INSTRUCTIONAL COACHING
My PHILOSOPHY OF COACHING
As educators, we know that what a person believes influences his or her success. Renowned educators Jim Knight and John Hattie have proven what we know to be true. In his newest work, 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning, Hattie states that,
“Success is based not only on competencies but more on mindframes, less on what we do and more on how we think about what we do.”
Jim Knight applies this idea in his article What Good Coaches Do, stating that,
"...how we think about coaching significantly enhances or interferes with our success as a coach."
Though effective coaches utilize evidence-proven coaching strategies, I have found the words of Hattie and Knight to be true. It is our beliefs, our thoughts about coaching, that bring our success.
I believe:
TEACHERS ROCK. The most effective coaches do not enter classrooms to "fix bad teachers," but to walk along beside teachers to help them become even "more awesome." The work of coaches revolves around increasing the collective efficacy of teachers; helping teachers see that what they do has an incredible impact on learners.
EVERYONE BENEFITS FROM COACHING. Instructional coaching is for the beginning educator and master educator alike. Just as professional athletes and expert physicians often work with personal coaches to improve their practice, educators are professionals who can increase their effectiveness with the help of a coach. Coaches, like teachers and administrators, deserve a coach of their own.
WE TEND TO TEACH THE WAY WE ARE TAUGHT. If we want teachers to empower students as independent learners, our work with teachers should empower them as well.
"WHEN TEACHERS AND COACHES INTERACT AS PARTNERS, GOOD THINGS HAPPEN." Jim Knight's partnership principles of equality, choice, voice, reflection, dialogue, praxis, and reciprocity are the foundation of coaching conversations that lead to increased teacher effectiveness and student success.
ONLINE INSTRUCTIONAL COACHING
Beginning in the fall of 2019, I began working as a BetterLesson contract coach, working with 50 teachers and leaders to complete over 420 coaching sessions.
EXAMPLE OF COACHING GROWTH
TEACHER IDENTIFIED AREA OF GROWTH: I will implement unit and lesson structures that engage students as active participants in their own learning.
STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING
3rd-6th grade artists used "I can" skills to create works of art that were designed by the artist (not teacher directed). QR codes were attached to anchor posters to support students throughout the process and allow for students to work at their own pace with as much or as little support as needed. This also allowed the teacher to be free to circulate the studio and build relationships with all students.
T.A.G. PROTOCOL FOR STUDENT FEEDBACK
As a result of our work together, this teacher created an anchor chart and slide deck to introduce her students to the Tell, Ask, Give (T.A.G.) process. To build student capacity to give feedback, she had them use the T.A.G. process to give her feedback on her own works.
The students gave and received feedback on their
radial pieces.
Photo of a student's corrected work. She had created symmetrical work instead of radial balance piece. Through the T.A.G. process, her peers caught her mistake and she decided to start again on the back of her paper to fix her mistake.
COACHING FEEDBACK
"Tracie is supportive, energetic, and very respectful! She is a wonderful coach!"
"My coaching sessions have been very beneficial to me. My coach has been a resource provider and assisted me with materials, tools and information to support classroom instruction. She has guided me with successful scheduling and communication skills. The support I have received from her has been phenomenal as I adjust to my new position as a coach"
FUTURE READY COACHING
From 2015 - 2019, I lead the Digital Learning team at ESC Region 11 to move from a workshop-based professional learning program to a instructional coaching based system that we called Future Ready Coaching. I began our Future Ready coaching in one small rural district grew it to impact teachers and students in 25 coaching cohorts.
COACHING CYCLE
The Future Ready Coaching Model is a personalized approach based loosely on Jim Knight's Impact Cycle from his book The Impact Cycle with influences from Catlin Tucker's Power Up Blended Learning, Results Coaching and other coaching models. Like master classroom teachers, coaches must constantly be in the praxis mode, growing to improve our practice.
Coaches partner with teachers to support them in
analyzing their reality,
setting goals,
identifying strategies to reach goals
implementing
making adaptations
until the teachers' goals are met.
Teachers have autonomy in all aspects of the coaching cycle, from setting goals to determining how the coaching cycle proceeds.
DAILY REFLECTION AND DIALOGUE
The foundation of coaching culture the at ESC 11 was most clearly evident in our Voxer chats.
Our coaches worked in districts spread throughout the region, with two or three coaches working with teachers at each district. We used the Voxer walkie-talkie app for daily reflection. All of the coaches and I participated in the "Twenty for the Team" Chat. The idea was that we would share a 20 to 90 second highlight of our day. The messages were filled with the Wins from the classrooms, new strategies that we had tried, and questions for the group. The team chat enabled coaches in remote locations to celebrate and learn with one another.
Additionally, coaches at each location shared a chat specific to that location. Because we started the year with a cohort kickoff event, the coaches at each location usually know each other's teachers and are familiar with the culture of the district. Therefore, the discussions on the location chats related more directly to individual teachers, administrators and general campus progress. Much of the "coaching of coaches" happened in our location chats. It was in the chats that I helped the coaches think through strategies and models of coaching that might work with their teachers.
COLLABORATION AND TEAM BUILDING
Coaches met together with the Coaching Coordinator once a month for a coaches' work day. Our work day agendas included:
Celebrating Wins from the month.
Digging in to monthly metrics/evidence of educator growth.
Setting new team goals related to metrics/evidence
Learning from one team member who shares something he/she has learned.
Role playing a specific coaching situation.
Short learning activities on various topics.
Team building activities.
Each coach and the Coaching Coordinator had a more focused coaching conversations once a month. These conversations focused on communication, relationship building, and on the coach's progress toward a self-identified goal. Depending on the coach's goal, he/she brought a video of coaching session with a teacher or data/evidence of student/teacher learning. The goal of the Coaching Coordinator was to help the coaching reflect and move forward.
Measuring the Impact of Coaching
One of our goals for the past two years has been to improve our evidence of impact. In our early years of coaching, each coach was keeping coaching logs and records with his/her own system. All were using Google documents, but some used sheets and some used docs, etc. Another issue was that schools set their own focus, so the coaches were not keeping records on the same attributes.
For the 2017-2018 school year, we established surveys with common questions to gather common data. At the beginning of the year, before coaching began, our questions ask teachers/administrators to rate their confidence with student-centered strategies. Middle of the year questions ask participants to rate how they are implementing the strategies. The end of the year survey asked participants to rate how the strategies impacted student performance.
Over the summer of 2018, we identified future ready best practices that cross over all of our districts. This year, the coaches are working with their teachers to identify Wins in each of the identified areas.
We are now able to use our teacher surveys, administrator surveys, and Win records together to determine impact of our coaching. (We are also able to see district test results, but do not have access to it by teacher. Since we do not coach all of the teachers on a campus, we are not able to tie our work directly to scores. Next year, we will add a student data element to our metrics.
Our results are reported three times during the year to district contacts and ESC Region 11 leaders. At the end of the year, we prepare summary Websites for each of our districts.
2018 Win Records from First Grading Period
2018-2019 District Portfolios
