Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Experimental Evidence on the Effectiveness of Coaching Beginning Teachers

Cohen, Julie
Wong, Vivian
Liu, Qing
Wilson, Kristyn
Yonas, Anna
Parten, Hallie

School of Education and Human Development, University of Virginia

Haley Vlach served as action editor.

Julie Cohen and Vivian Wong contributed equally as cofirst authors. The research reported here was supported through generous funding from the Robertson Family Foundation and by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grants R305D190043 and R305D220034 to the Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Robertson Family Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, or the U.S. Department of Education. We wish to thank Christina Taylor, Rose Sebastian, Jim Moscater, Anandita Krishnamachari, Alexis Prijoles, Chioma Amaechi, Arielle Boguslav, Jamie McLemore, and Katie Waddell for their help in collecting, cleaning, and analyzing the data included here. We could not have done this work without our incredible partners at Wesley and Thomson Universities, and we are so grateful for their collaboration. All errors are those of the authors.

Julie Cohen served as lead for conceptualization, funding acquisition, supervision, and writing–original draft. Vivian Wong served as lead for methodology, contributed equally to supervision and writing–original draft, and served in a supporting role for writing–review and editing. Qing Liu served as lead for data curation, formal analysis, and visualization and served in a supporting role for methodology and software. Kristyn Wilson served in a supporting role for data curation, investigation, project administration, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing. Anna Yonas served in a supporting role for data curation, investigation, project administration, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing. Hallie Parten served in a supporting role for data curation, project administration, visualization, and writing–review and editing. Julie Cohen and Vivian Wong contributed equally to investigation.

Julie Cohen, School of Education and Human Development, University of Virginia, 218G Bavaro Hall, 417 Emmet Street South, Charlottesville, VA 22903, United States [email protected]

Received June 27, 2024

revised February 7, 2025

Accepted March 18, 2025

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format for noncommercial use provided the original authors and source are credited and a link to the license is included in attribution. No derivative works are permitted under this license.

Journal of Educational Psychology 117(7):p 1137-1177, October 2025. | DOI: 10.1037/edu0000960

Given the limited duration and critical importance of teacher education, we need more robust evidence about scalable methods that effectively and efficiently promote new teacher development. Our prior work suggested that simulated practice and directive coaching could be such a method, but all our work was conducted in a single teacher preparation program. As such, a primary goal of the current study was to understand if our previous findings about the robustness of simulated practice and coaching replicated across diverse preparatory contexts. In this article, we present the results of a multisite, randomized controlled trial as part of a series of conceptual replication studies examining the effects of simulated practice and coaching compared to practice and self-reflection. The explicit goal of this study was to systematically examine two sources of potential effect variation: (a) across three heterogeneous teacher preparation programs, which differ in novice teacher demographics, programmatic structures, and the timing of simulated practice and coaching; and (b) across different pedagogical tasks within each site. We find coaching makes simulated practice more useful for classroom management tasks, across preparation sites. Coaching effects were more variable for a content-focused instructional task, and novices at an alternative route program did not benefit from coaching in the same ways as those at more traditional, university-based programs. We generate hypotheses about why coaching effects replicate in some, but not all preparatory contexts and for some, but not all teaching tasks. We conclude with implications for teacher preparation research and practice.