Playbook Rationale
The APS Coaching Playbook was designed in response to an initiative to create collaborative coaching structures and conversations within APS. Although instructional coaching has historically occurred across various departments (e.g., ESS, CLDE, General Education, and Equity), this powerful work was often siloed, and rarely in conversation with one another. With CLDE and ESS joining the coaching CADRE, we were given an opportunity to draw on our collective genius and to ensure that our coaching conversations were attending to the needs of all students and all teachers. To that end, the Playbook was born. By rooting in a common framework (NTC Indicators) and engaging in conversation with each other, we began the work of defining, internalizing, and complexifying practice in service of equity. The hope through this work is to ensure that the instructional moves and strategies that live within each practice draw on research from CLDE, ESS, and General Education to create a collaborative and iterative coaching tool that responds to the needs of our students and our system. In other words, we want to ensure that how we define and coach towards equitable practice is responsive, humanizing, and timely.
What This Playbook is Not
The Coaching Playbook is not an evaluative document. Rather, it provides stakeholders with specific evidence-based practices to cultivate teacher dispositions, strengthen instructional practices, foster student engagement, and build equitable classroom culture through coaching. Our use of the term “playbook” indicates that this document is never final; it will continue to adapt and grow just as our students, teachers, and leaders do!
Equity:
The Playbook represents an attempt to create a common language around practice, but more importantly, to collectively define practices that have the potential to create and sustain equitable learning environments. We draw on research on Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (Gloria Landson Billings) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Django Paris) as well as the APS definition of equity.
APS defines equity as individual and collective actions we take to ensure success for every student and staff member regardless of their race, gender identity, ethnicity, ability, nationality, age, religion, and sexual orientation. We understand that our collective student, staff, and community strengths and differences create a healthy culture. We acknowledge that equitable treatment of students and staff requires fluid and responsive differentiated support to highlight everyone's potential. We commit to dismantling inequitable systems and creating systems and structures that reinforce equitable human interactions, resources, strategies, conditions, and outcomes.
Measuring Impact:
Along with supporting cross-role collaboration and common language around practice and equity, the playbook creates an opportunity to measure our impact as instructional coaches. With revised rubrics, aligned to potential resources we can use in our coaching conversations, the playbook allows us to not only conceive but to quantify and qualify our impact on student actions, teacher practices, and classroom interactions.
