Professional Development That Supports the Teaching of Cognitive Reading Strategy

In this article we describe and report on the results of a study in Texas that tested two models of professional development for classroom teachers as a way of improving their practices and increasing the reading achievement of their students. To meet this goal, 44 participating teachers in grades 2-8 learned to teach their students cognitive reading strategies through one of two models of professional development. One group attended a traditional 2-day summer in-service; the second attended the workshop and received classroom-based support from a reading coach. Using a random-effects, multilevel, pretest-test post-test comparison group design and a multilevel modeling analytic strategy, we determined the effects of these two models.

The full intervention group (teachers who were coached) outperformed the partial intervention group (workshop only) in all the teacher observation and student achievement measures. This study demonstrates the potential of coaching as a viable model of the professional development of reading teachers.