Instructional Technology Coaching
What is Instructional Coaching?
Coaching is a careful approach of implementing strategies used during co-planning and co-teaching partnerships to strengthen a teacher's impact on student learning. Coaches support teachers in setting student-centered goals with effective instructional strategies to directly impact teacher practice and student achievement.
Guiding Principles:
Coaching is not about fixing teachers.
Coaching is a partnership focused on student learning.
Coaching is about continual professional development.
Coaching is part of a robust ecosystem of professional learning.
Why Utilize an Instructional Coach?
"Coaching is designed to impact student learning, it guides teachers toward using practices that are research proven, most likely to increase student achievement, and aligned with Visible Learning research." - Essential Guide to Student Centered Coaching
In his ground-breaking study “Visible Learning,” John Hattie ranked 138 influences that are related to learning outcomes from very positive effects to very negative effects. He and his colleagues found that the average effect size of all the interventions studied was 0.40. Therefore, he decided to judge the success of influences relative to this "hinge point" in order to find an answer to the question, “What works best in education?”
Our instructional coaches strive to structure conversations that incorporate the instructional strategies from Hattie's findings while also building on important staff development factors among the ever-evolving district initiatives impacting each of our schools.
Collective Teacher Efficacy (1.57)
Our instructional coaches enter with a mentality that our collaborative efforts are not about fixing teachers. We carry a belief in all teachers the same way we'd hope teachers carry a belief in all students. When we can live this belief within our coaching partnerships, teachers can strengthen their belief that they can have a positive impact on their students.
"We work with teachers to create a path forward through having meaningful formative assessment, co-planning high-quality lessons, and creating an overall belief that students can get there when we work together to create the proper conditions for learning." (p. 18)
Teacher Clarity (.075)
In a coaching partnership, teachers and coaches work together to plan and implement lessons. During these planning sessions, clarity for students and teacher roles in learning experiences are addressed to ensure learning intentions and success criteria align with standards and move the learning forward.
Our belief around coaching is that our focus should be on students, NOT teachers. Therefore, we adopt a Student-Centered Coaching mentality in our coaching cycles to help our collaborators better understand our role and focus.
Student-Centered Coaching provides the necessary discourse for coaches and teachers to gain clarity around the standards in order to unpack them and co-create high-quality learning targets. This equity practice ensures that our instructional lens is hyper-focused on the students and their needs; academic, behavioral, and social-emotional, and prevents us from wavering from the high expectations we established early on.
https://www.dianesweeney.com/student-centered-coaching-as-a-pathway-to-equity/
What Does Coaching Look Like?
Assess, Plan, and Teach
This model, repeated throughout a coaching cycle, encompasses the most basic aspect of what instructional coaching looks like. It is evident that teaching is getting continually more challenging. A supportive partnership in this work helps to strengthen the impact a teacher can have.
Steps in a Coaching Cycle
1. Set Standards-Based Goals
This starts with a basic question, "What would you like the students to know and be able to do?" The answer to this question leads us in together understanding the standards and build learning intentions and success criteria. While connecting learning with curriculum and materials in tactful efforts and identifying technology integration opportunities, this goal is the heart and soul of the coaching cycle and will be the basis for which all other aspects of our collaboration are based upon.
2. Develop Targets
Using learning intentions and success criteria is about grappling with what we think a particular standard really means by discussing the discrete knowledge, thinking and skills that are required. They provide a vision for what students will need to know and be able to do in order to meet the goal. Simply put, making learning visible helps us make it measurable.
3. Pre-Assess
Understanding where students are in their learning and thinking is essential towards developing plans for future lessons. This baseline analysis influences instructional strategies used and grouping techniques. While providing coaching teams data to reflect upon to determine impact of the coaching cycle, this step provides future reflection to show how students have grown, thus dictating future instructional design beyond the cycle's conclusion.
4. Co-Plan & Co-Teach
This is the majority of the work in a coaching cycle. Co-planning is an intimate and careful experience for a lot of teachers. Our coaches strive to respect this work by avoiding personal motives to ensure you have a true thought-partner. Co-Teaching provides the teacher and the coach opportunity to implement plans, measure student success and adjust instruction based on what students demonstrate or show. Our goal as coaches is to move past thinking solely around co-delivery of instruction and instead explore a variety of co-teaching strategies to best support students in reaching learning objectives.
5. Post-Assess & Reflection
Although reflections happens throughout each stage of a coaching cycle, teachers benefit from have a designated time and space to determine successes from the coaching work and identify areas the coach can work on to support their work moving forward. Within reflective conversations, the coach and teacher will also determine if the focus challenge was met. This data guides a coach in determining possibilities to highlight the findings and impact on student learning elsewhere, while also providing a space for celebration.