Effects of Coaching on Educators' and Preschoolers' Use of References to Print and Phonological Awareness During a Small-Group Craft/Writing Activity

Abstract

Professional development that included coaching with a speech-language pathologist enabled educators and children to engage in more phonological awareness talk during this activity.

Improving Preschool Educators' Interactive Shared Book Reading: Effects of Coaching in Professional Development

“…Although the results of the present study are promising, additional studies with larger sample sizes are needed to confirm the effectiveness of coaching-in particular, its impact on children. However, the findings of the present study, in addition to parallel studies that have focused on vocabulary and code-related talk (Milburn et al, 2015;Namasivayam et al, 2015), provide relevant information on the domains that may be most sensitive to change with this teaching approach. In fact, these studies suggest that the added value of five individual coaching sessions on educators' behaviors consists of fine tuning specific strategies (i.e., vocabulary and phonological awareness teaching, elicitation of experiential reasoning).…”

“…Namasivayam et al (2015) showed that the children in the workshop plus coaching group engaged in more vocabulary-related talk during a shared book reading activity relative to children in the comparison group, whose educators received only workshops. In a second study, Milburn et al (2015) observed that workshops plus coaching significantly affected the number of educators' and children's utterances related to phonological awareness-a skill that has not shown improvements in previous studies (Landry, Swank, Smith, Assel, & Gunnewig, 2006;Neuman & Wright, 2010). Further studies focusing on different areas of language and literacy-in particular on conversations and decontextualized language-are needed to explore the specific effect of coaching on interactive shared reading.…”

“…The in-service workshops included content on how to (a) engage children in conversations during shared reading (e.g., promoting book-related conversations, engaging all the children in the group) and (b) promote children's use of abstract, decontextualized language (e.g., predictions, explanations, inferences, and text-to-self connections) through the use of questioning techniques. The workshops also included content on vocabulary teaching and code-related skills that are the focus of previously published work (Milburn et al, 2015;Namasivayam et al, 2015).…”

“…However, practical issues such as staffing and scheduling concerns require decisions concerning professional development to be made that balance cost and effectiveness. Previous studies (Milburn et al, 2015;Namasivayam et al, 2015;Neuman & Cunningham, 2009;Neuman & Wright, 2010) provided evidence for coaching as a valuable-albeit costly-form of professional development (Hamre et al, 2012). These studies yielded medium to large effect sizes.…”

A systematic review of the evidence base for professional learning in early years education (The PLEYE Review)

“…Along with these elements, 11 studies included a workshop; these were held at the beginning of the intervention or at intervals across the duration of the PDL interventions (e.g. Powell et al ., ; Lonigan et al ., ; Milburn et al ., ). This combination of approaches appears to be effective.…”