budget Environment,” offers strategies and suggestions for ensuring a school district’s instructional coaching practice is sustainable, consistently improving, and continually offers a strong return on investment (ROI).
To adopt an ROI-based approach to instructional coaching:
- Assess the current instructional coaching model’s practice and costs. High-quality coaching is provided by instructional leaders who understand both content and curriculum. Teachers participate in weekly, expert-led, curriculum-focused collaboration and regular cycles of observation and feedback. With these critical elements in mind, even small adjustments to caseloads and time allocation for collaboration, preparation, observation, and feedback can have a significant effect on cost.
- Adjust your strategy to maximize your system’s strengths within the budget realities. Shifting resources to support coaching initiatives while decreasing investment can be useful, but only if the impact of the coaching remains intact. For example, in districts where instructional coaching is well established and effective, leaders might decide to scale back on central support or coaching in areas where instruction is strongest. Other districts might focus their most effective coaches on the highest-need schools or assign some coaching to teacher-leaders who are granted additional release time.
- Focus on continuous improvement and increasing impact while maintaining sustainable cost structures. Track the impact of your district’s coaching practice and adapt your approach with a structured “continuous improvement model” to ensure that—whatever your district’s level of investment—ROI is improving over time.
School business leaders can read the full brief to learn how to leverage these approaches to sustain high-quality instructional coaching and build toward a bold, new vision for teaching and learning in their schools.