Coaching Professors

How a former superintendent's pre-K-12 experience put him on a mission to improve teaching in higher education

From the Winter 2024 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

By David G. Title

In the fall of 2019, a colleague from another department approached me about a peer observation for her tenure review. As a former superintendent of schools, I was flattered but reluctant; after all, I had been an assistant professor at the University for just three years. But this colleague persisted. I agreed on the condition that I could use the classroom observation and a follow-up conference to see if the methods I had used for decades with pre-K to 12th-grade faculty could be adapted for instructors in higher education. As it turned out, the colleague found the experience valuable not just as a box to check for her tenure portfolio, but also as a way to improve her instructional practice. Her excitement was palpable, so much so that, within a few months, I joined with another colleague, Dr. Kristin Rainville, who had a background in adult coaching, to launch Faculty Peer Coaching at Sacred Heart University.

Evaluation vs. Coaching

As a superintendent and assistant superintendent of schools, I spent more than 25 years trying to improve instructional practice across an entire school system. After I started teaching at Sacred Heart, which has a stated goal of excellence in classroom teaching across the entire University, I thought often about how to bridge my knowledge and experiences to the higher education setting.

For as long as teachers have been teaching, leaders have used supervision and evaluation as tools to improve teacher practice. As an assistant principal at a high school back in 1984, I used a clinical supervision model to evaluate individual teachers and, I hoped, improve their instructional methods. Clinical supervision was a long process: a pre-conference, a full-class observation with data collection, a post-conference to discuss the findings of the observation, suggestions for improvement and a written summary at year-end for the teacher’s personnel file.

Although the process of observation and debriefing was time consuming for the evaluator, teachers enjoyed it. Rather than simply saying “You’re a good teacher” or “Nice lesson,” the evaluator offered specific evidence of how the teacher had displayed effective instructional practice. Many teachers found value in brainstorming ways they could strengthen their practice and wished the observations could happen more often. However, the ratio of teachers to administrators is too high to allow for more than maybe one visit per year.

In 2005, I learned about Instructional Rounds: a learning community of a dozen superintendents in Connecticut engaged with Professor Richard Elmore from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to begin observations of classroom instruction in each other’s districts, along with a structured debriefing protocol that emphasized collecting evidence in multiple classrooms, analyzing it and determining the next steps for improving practice in that school or district. Instructional Rounds in Education, a 2009 book by Elmore and his colleagues, brought national attention to this practice.

Instructional Rounds differs from clinical supervision in important ways that influenced my thinking about higher education. First, it was not part of the individual teacher evaluation process. This understanding freed participants to take risks. Second, Instructional Rounds results in learning for both the observer and the observed instructor. Finally, Instructional Rounds is based on a developmental continuum of practice—what educators might call a “growth mindset.” After all, every instructor, no matter how skilled or experienced, can improve their practice. The result of a Rounds visit is the identification of what needs to happen to move along the improvement continuum to excellence.

“Pioneers in Peer Coaching”

I wondered: Was there a way to take the best features of clinical supervision, combine them with the essential elements of Instructional Rounds and apply them in higher education? That is how Dr. Rainville and I landed in the world of Faculty Peer Coaching. We wanted a process that would, initially, gather a group of University faculty who wanted to improve their practice in a psychologically safe way, far from the prying eyes of the dean, chair or program director. Knowing that many college-level faculty members do not often possess a deep understanding of effective instructional practice, we wanted to start with an accessible set of practices that faculty members could build upon. We would invite volunteer faculty members who wished to improve their instructional practice. We wanted to teach the participants how to observe another faculty member’s classroom, collect evidence and have a conversation where both the observer and the instructor would learn. In short, we were looking for a way to combine the best of clinical supervision and Instructional Rounds and apply it in a higher education setting. We called it “Pioneers in Peer Coaching.”

With the support of former education dean Dr. Michael Alfano, now the University’s vice president for strategic initiatives, our first cohort began its work in January 2020. We taught participants the elements of effective instructional practice, focusing mainly on how to engage more students in the classroom and how to enable those students to complete cognitively challenging learning tasks. We taught them how to collect data in an observation and how to conduct the post-observation conference.

Even with the move to online instruction in March 2020, our participants persisted, and the initiative carried on. We gathered the group at the midpoint of the semester to share their learning from their first observation cycles and ascertain whether they needed additional help to understand the process of peer coaching. In the literature, these are called communities of practice, and ours continue to this day.

“Let's Get to Some Harder Stuff”

One of the early discoveries in our work was that many faculty members were hungry to learn more. “I’ve already mastered the easy stuff you gave us,” one early participant told us. “Let’s get to some harder stuff.” When faculty shared a common concern at the community of practice sessions, we began to offer optional workshops on topics such as conducting more effective classroom discussions, how to be a better lecturer or how to get students to engage in outside reading.

With the continued support of our dean, and now the University’s leadership, we added a second cohort of 20 new participants in September 2020 and allowed the original cohort to continue. To our surprise, 10 of the 12 participants from the original cohort wanted to stay on, and so began our practice of allowing faculty members to stay in the initiative for as many years as they wanted.

A Community of Practice

We began to research what our participants were gaining from this initiative and why they stayed. First, participants reported that they learn about and implement new instructional practices and that these practices work. They learn improved practices not just from being observed but also by observing other faculty members and seeing what might transfer to their own classroom. They also learn from each other in the community of practice. Second, participants feel safe to talk about their practice and to try new practices because of the confidential nature of the observations and the community of practice meetings. Participants cite the psychologically safe environment as critical to its success. Third, they feel affirmed. As one participant put it, “I never realized how many effective practices I am already using.” Finally, participants feel a sense of belonging from the work. They interact with colleagues across the University who are struggling with the same issues as they are. They realize they are not alone and that they have support along their improvement journey.

By 2021, Dr. Rainville, an accomplished scholar and tenured professor, found a publisher interested in our work. Information Age Publishing not only wanted to publish a book about Faculty Peer Coaching, but also wanted us to edit a second book on the subject as well as an entire series: Transforming Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. We asked Dr. Cynthia Desrochers, an expert in faculty development from California State University, Northridge, to join the effort. As of fall 2024, we have published six volumes in this series.

As the program grew, adding a cohort per year, the University’s Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) embraced our initiative. Completely reimagined under the Center’s director, Dr. Beth Luoma, the CTL has supported our program since 2022. Close to 100 faculty members have participated since the program’s inception, nearly 30% of the full-time faculty. We complement other Center offerings, such as book clubs or faculty learning communities, and participants in Faculty Peer Coaching find themselves interested in these programs. CTL can offer workshops to the full faculty, and we offered one on formative assessment for the Faculty Peer Coaching initiative in spring 2024.

From a small start, Faculty Peer Coaching has become an important element of the University’s goal of improving instructional practice for the benefit of our students. We have presented our work at national and international conferences and consulted with universities across the country who are considering adopting this practice—and it all started when one faculty member went looking for a colleague to help with a routine observation for her tenure file.

Dr. David G. Title is an associate teaching professor in the Farrington College of Education & Human Development, is a co-author of Peer Coaching in Higher Education: Faculty Coaching Partnerships to Support Rigorous and Engaging Classrooms (Information Age Publishing). A portion of this essay is adapted from his introduction to that book.