| Literacy coaching as part of professional development models has become a successful way to enhance the instructional abilities of classroom teachers. Literacy coaching has become a key component included in state and federal literacy reform initiatives (Mraz, Kissel, Algozzine, Babb, & Foxworth, 2011) and has spread to nearly every school district in the country as a strategy for increasing early elementary classroom teacher skills in helping struggling readers who may be poor, minority, or English language learning (ELL) students (Matsumura, Garnier, Correnti, Junker, & Bickel, 2010). Inquiries on this reform topic in education are timely because of promising findings in recent studies about the effectiveness of literacy coaching for classroom teachers in helping to prevent reading failure in young children (Amendum, Vernon-Feagans, & Ginsberg, 2011; Carlisle & Berebitsky, 2011; Neuman & Cunningham, 2009; Vernon-Feagans, Kainz, Amendum, Ginsberg, Wood, & Bock, 2012).;The purpose of this embedded multi-case study was to explore and describe the interactive processes between coaches and teachers. Of particular interest was how kindergarten classroom teachers acted out initial resistance in the context of participating in a hard coaching model of literacy intervention called the TRI within rural low-wealth school settings.;Four major findings emerged from this study. TRI literacy coaches enacted coaching strategies focused within three major coaching domains (relationships-focused strategies, processes-focused strategies, and results-focused strategies) in order to support both high-implementing and reluctant, low-implementing/initially resistant kindergarten teachers during TRI intervention. Kindergarten teacher response to strategies within the three coaching domains appeared to differ by high-implementing classroom teachers and reluctant, low-implementing teachers. The data analysis suggested further that whereas a single approach, incorporating one essential domain of coaching strategies, was sufficient for high-implementing teachers, one essential domain of coaching strategies was simply not sufficient to support reluctant, low-implementing/initially resistant teacher participants in implementing the TRI with their kindergarten students. Data analysis also revealed that in live TRI coaching sessions, literacy coaches provided a different type of support to low-implementing teachers than they provided to high-implementing teachers. Reluctant teachers who were initially resistant to the TRI also cited additional perceived barriers to literacy coaching. |
