Peer Coaching as an Efficacy Enhancing Alternative to Traditional Teacher Evaluation

Traditional accountability-driven teacher evaluations often fail to inspire teachers to improve their lessons. A new, non-evaluative peer coaching program has been instituted for experienced, tenured teachers who work at the charter high school in this study. While multiple studies have established the link between peer coaching and teacher efficacy in other environments, the same link had not been established in public high schools. Using Bandura's theory of self-efficacy as the framework, this study answered the research question of what impact the non-evaluative collaborative peer coaching process, as compared with that of traditional administrator evaluations, has on teacher's perceptions of their own self efficacy at one school. This quantitative, pretest-posttest, nonequivalent control-group design study included collecting and analyzing data from the 24-item Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale for two groups of teachers, 45 of whom were evaluated by administrators and 19 of whom participated in a peer coaching program. An analysis of covariance was performed to compare group differences. Cronbach's alpha reliability analyses for instrument subscales were conducted, and subscales were confirmed for the study sample. For two of the three subscales, student engagement and classroom management, statistically significant differences were found between control and treatment groups, supporting the hypothesis that peer coaching impacts teacher self-efficacy. These findings support the theory that the local peer coaching program enhances the efficacy of teachers to accomplish more, feel less stress, and maintain student engagement and teaching motivation. Since teacher efficacy has been linked to student achievement for over 35 years, replacing peer coaching as a means of teacher evaluation could provide social change benefits for students themselves in this and other school districts.