From leadership research to district action: The Role of Coaches in a School Leader Preparation Program: “The Cooperative Triad”

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract As aspiring school leaders or interns complete their graduate program and year-long school-based internship in an urban school setting, they receive support from an on-site school leader mentor and an external coach. This trio, coined the cooperative triad, fosters leadership development through a collaborative approach. When alumni begin their career as a school leader, they continue receiving support from the leadership program as well as an external coach. Because of their important role, this study sought to understand how coaches conceptualized their role, what influenced their ability to carry out the role, and their influence on the internship and alumni experience. Utilizing a qualitative case study design, researchers engaged in data collection and analysis across interviews with seven coaches, seven interns/alumni, and five mentors. Findings highlight the importance of creating a coaching structure while remaining flexible, building trust and community with participants, and continually developing coaches in their practice. Further, the cooperative triad model demonstrates the potential for positive school-wide impact, as the coach supports both aspiring and practicing leaders. Keywords: internship coaches, leadership coaching, school leader internship, principal preparation, cooperative triad

Study methods

This paper is part of a larger qualitative case study on leadership preparation focused on the school leader internship. Due to the small size of the program, the researchers used purposeful selection to invite all individuals who had served as a coach, mentor, or intern/alumni to participate in the study in an effort to ensure that the research questions could be answered using multiple viewpoints (Maxwell, 2013). Using the research questions as a guide, interview protocols were developed for each group of participants to capture their experience with coaching. Researchers piloted the coach interview protocol (Creswell & Poth, 2018) with an individual who served in a unique position as a program-school district liaison during the program’s planning year, during which she supported the program’s sole intern while the coaching model was being developed. Invitations to participate in this study were then extended to eight coaches, of which seven agreed to participate; ten interns/alumni, of which seven agreed to participate; and eight mentors, of which five agreed to participate. Semi-structured interviews were conducted between December of 2024 and July of 2025 via Zoom, each approximately one hour in length (Flick, 2018). While the focus of this paper is the program’s coaches specifically, findings were triangulated (Yin, 2016) across interviews from seven interns/alumni and five mentors from the same research project to ensure our themes aligned across all 19 participants. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed using Zoom’s built-in transcription feature. The recordings allowed the researchers to verify the accuracy of the transcripts when using direct quotes.

Limitations

Our research is limited by the young nature of the program, which, consequently, leads to a smaller number of participants and a limited longitudinal examination into the influence of coaching. Additionally, all coaches were external to the school districts they served. Considering the sample size of coaches, we strengthened our data analysis by triangulating findings across three groups of program stakeholders: coaches, mentors, and interns/alumni. The various perspectives of all stakeholders in turn offsets the program’s small pool of coaches. We address any further limitations regarding the influence of our personal biases on this study in our reflexivity statements within the methodology section above.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Lacey E Seaton; Samantha T Hope; Suhani S Vakil. The Role of Coaches in a School Leader Preparation Program: “The Cooperative Triad”. Behavioral Sciences (2026-05-17). https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16050798

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.