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The "My Teaching Partner-Secondary" (MTPS) program demonstrated improvements in classroom interactions and student outcomes in secondary schools using one-on-one coaching between study staff and teachers. Despite promising results, the time, cost, and oversight from a university research team may pose barriers to adoption of coaching programs like MTPS at scale. The "My Teaching Team" (MTT) project sought to translate key ingredients from MTPS into existing professional development contexts that are already built into many middle and high school educators' weekly schedules: co-planning or professional learning community meetings. Six teams of secondary teachers (N = 30 teachers) participated in a pilot test of the usability of MTT materials across 5 months in one school year. Three teams elected to use MTT materials, and three elected to be a comparison group who continued their typical practices. Teams adopting MTT materials were observed to do so with good implementation integrity, and reported satisfaction with the intervention. Compared to typical practice teams, those using MTT were observed to spend more meeting time discussing teaching practice and less time discussing logistics/mechanics, and engaged in more video sharing and feedback to team members in the MTT sessions that explicitly encouraged this. The number of MTT meetings completed by a team, as well as spending more time discussing teaching practices and video sharing (but not feedback provided) during team meetings, predicted students' self-reports of greater engagement and observations of higher levels of emotional support provided in the classroom. Implications for translating empirically-supported interventions from the lab to real-world school settings are discussed. [This paper was published in "Frontiers in Education" v7 Article 883226 2022.]

Teacher-educators and policy-makers recognize that ongoing training and support for high quality implementation of curricula can be a vital component of systems that ensure the value of education experiences, particularly for students at-risk of school failure (Meisels, 2007; Pew Charitable Trusts, 2007; Pianta, 2005). In particular, there is growing consensus that one-on-one consultation approaches (also referred to as coaching, mentoring, staff development) that provide ongoing support and feedback may be the most direct, effective path to producing high quality implementation of curricula (Ingersoll & Kralik, 2004; Landry et al., 2006; Pianta & Allen, 2009). However, there is as much potential for variability in the quality of coaching as there is in a teacher's fidelity to a curriculum, which raises several questions about how these different levels of intervention fidelity are related to one another. The current study is embedded within the evaluation of an integrated SEL and literacy program in third through fifth grade classrooms called the 4Rs (Reading, Writing, Respect, and Resolution; Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, 2001). A recent randomized controlled evaluation of 4Rs indicated moderate to large, positive impacts on teacher practices and small, positive impacts on student outcomes (Brown, Jones, LaRusso & Aber, 2010; Jones, Brown & Aber, 2011). Despite the promise of these findings, there was considerable variability during implementation of the 4Rs Program in curriculum delivery, which may have attenuated intervention effects. Therefore, in the current study teachers using the 4Rs curriculum are supported with a standardized, video-based coaching program called MyTeachingPartner (MTP; Pianta et al., 2008). In past trials with a variety of curricula across prek and secondary classrooms, MTP yielded improvements on teacher implementation and teaching practices that were moderate to large (Pianta et al., 2008). As part of this evaluation of 4Rs+MTP, authors monitored the quality with which coaches implement the 2 main components of MTP: (1) on-line written prompts that ask teachers to analyze key interactions from their own videotaped 4Rs lessons, and (2) in-person conferences that deepen teachers analysis of their 4Rs practice and result in actionable improvement plans. In addition, videotaped footage of teachers' implementation of 4Rs are coded by independent observers for fidelity to the curriculum protocol. These data allow researchers to explore the following questions about patterns of variability in these 2 levels of implementation and how they relate to one another: (1) To what extent are the two measures of coaches' quality of implementation (prompt-writing, conferences) related to one another? (2) To what extent is there variability on these two measures within coaches, across their caseload of teachers? (3) To what extent does quality of coaching predict variation in teachers' implementation of the 4Rs curriculum, above and beyond a global measure of teaching quality (CLASS)? Researchers expect to learn how different measures of coaching implementation are associated with one another and to identify elements of coaching that may be particularly challenging to standardize. Implications will be drawn about how best to provide support to coaches in the field to maintain their fidelity to the coaching model and ensure a high quality coaching experience for teachers.

The quality of classroom interactions has typically been studied using aggregates of ratings over time. However, within-day ratings may contain important variability. This study investigated within-day variability using the NICHD Study of Early Childcare and Youth Development's observational data during grades 3 and 5. The first question examined the stability of classroom interaction quality within a day, and the second question examined the extent to which time of day, activity setting, numbers of adults and children, and instructional grouping predicted the quality of classroom interactions within a day. Results indicated that classroom interactions were most stable within emotional support dimensions and least stable within instructional support dimensions. Results also indicated that the start of the day and transitions were associated with lower-quality classroom interactions. Academic activities, more teachers, fewer students, and group instruction were associated with higher quality. Implications are discussed in terms of understanding students' experiences and conducting classroom observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]