Literacy Coaches

by Barbara Hall

An Evolving Role

The concept of literacy coaches dates back to the 1920s—but they are increasingly in demand in 21st century schools.

For six years, Stacy Fell-Eisenkraft has been a literacy coach at Intermediate School 131, in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown. She and other literacy coaches in schools across the United States are working to increase the instructional capacity of content teachers, so that they can incorporate literacy instruction in science, math, history and other subject areas. With too many of our nation’s students unable to read adequately, this new approach is aimed at equipping all students with strategic reading skills, so that they will be prepared for college and the demands of today’s workplace.

On a morning in late spring, Fell-Eisenkraft meets with Bryce Bernards, a first-year teacher at I.S. 131. Before their thirty or so eighth graders enter the classroom, the two educators trade ideas and approaches to the day’s reading and writing lesson.

Recognizing that a literacy coach should be supportive to teachers, Fell-Eisenkraft skillfully and sensitively helps Bernards refine his lesson plans. He is pleased with her suggestions, and, as students stream in, takes his place in front of the classroom. Fell-Eisenkraft remains nearby, assessing how she can be helpful in the classroom. The young teacher begins the class by engaging the students in reading exercises, intertwining the themes of “recipes” and “identities” to capture the students’ interest. Like a carefully constructed painting, brushstroke by brushstroke, the morning’s lesson cumulatively takes shape, forming a cohesive whole. During the to and fro between teacher and class, Fell-Eisenkraft writes key points on the board—especially helpful, Bernards says later, because of the multilingual nature of his class.

Literacy Coaching Defined

Literacy coaching is a growing development in the field of American education. Like other educational innovations, from charter schools to enriched after-school programs, literacy coaching is protean, varying from venue to venue and even described by different terms in various regions of the country.

On the West Coast, educators work with an instructional framework known as “reading apprenticeship,” while an East Coast source calls literacy coaches “advisor/mentors.” These terms have evolved over the years, with early studies on the subject often using the term “reading specialists.” Barbara Neufeld and Dana Roper of Education Matters, Inc., a nonprofit educational research organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, refer to literacy coaches as “change coaches” and “content coaches” in a June 2003 report, Coaching: A Strategy for Developing Instructional Capacity. Hundreds of interviews with literacy coaches, principals and other administrators, along with synthesis and analysis, are gathered in the report, which was prepared for The Aspen Institute on Education and The Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

One model for literacy coaching, as it has been introduced into Boston classrooms and elsewhere, is called Collaborative Coaching and Learning (CCL) because a chief characteristic of the model involves active participation by teachers who collaborate with their colleagues. Coaches and teachers are carrying out CCL through practices that involve demonstration and observation, pre-conference meetings, lab-site activities, debriefings and classroom follow-up.

The Role and Qualifications of the Reading Coach in the United States, an important statement on literacy coaching, was published in June 2004 by the Delaware-based International Reading Association (IRA). Cathy Roller, director of research and policy for the organization, helped develop the report with the IRA board of directors; the publication is endorsed by an array of organizations representing many learning disciplines. One of the report’s recommendations is for higher standards for literacy coaches, notably, a requirement of a master’s degree. The report also draws attention to the marked flexibility—not necessarily a positive thing, in the authors’ view—in the definition of literacy coaching.

“Some coaches are volunteers with no specific training in reading,” the IRA publication notes, “where others are school district employees with master’s degrees and reading specialist certification. In some schools, tutors who work with students are also called coaches; these individuals have a variety of levels of training and they may work for companies (both profits and nonprofits) who supply supplemental services to students attending schools labeled ‘in need of improvement’…There are no agreed upon definitions or standards for the roles…In the leadership role [coaches] design, monitor and assess reading achievement progress; they provide professional development and coaching for teachers…they are responsible for improving reading achievement; and they may also have staff supervision and evaluation assignments.”

