Classroom Coaches to the Rescue

When a reading lesson on point of view came up recently in her Sylmar classroom, second-grade teacher Ruby Sandoval did not feel confident explaining the topic to her students. So she flagged down her coach and asked her to stop by.

Julie Maravilla subbed in at the appointed time and wrote “I, We, Me” on the chalkboard, then launched a 30-minute lesson while Sandoval sat to the side and scribbled notes.

“When you see these words in a story,” Maravilla told the children, “you can be pretty certain that this story is written from a first-person point of view.”

Soon, Sandoval’s students were spotting I’s, we’s and me’s throughout their textbooks and were on their way to mastering the basic method for identifying a story’s narrator.

Just as career coaches have emerged to motivate drifting office workers, educators are perfecting their skills under a coach’s eye. The Los Angeles Unified School District has deployed 297 literacy coaches to kindergarten, first- and second-grade classrooms.

Despite criticism from some teachers who label the coaches “police” and from parents who worry that the program only worsens the teacher shortage, Supt. Roy Romer wants to spend $40 million next year to hire 463 more coaches for Grades 3 through 5. The team would include 285 coaches for the district’s new mathematics curriculum. Elsewhere in the state, 27 school districts employ literacy coaches through a grant from the Packard Humanities Institute of Northern California.

For years, junior teachers were paired with senior educators, usually called mentors, who offered newcomers suggestions, such as how to keep order in their classrooms or where to deliver report cards. Additional training for teachers was limited to group seminars and conferences.

Today, the focus is on content and the individual teacher. Coaching is one way to help teachers adjust to California’s emphasis on standardized testing and the introduction of new curricula that match those standards, experts said.

“Most teachers aren’t given enough time to learn anything new,” said Beverly Showers, an educational researcher in the Northern California city of Aptos. “It takes a lot of things to make a difference, and coaching is just one part of that.”

Sandoval, a third-year teacher at Dyer Street Elementary School, talked with Maravilla after class about her point-of-view lesson.

“I just wrote everything you were doing because I thought it was so good,” Sandoval told her coach, flipping through a heart-shaped note pad. “It was really hard for me to do it, and now it’s really clear.”

This form of coaching--in which teachers imitate their coaches’ techniques--complements the so-called Open Court reading curriculum that many districts use in their elementary schools, educators said. Open Court, which Los Angeles Unified adopted last fall in 360 schools, outlines lessons and activities for each day.

Students’ reading and writing are evaluated about every six weeks, and coaches offer teachers prescriptions for rescuing those who have fallen behind.

Some teachers complain that Open Court and Success for All, the district’s other elementary reading program, stifle creativity because of their rigid scripts. And coaches, the critics say, are spies for principals.

The combination of literacy coaches and the Open Court curriculum brings some much-needed consistency to reading instruction, said Alice Furry, director of Reading Lions, a Packard Institute program that uses coaches.

“We use coaches because otherwise the boxes [of Open Court teacher guides] wouldn’t be opened,” Furry said. “You have to use these programs as designed, or you miss too many students.”

As Maravilla sees it, “My role’s not evaluative. I’m not in there to judge the teacher and see whether they’re doing it right or wrong.”

Maravilla, like nearly all of Los Angeles Unified’s reading coaches, was recruited from the district’s teaching ranks. That concerns some parents, said Kathryn Steinberg, president of the 31st District PTSA, the San Fernando Valley’s parent-teacher group.

“The teacher shortage as it is, you’re taking, in many cases, your best teachers out of the classroom,” said Steinberg, who is inclined to give the program more time to develop. She wondered: “In order to support math and reading, what are you doing to the general program overall?”

Ronni Ephraim, the district’s director of elementary instruction, says the coaching program’s benefits outweigh the losses.

“We’re always leery of pulling good people out of the classroom,” she said. “But on this program, we’re not pulling them into administrative roles. We are pulling them into teaching roles, and that’s the critical difference.”

A typical literacy coach in the district is based at a single school and assigned to work with 30 teachers, visiting their classrooms, working with them individually or leading seminars for groups of teachers.

Literacy coaches are trained by Open Court teachers from other schools districts where the curriculum has been in place for several years. Los Angeles Unified coaches are paid regular teachers’ salaries but receive bonuses for working longer hours or year-round.