Research Background

The purpose of this research is founded in a call for the development of instructional coaching models that allow for differentiated teacher support (Hui et al., 2020).

This research attempts to answer that call with the creation of an adaptive instructional coaching framework that guides the facilitation of differentiated teacher professional development. It is believed that by combining a multidisciplinary coaching framework with Universal Design for Learning (UDL), this adaptive coaching framework will facilitate differentiated teacher professional development. 

The function of the framework is to guide instructional coaching supported personalized professional development for the provision of differentiated educator support. 

Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design and test an adaptive cloud-based instructional coaching framework that guides personalized professional development for higher education faculty.

This personalized professional development process is a part of a Design Based Research study. According to McKenney and Reeves (2019) Design Based Research (DBR) empirically links the practical to the theoretical through the development of real-world applications designed to address a particular need through solutions that are grounded in the context of the problem. The goal of this type of research is to produce actionable knowledge that can be presented in summary form (McKenney & Reeves, 2019). This study seeks to produce actionable knowledge in a summary format in the form of a UDL integrated instructional coaching framework.   

The iterative design process of this DBR study takes place in alpha, beta, and gamma testing phases where each phase informs changes to the next through the process of data collection and analysis. The alpha stage is centered around expert review of the designed intervention. In the beta stage, the intervention is tried out by the end-users in a pilot study. Finally, the gamma stage is focused on testing the designed intervention in a real-life setting (McKenney & Reeves, 2019).