AIM Coaching: OSEP

Overview

Adaptive Intervention Model (AIM) Coaching is an adaptive coaching system for instructional leaders to promote a schoolwide adolescent literacy model. Using AIM Coaching, instructional leaders provide ongoing professional development to middle school teachers, differentiated based on teachers’ levels of skill and will, as they implement evidence-based literacy practices through the Promoting Adolescents’ Comprehension of Text (PACT) program.

Instructional leaders use AIM Coaching to support teachers’ implementation of PACT. PACT is a set of evidence-based literacy practices to provide middle school students with background information and explicit vocabulary instruction. The PACT practices also help teachers facilitate text-based discussions. These practices are curriculum independent, which allows them to be integrated into any content area and used with any text. Thus, teachers can use PACT with texts that are a part of the curriculum and with supplemental text. PACT provides students with frequent opportunities to engage with and comprehend text and, ultimately, acquire essential content knowledge. AIM Coaching supports teachers in implementing the following PACT practices: Comprehension Canopy, Essential Words, and Critical Reading of Text.

Project Implementation Years

• Year 1: Planning and recruiting
• Year 2: Baseline
• Year 3: Intensive support
• Year 4: Responsive support
• Year 5: Sustainability

Goals

The three primary goals of this project, funded through the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), are the following:

1. Gain a better understanding of how to implement and sustain schoolwide models that encourage instruction in evidence-based vocabulary and comprehension practices across Tier 1 English language arts, social studies, and science classes and in Tiers 2–3 reading intervention and special education classes
2. Increase knowledge about the implementation, efficacy, and sustainability of AIM Coaching when it is implemented under routine conditions
3. Increase availability of evidence-based technical assistance on professional development, coaching, and schoolwide adolescent literacy models

Join Us

We are recruiting two Texas middle school campuses with instructional coaches, administrators, teachers, and students to help us learn about AIM Coaching and effective research-based literacy practices. All professional development, materials, and support from the AIM Coaching team is provided at no charge.

If you are a middle school instructional coach or administrator and would like to join our team to receive AIM Coaching professional development, contact Colleen Reutebuch, co-principal investigator at The University of Texas at Austin.

Outcomes

• Improved outcomes for children with disabilities
• Improved capacity of local coaches to support personnel who serve children with disabilities
• Improved capacity of sites and the central offices or programs that support them to build infrastructure that supports an effective coaching system
• Improved understanding of how state agencies could reduce barriers to, and support, implementation of coaching systems

Resources

AIM Coaching recruiting flyer

AIM Coaching: OSEP flyer

This page was produced under U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, contract No. H326M200015 to the University of Maryland. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Education. No official endorsement by the U.S. Department of Education is intended or should be inferred.