Roller suggests that what distinguishes literacy coaching is teacher-to-teacher communications that occur both during class and at other times as well. She also observes that the supply of literacy coaches these days is far exceeded by the demand. Her sentiments are echoed by Susan Frost, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington, D.C., who offers the idea that literacy coaching is an outgrowth of “high-stakes” testing—schools fail if students fail tests; improvement in test performance depends, in part, on a student’s ability to read and comprehend the test material.

For Carnegie Corporation of New York, a concern with increasing the number of qualified literacy coaches who are currently working in middle and high schools is an element of its overall work in the area of improving adolescent literacy, which grows out of the Corporation’s long history of supporting literacy efforts. Currently, grantmaking in this area is focused around its Advancing Literacy: Reading to Learn subprogram, which was launched in 2003 after an extensive two-year review that included consultations with the nation’s leading practitioners and researchers. Specifically in support of literacy coaching, the foundation has made grants to the University of Michigan to help train coaches through the use of technology and to IRA to begin to review and help set standards for middle and high school literacy coaches.

Improving adolescent literacy is a particularly difficult challenge, since what is expected in academic achievement for middle and high school students has substantially increased, yet the way in which students are taught to read, comprehend and write about subject matter has not kept pace with the demands of schooling. American 15-year-olds, for example, barely attain the standards of international literacy for youngsters their age, and during the past decade, the average reading score of fourth graders has changed little. Readers who struggle during the intermediate elementary years face increasing difficulty throughout middle school and beyond.

“We’re losing these youngsters,” says Andrés Henríquez, Carnegie Corporation program officer in the Education Division. “In high schools, a third or more of the entering ninth graders will not graduate; the problem may be exacerbated in urban communities, but it is not just an urban problem, it is also a suburban and rural problem. Our nation needs to focus on the issue of adolescent literacy.”

“It is clear to teachers and principals alike that one-day professional development workshops are not sufficient,” he continues. “Coaches are an answer to a district’s need to provide ongoing professional development for teachers in specific content areas. Literacy coaching can help teachers make the content of their subject more comprehensible to students, so they can truly understand the complex information in their textbooks.”

Tracing Developments Through the Literature

Rita Bean, an IRA board member and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, says it’s nice to be prescient. With Robert Wilson, Bean wrote a 1981 report for IRA entitled, Effecting Change in School Reading Programs: The Resource Role. Among its attributes, the work clearly anticipates the ascent of the literacy coach, though the authors did not use that term. Now, says Bean, “The extent of the phenomenon is surprising to me.”

In their work, Bean and Wilson trace the literacy coach movement to the 1930s. They write that, “In looking at the evolution of the reading specialist as a support person, it is interesting to note that the early specialists (1930s) were essentially supervisors who worked with teachers to improve the reading program. It was after World War II, in response to the raging criticism of the schools and their inability to teach children to read, that remedial reading teachers became fixtures in many schools, public and private, elementary through secondary…”

For “reading specialists,” the mid-1960s marked a shift from the remedial to the resource role. A 1967 study on the subject (“Standards and Qualifications for Reading Specialists,” Reading Teacher, March 1967), suggested “the need for certain personal qualifications that would enable the specialist to establish a rapport with teachers, administrators, parents, and students; communicate effectively with teachers by listening carefully before evaluation; and encourage teachers to perform their instructional tasks effectively…”

In their 1981 paper, Bean and Wilson cite the then-surfacing “resource” role as one of “colleagueship” with classroom teachers, parents, administrators and other resource workers, noting, “…the reading specialist and the teacher must work as ‘associates and equals’ bound together by a common purpose, the improvement of students’ learning…”

The Literacy Coach: A Key to Improving Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools, written by Elizabeth G. Sturtevant, also for the Alliance for Excellent Education, calls literacy coaches “key players in the change process” aimed at improving adolescent literacy. The report (November 2003) addresses the need to build bridges between literacy coaches and the middle and high school levels, as well as tie into teacher training in college. When asked about the greatest challenges facing literacy coaches, however, Sturtevant, associate professor and co-coordinator of the literacy program in the graduate school of education at George Mason University, cites “economic issues.” While reading initiatives for younger children receive ample resources, teens in the middle and high school years continue to need literacy support, she points out, but the money to pay for it often is not available.

