2026 Theses Doctoral

ICF-Based Coaching at Teach For America: An Exploratory Case Study of Teach For America Coaching Professionals

Gjata, Desantila; Ghosh, Rajashi

This exploratory case study examined how seven teacher coaches working within Teach For America (TFA) develop and enact coaching practices grounded in the International Coaching Federation (ICF) competencies for the development of K-12 public educators. As this is a novel approach to coaching at TFA, the participants in this study served as key sources of data to understand how this new coaching approach is manifesting across the organization and in the context of developing TFA Corps Members (CMs), or educators, in K-12 public education.

Additionally, in the broader context of coaching K-12 public educators, coaches' voices are largely absent from the literature, making it challenging to understand and innovate on how we can support coaching professionals, particularly in the public K-12 education context. This case study begins to address this gap in the literature by spotlighting the direct perspectives of the TFA coach participants, centering on how they interpret, adapt, and integrate ICF-based coaching into their daily work with public school K-12 teachers across the United States.

The case study design serves as the core methodology of this study, incorporating elements of grounded theory analysis. Two semi-structured interviews, aligned with the theoretical framework for Transformative Learning (TL) Theory, were conducted with all participants to understand how they surface and reconstruct the meaning and practice of their evolving coaching craft. TL theory is also enhanced as a phasic, conceptual framework in this study, supporting the analysis of a complex professional development journey through the lens of TL as both a practice and an orientation in the ICF-based TFA coach's development experience.

The study's findings were first generated as participant-level themes, ultimately yielding three major case-level findings. First, dichotomies in coaching frameworks were identified as the key juncture in the evolving coach perspective. Coaches in this study were repeatedly prompted to engage with the tensions between competing coaching frameworks and philosophies, while enacting a novel coaching approach through the ICF framework, without a definitive resolution of the underlying tensions.

As a result, this juncture in perspective is a core element of their coach development journey and enabler of their evolving coaching practice. Consequently, the second case-level findings highlight the tension between competing coaching frameworks as a central and sustained feature of the disorientation of the coach development journey. This sustained disorientation then prompts a continual practice of informed improvisation of ICF-based coaching. The third case-level finding ultimately highlights improvisation as a mechanism through which transformation occurs in the coaches’ evolving ICF-based coaching practice.

The findings of this study show how TFA coaches develop a new coaching approach while managing the tensions between their prior knowledge and real experiences coaching K-12 public educators. This parallel growth demonstrates their ability to handle complexity and respond to, rather than resist, significant changes in their professional coaching practice.

Additionally, this study expands on two concepts in TL theory: the main phases and perspectives of transformation and a phase-based view of the stages of TL theory as they influence transformative coach development and practice. Finally, these findings have implications for ICF-based coach development at TFA, as well as broader implications for K-12 teacher coach development, including theoretically informed professional development initiatives to advance the K-12 coaching profession.