Reading is critical to children's academic and future economic success. Yet reading skills continue to lag in the upper elementary grades. One way that school districts across the country have responded to the challenge of improving students' reading skills has been to hire additional, presumably more skilled, teachers as "instructional coaches" to work with teachers to improve their instructional practice. However, there is no agreed upon definition of the coaching job, and the actual tasks that coaches carry out vary widely. The authors' project implements and studies a structured coaching program (Content-Focused [superscript SM] Coaching; CFC) that is designed to improve reading comprehension instruction in the upper elementary grades. The fundamental research question for their study is: 1) What is the effect of a well-defined instructional coaching program (CFC) on reading comprehension instruction and students' reading achievement? Results indicate that teachers' in the CFC schools significantly and positively increased in the frequency of their participation in coaching focused on enacting instruction and understanding the theory underlying effective reading comprehension instruction. Teachers in the CFC schools also showed modest improvement in the quality of their observed and self-reported reading comprehension instruction. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)