Sturtevant gives her own description of the history of coaching. “As long ago as the 1920s,” she suggests, “reading educators advocated that secondary content teachers teach students to comprehend their content texts [“An Historical Exploration of Content Area Reading Instruction,” Reading Research Quarterly, 1983, pp 419-38]. Educators of that time found that many children had difficulty transitioning from the children’s stories that were used in the early grades to more difficult content area textbooks in secondary schools.” In a word, there was a disconnect.

Two Reformers Reflect

John Goodlad and Theodore Sizer are prominent education reformers with an active interest in literacy coaching.

Goodlad, president of the Institute for Educational Inquiry and a founder of the Center for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington, wrote the classic, A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future (McGraw-Hill, 1984, 2004). His latest book is Romances With Schools: A Life of Education (McGraw-Hill, 2004).

Goodlad says that from his vantage point, “The coaching idea is not new at all. My view of it is a cultural one. The term dates back to the multi-language problem; I’d time it in with the growth of the Hispanic population, forty or fifty years ago. Simultaneously,” he continues, “there were people making their concerns known at the university level. They had the sense that you didn’t get anywhere if you couldn’t read. There was a call for vocabulary to understand social studies, science and so on.”

Math dominated the coaching landscape, he recalls. “That’s my first memory of the use of the term ‘coaching.’ Today, though, literacy coaching has become a cottage industry.” He goes on to suggest that there should be greater evaluation of the field. “We need long-term studies of literacy coaching—it’s difficult to understand its value without ongoing studies and assessment. It’s a tough question because we don’t know the impact of shifting heavily to technology and what the computer will do to literacy in the long run. I worry some about this. The contrast between computer-based literacy and print-based literacy provokes,” he says, “a layered conversation.” Adding a cogent comment, he says that he believes “the understanding of democracy involves the written word.”

Sizer, too, has a new book: Keeping School: Letters to Families from Principals of Two Small Schools (Beacon Press, 2004) written with Deborah Meier and Nancy Faust Sizer. Currently visiting professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Sizer is also the chairman of the Oakland, California-based Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), which “provides national networking and professional development opportunities, conducts research, and advocates for public policies” that are aimed at developing “equitable, intellectually vibrant, personalized schools.”

Infused with Sizer’s ideas about educational reform, CES is committed to the idea of literacy coaching. Sizer likens a literacy coach to the artist/teacher. “You still do your own art while you’re teaching,” he says. “You’re still influenced by current movements in the art world.”

What Sizer says worries him is coaches who end up not actually teaching—departing from what he calls the practice of “school-keeping.” “My concern,” he says, “is that coaching carries a great deal of ideological freight. Moreover,” he adds, “if coaches are just thrust upon teachers, there will be resentment.” But there are directions to follow, Sizer suggests. For example, “It’s important,” he says, “to build a network of people who are very close to the action of schools, who are trained to work with others.” Overall, Sizer is optimistic about the growing practice of literacy coaching. “It’s one of the pieces of education reform most likely to be sustained,” he says.

Frictions and Mini-Epiphanies

While the practice of literacy coaching continues to make inroads in schools across the nation, even its most dedicated advocates acknowledge that it can have drawbacks. In studying literacy coaching at the Boston public schools, for instance, educators candidly caution that there are sometimes turf battles between coaches and teachers—and content teachers, who are deeply invested in the practice of imparting knowledge about a particular subject area, do not always welcome the idea of having to teach literacy and comprehension at the same time. Their feeling, often, is that by the time kids reach the middle grades, their elementary schools should have already taught them to read and understand the information in their textbooks. With the added pressure of having to ensure that students pass required tests—so that not only can the student continue his or her educational career but also so that the school itself doesn’t suffer the stigma of being a “failing school”—literacy is not always the first subject on a middle or high school teacher’s agenda.

