Core Competencies for Coaches
Competencies are defined as an individual’s demonstrable abilities that can be observed or otherwise assessed. The competencies in this document represent core strategies that coaches can use to scaffold educators’ ability to provide children with high quality and impactful experiences, interactions, and instruction.
Individualized coaching is a promising strategy for improving the quality of children’s learning experiences. Coaching models have been linked to gains in educators’ self-efficacy and can increase practitioners’ use of effective instructional strategies, which, in turn, may help practitioners to feel more effective and reflective in their teaching practices. Despite this promise of coaching, there continues to be mixed research support for its effectiveness as a professional development model, likely due to poorly defined coaching processes across the field of education. Unclear coaching processes can undermine the effectiveness of coaching and result in missed opportunities to improve instruction and, ultimately, student outcomes. A goal of this document is to increase the transparency of quality coaching strategies to support alignment and implementation of effective practice across all coaching contexts. Using this competency-based framework naturally supports quality improvement efforts because it articulates specific behaviors that can be set as goals, practiced, and observed for improvement.
Over the past 20 years, the Children’s Learning Institute (CLI) has established a significant body of research and implementation expertise in the development and investigation of coaching-based professional development models for early childhood educators. Repeated implementation and refinement of our model has helped us to isolate the coaching behaviors that we hypothesize are contributors to practitioner change independent of intervention content or grade level. Thus, the competencies included in this document are generalizable across varied coaching contexts and can be applied to most age levels and programs.