Abstract:

In digital education reforms, some teachers are designated as instructional coaches to accompany peers in their professional development. Because instructional coaches play a decisive role in the durability of education reforms, the aim of our study is:
1) to identify and understand the difficulties they face in mentoring teachers in the improvement of their digital skills
2) to identify the coaching activities they offer to teachers and the reasons behind their choices. The final objective is to provide recommendations to school leaders and instructional coaches’ trainers in order to improve the working conditions and their impact on teachers’ professional development.

The research team used a mixed method research design. Thirty-eight primary schools’ instructional coaches involved in a large-scale digital education reform took part in a focus group. Forty-eight answered a questionnaire after the focus group took place. The researchers applied a convergent mixed method to integrate findings of quantitative and qualitative analyses to answer the research questions.

The findings highlight that some challenges are connected to the lack of clarity of instructional coaches’ role and tasks. The consequence is they devote a lot of time to technical troubleshooting, and have little time for pedagogy and coaching. The organizational characteristics of the schools where they work are also important. The school leadership’s information, skills and understanding of digital education is critical to the guidance it may offer to instructional coaches to overcome the problems they have to solve in their daily work. The research team recommends coaching school leaders to recognize instructional coaches as partners in designing the school digital strategy, in creating and promoting a digital culture, in clarifying roles of instructional coaches and IT support.

The second research question was to identify the professional development activities they provide to teachers. Some instructional coaches offer activities with low involvement from the teachers. For instance, they spent time on in-class modeling without fully using its potential, as teachers are not always actively involved. Based on this result we suggest that instructional coaches should be trained to select professional development activities according to a needs analysis and supported developing strategies to take better advantage of these activities.

This research presents a new perspective to help understand and improve in-service teacher professional development and coaching in the context of a digital education reform.

Keywords:

Instructional coaching, technology coaching, professional development, digital education, teacher training, digital education reform.