Still, Boston and other systems have also had their “mini-epiphanies.” The term is used by Lisa Gonsalves, author of a 2003 University of Massachusetts study of literacy coaching in Boston’s public schools. But, as Gonsalves and others note, Boston’s successes can, in large measure, be chalked up to a dedicated and capable team. Cathleen Kral, the instructional leader for literacy K-12 in the Boston public schools and coaching head there, has worked closely with individuals such as Ellen Guiney, executive director of the Boston Plan for Excellence in the Public Schools Foundation, and Barbara Neufeld to incorporate the literacy concept in the city’s middle and high schools. (The Boston Plan for Excellence also partners with the Boston public schools in Schools for a New Society, a Carnegie Corporation initiative being carried out in seven urban communities that focuses on reform of school district policies and practices to help reshape teaching and learning in high schools; key elements include creating small learning communities and a citywide network of excellent schools that can provide high-quality education for all students.)

The challenges of developing a literacy coaching program have been many, says Guiney, “With coaching in the picture, teachers teach in entirely different ways than they used to… so one key is that we’ve got to find just the right teachers to participate.” Some 80 percent of Boston’s literacy coaches are former teachers, Guiney reports.

She has a number of recommendations for schools that want to begin inculcating literacy coaching into their classroom. “I would start small,” she counsels. “But don’t wait too long to scale up.” She also lists these points to focus on: invest in the development of professional coaches, work closely with school organizers, ensure that school leaders buy in, get the incentives right for the coach and carve out time for the coach and teacher to work together.

In describing workshops for Boston’s teachers, Kral notes that the over-arching goal is to “deepen a child’s thinking.” Coach/teachers begin at the “pre-conference stage,” she explains and continue through debriefing. “They should leave with something to do, with a kind of assignment,” Kral adds.

Another developing story is taking place in rural Stafford County, Virginia. Nancy Guth, who has been the language arts supervisor for the county’s public schools for the past 13 years, recently received good news: school officials had endorsed funding for her literacy coaching program, including coaches at the secondary level. “It’s horrible to live on a year-by-year basis, so this is a great relief,” she says. She credits the ultimate strength of her program to a team approach, involving parents, administrators and teachers. “It was with the support of the superintendent and the superintendent for instruction that we’ve made progress. They said, ‘Okay, show us how it works,’ and we did. But once we did, they really paid attention.”

Other notable initiatives include a “Reading and Writing Studio” course in Denver that asks middle and high school students reading below grade level to read a million words a year. The students’ teachers are aided by literacy coaches who, among their duties, serve as liaisons to other subject teachers.

The Southern California Comprehensive Assistance Center of the Los Angeles County Office of Education sponsors a “Reading Success Network” that involves identifying reading coaches in all schools and school sites joining the network; the coaches are then provided with training, seminars and supports. Ruth Schoenbach and Cynthia Greenleaf, co-directors of the Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) of WestEd, a nonprofit educational organization headquartered in San Francisco, work with the network. Both say they’re dedicated to promoting “high rigor, high literacy, not just basic literacy.” Through the network program, they explore “how teachers think of their own lives as readers.” One area they work on is trouble-shooting. “Say you have a Scientific American article,” says Schoenbach. “We try to help our teachers determine where they themselves might have gotten stuck, what they didn’t understand. In that conversation—working out meaning—you have teachers saying, ‘Wow, there’s something here that I do understand now, and here’s why.’ In that way, you see how different people make sense of things in terms of reading.” Essentially, says Schoenbach, what they’re looking for are the different ways to really dig into a text and then weave those methods into teaching—a concern that underpins almost every effort to give students the literacy skills they need to understand what they read, and help their teachers find ways to guide students to meet that goal.

