Eliminating racial disparities in discipline coaching ¹

At-A-Glance

Current behavior:

Teachers provided disciplinary referrals to African American students at disproportionately high rates.

Desired behavior:

Teachers provide same rate of disciplinary referrals to all students.

Change approach:

Teachers received coaching, classroom footage reviews, and specific goals for improving their classroom practices, none of which explicitly focused on racial dynamics.

Impact:

The rate of disciplinary referrals for African American students went down by 50%; it went from being double the rate of the referrals for other students to being on par with it.

Implications for implementing partners:

Provide very specific, concrete guidance on how to change practices (e.g., rubric of specific actions).

Implications for supporting partners:

Invest in research on the forces shaping teacher practices, and whether some actions are caused by seemingly unrelated forces (e.g., ineffective classroom management leading to disproportionately negative impact on minorities).

My Teaching Partner-Secondary (MTP-S) provides coaching to teachers to improve the emotional, organizational, and instructional dimensions of their classrooms. A remote coach meets with a teacher over video calls, reviews footage of classroom discussions, and provides written feedback and goals for improvement. The program uses a clear rubric of classroom management practices to guide teacher practices and evaluate their performance. The written goals provided by coaches also correspond closely to the rubric.

The program was primarily designed to improve student performance and is effective at doing so. It also had a surprising effect on equity in student discipline, though racial equity and treatment of racial minorities is not explicitly addressed in the trainings. In a randomized controlled trial in Virginia, teachers who participated in MTP-S reduced the disproportionately high rates of disciplinary referrals for African American students, bringing it down to the same level as their peers (in the control group, African American students were twice as likely as their peers to get referrals).

More equal disciplinary referrals were tied to teacher sensitivity to individual student needs, and opportunities to engage in complex problem-solving.

Further analysis investigated what practices from the structured rubric of teacher behavior were most tied to reducing inequitable discipline. Two dimensions of teacher practice were found most relevant: teacher sensitivity to individual student needs, and opportunities to engage in complex problem-solving. By being attuned to the individual needs of each student teachers could see what each student was dealing with; this helped them see student behaviors more sympathetically, and not just as a discipline problem or part of a group stereotype. By creating a more challenging academic environment, teachers made students more engaged in meaningful problem-solving and started seeing their students’ achievements and potential in a better light.

The program saw effects during both years of its implementation, and encouragingly, the effects persisted in the year after the coaching ended.