Years ago, while listening to audio recordings of classrooms, Mary Budd Rowe (1986) overheard a simple way to deepen student thinking and classroom participation: wait time—teachers pausing a few seconds after asking questions, and again after students answered, before calling on other students. Wait time seemed simple to learn, yet difficult to master. However, Rowe found that, with patience and practice, most teachers could employ wait time in their classrooms within a few weeks.
Then a funny thing happened. As wait time spawned richer student dialogue, Rowe discovered that many teachers, worried they were losing control of their classrooms, reverted to rapid-fire questions—unless one condition was present: a peer to discuss what was happening in their classrooms.
As it turns out, Rowe had uncovered a fundamental truth about professional learning (and human behavior change in general). We're more likely to adopt new practices (and break old habits) with someone there to support us—whether it's a workout buddy in the gym, a sponsor to help us stop drinking, or a fellow teacher to help us embed better practices into our teaching.
Making Professional Learning Stick
In seminal research on the impact of various forms of professional development on teacher learning, Joyce and Showers (2002) found that merely sharing better strategies results in teachers transferring only about 5 percent of what they learn to classrooms. Seeing the strategy modeled and practicing it contributed to small improvements in transfer, but the only condition that really made a difference—jumping the transfer rate up to 95 percent—was the addition of a peer coach.
Similarly, a review of 13 scientific studies of the before-and-after effects of coaching following professional learning found, across all 13 studies, little uptake of new strategies prior to coaching but significant application after coaching (Kretlow & Bartholomew, 2010). Basically, without coaching, teachers brought little of what they learned during workshops back into classrooms.
It's not all good news for coaching, however. Some studies have found lackluster results for peer coaching. For example, the U.S. Department of Education found that adding teacher coaching to a series of workshops on reading instruction had virtually no effects on teaching or learning (Garet et al., 2011).
At the same time, workshops on their own might be getting a worse reputation than they deserve. A review of rigorous studies of professional development effectiveness concluded that "workshops are not the poster child of ineffective practice that they are often made out to be" (Guskey & Yoon, 2009, p. 496). Workshops can, in fact, have positive effects on teacher practice and student achievement if they focus on evidence-based practices; aren't stand-alone but instead provide ongoing, intensive (30-plus hours) training; and actively engage teachers in adapting new strategies to their classrooms. Incidentally, no model of effective professional development in the sample included peer coaching.
So, how should we interpret these conflicting results? Perhaps with a simple (albeit equivocating) observation: peer coaching is effective when it's done, well, effectively.
It's All About the Quality
A small experiment with teachers in Kentucky schools (Murray, Ma, & Mazur, 2009) illustrates how peer coaching can go off the rails. This study found no difference in outcomes between two groups of teachers—one that engaged in peer coaching following summer institutes on mathematics instruction and another that did not. For this study, though, the researchers listened in on peer-coaching conversations and found they were generally supportive, yet often sidestepped reflective discussions of teaching. Researchers also noticed that peer coaching conversations tended to flit from one topic to the next, covering as many as 18 topics in 19 minutes, without diving into any one particular teaching strategy. "Overall," the researchers observed, "peer partners did not challenge or question one another's classroom practices" (p. 209).
In contrast, a researcher in Canada (Jao, 2013) gave teachers guiding questions for their coaching conversations and protocols for observing each other's classrooms. Before being observed, for example, teachers shared what practices they were working on and invited feedback by answering these questions:
- What are you planning to do today in the classroom?
- What did you do in the past?
- What would you like me to observe?
While observing others' classrooms, peers used a rubric to identify exemplary practices related to the strategy at hand. Afterward, observed teachers initiated coaching conversations by sharing their own reflections on the lesson followed by their peers sharing observations (not judgments) about what they'd seen. The conversation ended with observed teachers identifying what they planned to do differently next time. Teachers appreciated these structures, noting they took the edge off what otherwise could have been a prickly process. With these structures, peer coaching was far more incisive and productive.
Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap
Perhaps the most important takeaway here is that effective peer coaching requires finding a middle ground between superficial "I'm-OK-you're-OK" affirmations and judgmental evaluations that leave teachers feeling criticized and defensive. Case studies of schools in Colorado and Washington that embraced peer coaching suggest that striking this balance has a lot to do with how school leaders frame peer coaching (Hanson & Hoyos, 2014).
In particular, leaders in these schools made clear that their schools' view on peer coaching was that it's meant to help everyone get better, not to triage bad practices or rectify struggling teachers. Leaders also encouraged teachers to take risks and make mistakes.
These studies suggest that peer coaching fits within a chain of activities that help teachers close the knowing-doing gap. Ultimately, applying and sticking with any new practices—even those as deceptively simple as wait time—requires structured opportunities to collaborate with and receive feedback from others to encourage reflection and use of new practices. For that to happen, leaders must develop a school culture in which everyone embraces an attitude of "I'm-OK-you're-OK, but we could all be better."