Every Child a Graduate: A Framework for an Excellent Education for All Middle and High School Students, written by Scott Joftus, policy director of the Alliance for Excellent Education, is a relatively recent report (September 2002) that provides a snapshot of the practice of literacy coaching in California’s Long Beach Unified School District: “Each coach specializes in a specific subject—math, science, English, history—and works four days a week to mentor new teachers, model instruction methods and help select and use resources. In addition to these content coaches, the school district provides a variety of first-year teacher coaches who help inexperienced teachers learn classroom management, essential elements of effective instruction and other important skills.” In his report, Joftus also provides insight into the reaction of a young teacher in a Long Beach school taking full advantage of literacy coaching as a collaborative tool: “First-year teacher Jason Marshall’s enthusiasm suggests the positive impact the coaches have on the school: ‘I go home smiling every day,’ Marshall said. ‘I don’t feel frustrated. Just yesterday we spent a few hours picking (our history coach’s) brain and working with her to create lesson plans for the next six weeks. We’ve got clear ideas about how to tackle each lesson we’re going to be doing. I don’t feel burdened. I feel excited about coming to school.’”

Pitfalls and Sustainability

While support for literacy coaching is strong on many fronts—educators increasingly favor the practice, parents see its results—there are also pitfalls to be considered, such as the shifting definitions of coaching and the problem of sliding standards. The term “coach” can refer to volunteers, paraprofessionals or individuals holding advanced degrees.

Effective coaching also depends on school administrators’ full understanding and approval. And there is the quandary presented by school administrators who, beset by budget woes, redirect money meant for coaches into their coffers for content teachers. Yet some administrators recognize the valuable role of coaches.

“Although states have drastically reduced education budgets and are in the worst financial shape in decades, scores of literacy coaches are being hired in school districts throughout the country,” Carnegie Corporation’s Henríquez says. “This may be happening, in part, because the No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to provide data on students’ reading and math scores for third to eighth graders. And in high schools, every day 3,000 students drop out. Of course, the districts and the teachers feel pressure for their upper elementary and middle schools to be successful, and high schools want to ensure that young people stay engaged in school. Literacy coaching may be a way to help improve student literacy and reduce high dropout rates.”

Before embarking on a coaching program, Neufeld and Roper suggest that educators and school administrators ask themselves the following questions:

• What are our professional development goals and what do we want to accomplish with our overall professional development programs?
• What would we gain from having coaching as part of our repertoire of teacher/principal learning opportunities?
• What would coaches do to help us achieve our instructional goals?
• Are there other approaches to achieving our goals, and might they be more appropriate for us?
• What else, in addition to coaching, would we have to support to help us reach our instructional goals?

Expectations, many experts suggest, must be reasonable. Concurrently, there must be adequate support for coaches to meet their potential as contributors to the learning process. But the most critical issue—one on which virtually all stakeholders agree—is that the practice of literacy coaching will provide few long-term benefits if there isn’t secure, ongoing funding available to ensure that coaching has staying power on the educational agenda.

Two pieces of legislation have been proposed that address the need for such funding. The PASS Act (see Sidebar) calls for funding for literacy coaches as well as academic counselors and resources. The Graduation for All Act is co-sponsored by Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-CA) and Congressman Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX), who is Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Education Task Force. The Act could provide $1 billion in federal funding for schools to place literacy coaches in high schools and implement individualized graduation plans for students most at risk of dropping out of high school. Graduation for All is targeted at schools with the lowest graduation rates and allocates funding for at least one literacy coach for every high-needs middle and high school. Coaches would help teachers incorporate research-based reading and writing instruction or English-as-a-Second-Language instruction into teaching practices for core academic subjects.

In Florida, the Middle Grades Reform Act, which went into effect in May 2004, funds reading coaches for 240 middle schools. Although Governor Jeb Bush (R) announced grants of $16.7 million to support this effort, many policymakers will be paying close attention to this initiative in the hope that it will provide some guidance to other districts and states around the country.

Meanwhile, Back in Chinatown…

At Intermediate School 131 in New York City’s Chinatown, on a spring day towards the end of the school term, Bryce Bernards familiarizes his students with the format of recipes; features such as measurements, cooking instructions, ingredients, number of servings and required utensils are discussed. The children, quiet, intent, talk about how members of their families use recipes at homes.

