Understanding the nature of coaching interactions and teacher engagement in an online coaching intervention

Coaching is a popular mechanism for supporting teachers' improved use of teaching strategies. However, relatively little is known about which coaching processes are used or how those are implemented, especially in emerging formats like online asynchronous coaching. We used a multiple-case study design to examine coaching logs from an asynchronous writing intervention for preschool teachers (iWRITE). We examined the strategies that coaches used to support teachers' writing instruction, how they created relationships with the teachers, and how teachers responded to those strategies in the asynchronous context. We found that teachers responded to the coaches more often and completed more of the iWRITE modules when coaches enacted deeper-level relationship building moves. When coaches provided detailed observation about classroom practices linked with differentiated feedback to teachers this supported coaching retention. Furthermore, coaches' positioning within the intervention seemed to influence their overall relationship with teachers; specifically, having to be both coach and fidelity manager seemed to impair the relationship between coach and teacher.