Chapter 12: How Coaches Support Improvement Teams: Challenges and Considerations

Educational institutions are increasingly adopting continuous improvement approaches to redress longstanding inequities. Employing disciplined inquiry, networked improvement communities coordinate efforts to develop, test, and refine solutions for complex problems of practice in education. While there are tools and resources to support continuous improvement that come from outside of education, there is a gap in the literature around how to actually do one aspect of the work: coaching improvement teams. Improvement coaches spend the bulk of their time working with improvement teams in solving specific problems of practice. This chapter provides a more detailed understanding of how improvement coaches think about and approach their work, and articulates a set of four categories to describe the practice of coaching improvement teams in education. We sought to answer the following questions: (a) “What are the dilemmas that improvement science coaches face within education?” and (b) “How do improvement coaches approach coaching improvement teams?”