Bernards then asks the children to superimpose their life stories onto the recipe framework. (What he’s aiming for, in his words, is to teach a lesson in “sustained metaphor, the genre of recipes.”) He offers details of his own background to get the youngsters started. He says his life has consisted of “One-fourth cup of overbearing, demanding parents. An uncle who didn’t want me to become a teacher. One can of Wentworth Avenue sauce.” (He explains that’s the address where he grew up.) “A bag of wild friends who lived on my block and played street games. Plus two World Series championships tickets for the Minnesota Twins, a big part of my childhood,” he informs the class.

The children respond in kind. One boy, for instance, offers the following: “One cup of my mother who watches out and keeps an eye on me when I get in trouble. Five packages of curiosity because I want to know everything. One cup of over-reacting parents.”

“Our identities are pretty complex,” Bernards observes.

The students then compose their recipes in more depth. During the class, literacy coach Stacy Fell-Eisenkraft circulates among the students, a reassuring presence for the children and for Bernards. The coach, who is also earning a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, not only works closely with teachers in her New York City middle school, but also assumes tasks ranging from ordering books to running after-school book clubs for the faculty. Fell-Eisenkraft may also help Bernards adjust to his new profession. As a young teacher, he and others like him across the country are vulnerable to the demands of a new job and drop out at higher rates than their more established colleagues; a University of Pennsylvania study indicated that as many as 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within five years. Literacy coaches can provide a support system that will help these younger faculty members cope with the challenges of their profession.

Bernards agrees that Fell-Eisenkraft is indispensable to his work. “She keeps me focused on what’s important,” he says. “For example, I may come in with a lesson that tries to incorporate three different skills, and she will help me narrow it down, which leads to more effective teaching.” He then goes on to talk about how he and Fell-Eisenkraft designed a lesson to accommodate the multiple-languages—Chinese, Spanish and English—spoken by the children in his class. “You saw Stacy writing on the board behind me,” he says. “That always helps in terms of the students being able to visualize the words.”

One advantage Bernards and Fell-Eisenkraft have in carrying out their teaching partnership is the support of those who run the school. “Our administrators are completely behind us,” Fell-Eisenkraft reports. “They realize, as I do, that the overall level of instruction is raised because of literacy coaching and that teachers and students really benefit.”

Her words are music to the ears of Jane Lehrach, the school’s principal, who often attends her school’s literacy coaching sessions. The veteran educator is justifiably proud of her school. “It’s a safe and peaceful place,” she says, adding that “respect” is the watchword at I.S. 131. She goes on to say that “education is a journey of growing, and literacy coaching, done right, is a manifestation of that philosophy.”

As she speaks, one of Bernards and Fell-Eisenkraft’s eighth graders passes on his way to his classroom seat. Lehrach lets her comments waft off in the air as another idea intervenes. “I like to say that every child has treasures. And what are your treasures?” she asks the boy.

“Books!” he exclaims, providing the answer Lehrach hoped to elicit. Although the youngster has come to love books, literacy coaches at I.S. 131 and other schools across the country know they must go beyond teaching a love of reading literature and help students develop reading strategies that will allow them to comprehend the complex information presented in their textbooks.

Summing up how literacy strategies such as coaching should be inculcated into teaching and learning, Sturtevant writes in her report, “Schools and teachers have the ability to base their instructional and curricular decisions on years of research related to the types of learning environments and day-to-day teaching strategies that best support students’ growth in reading, writing, and critical thinking. Schools and teachers can make a real difference in the lives of the adolescents with whom they work. The current challenge is to make this goal a reality in middle and high schools throughout the United States.”

Barbara Hall has written about education since she covered local school board meetings for a New England weekly newspaper some 25 years ago. Between then and now, she’s written on learning for publications including The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She also writes for children in the award-winning AppleSeeds magazine and is currently writing and illustrating a children’s book.