The effects of high-quality pre-kindergarten programs are well documented, including improvements in cognitive, literacy, math, and social-emotional skills. Evidence shows that low-income and minority students tend to benefit most from these programs, potentially helping to reduce academic performance disparities. A commonly employed intervention to improve pre-k classroom quality is coaching; however, there is little consensus regarding what coaching should "look like" in early childhood education and a great deal of variability in coaching quality. This paper describes a community-university partnership to develop a coaching model for a publicly funded prekindergarten program, using a participatory research approach and seeking input from stakeholders at multiple levels to address the particular needs of the school district. This paper describes the origin of the partnership, the development and implementation of the coaching model, and the benefits of using this type of collaborative approach to pre-k coaching. Taking a collaborative approach to the development and implementation of a pre-k coaching model resulted in an intervention that met program needs, achieved buy-in from multiple levels of administrators and staff, and helped build the school district's capacity to use data to guide decision-making. Challenges encountered throughout the project, how those challenges were addressed, and steps taken to ensure the sustainability of the coaching model are also discussed.

The present study examined the effects of data‐guided innovations on students’ social‐emotional (SE) development within prekindergarten settings. Specifically, this study examined the effects of a pilot effort that sought to improve instructional quality through the use of structured classroom observations by coaches to help support teacher implementation of curricula and evidence‐based practices. In addition, teachers used formative assessments of students’ SE functioning to guide and individualize their instruction. To examine the effects of the multicomponent intervention, this study compared the SE functioning of students across three conditions: (1) students whose teachers received no data‐guided innovations; (2) students whose teachers received SE formative assessments; and (3) students whose teachers received both SE formative assessments and performance‐based feedback using structured classroom observations. Students whose teachers received both SE formative assessments and performance‐based feedback using structured classroom observations evidenced significantly greater SE competencies than those in the control group. Additionally, students whose teachers just received SE formative assessments evidenced greater SE competencies than those in the control group, however, the differences were not significant. Results indicate the potential value of these data‐guided innovations for improving prekindergarten student outcomes such as SE development and point to the next steps for future research.