Make Coaching Part of Your Professional Development Plan

During these final days of school, many of you are having end-of-year conferences with your evaluating administrator and are receiving accolades and areas of growth based on their observations, your progress toward goals, and your professional learning for the year. Evaluations like these are no one’s favorite thing, neither for the evaluated or the evaluator, but the best meetings of this type conclude with both parties having an idea of what strengths have been reinforced and of what the next step is in the educator’s growth as a professional. If we are educators with growth mindsets, we don’t see appraisals as reflections of our worth as human beings but instead as opportunities to continue to hone our craft in what is an extremely challenging profession—one that no one ever really masters because there’s always room for improvement.

The hardest thing about any feedback—and something we need to be mindful of as we provide comments on our students’ learning—is that we tend to fixate on the negative. Thirty accolades can be undone by one “recommendation for growth.” That’s human nature. Do your best to conquer the monster of your negative inner voice and instead try to be objective. Force yourself to see that less-than-stellar mark as a guide to help you direct your improvement efforts next year. Turn those marks of “developing” and “improvement needed” into invitations to become “accomplished or distinguished.”

An instructional coach can be a valuable ally in your improvement. We don’t work for your principal; we work for you. And, unlike most every other kind of professional development, we bring the learning into your classroom and personalize it to your individual needs.

Here’s how:

1.  You identify an area of growth and contact a coach to help you. Or you contact a coach first, meet to talk about your situation and ideas, and let the coach help you determine an area of growth.

2.  Set a measurable goal along with the coach, determine what you need to learn to help you achieve that goal, and learn all you can with the guidance of the coach. Instructional coaches have experience with research-supported best practices and can provide you with resources to facilitate your learning. Because we know you’re busy, we can distill some of the learning and come to your campus to share it with you at a time that fits into your schedule.

3.  At some point, you could choose for the coach to observe your class to collect data. Even better, the coach could video your lesson so you can watch yourself and/or your students to get a clear idea of what is going on. Collecting data before and after the learning is a fantastic opportunity for you to document your progress toward your goal.

4. Part of the learning could involve observing someone else teach, watching the coach model part of a lesson, co-teaching with the coach, or rehearsing a lesson with the coach.

5.  Implement your new learning and collect data to see how it worked.

6.  High-fives all around if you met your goal. You can now continue working on another aspect of the same goal, begin a new goal cycle, or decide you’re going to just revel in your success. If you didn’t meet your goal, that’s okay, too. Your coach can help you implement Plan B (or C or D or E) until you see results.

That’s instructional coaching in its purest form, but it doesn’t always look like that. Sometimes, coaches help teams or individuals plan lessons, work on ways to implement differentiation strategies, set up classroom management routines, and turn other professional learning into action.

You’re free to share with your administrator that you’re working with a coach, or you can choose to keep it quiet. The coaching relationship is a partnership. What happens in a coaching relationship stays in that coaching relationship. Your boss will only know what you choose to share.

Instructional coaches can help with any of the four domains on T-TESS:  planning, instruction, learning environment, and professional practices.

Here are a few areas from the T-TESS where a coach would be happy to assist you:

• Unpacking lessons from the curriculum and tailoring them to the needs of your students and your teaching style
• Communicating daily learning goals clearly to your students
• Integrating technology in a meaningful way to enhance student mastery of goals
• Using formative assessments to get a clear picture of student learning and to communicate that to students and parents
• Collecting data to measure student progress and adjusting instruction in response
• Framing lessons to engage and connect with students
• Providing opportunities for students to individualize their learning
• Promote authentic questioning and student inquiry
• Increase student ownership in their learning
• Plan for collaboration that maximizes student participation and accountability
• Promote high-level student achievement through goal setting, metacognition, and self-monitoring.
• Increasing your own content expertise in your subject area
• Sequencing instruction appropriately
• Using effective questioning techniques so that all students can access learning at an appropriately sophisticated level
• Adapting lessons to meet the needs of all students by using appropriate differentiation strategies
• Gathering input from students to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction and adjust if needed
• Creating a safe, efficient, welcoming classroom environment that promotes student leadership and high-level learning
• Establishing, communicating, and maintaining clear expectations for student behavior
• Developing rapport with and among students
• Reflecting on your practice to implement changes that result in improvement in student performance

Consider including a coach in your professional development plans for next year, and be prepared for powerful, personalized professional learning that can transform your classroom to increase student success.

With the end of school only days away, next year is probably the last thing on your mind, but in case you are interested, feel free to reach out to a coach now, especially if you’d like to meet during that back-to-school week in August. We can help you start the semester so that the year goes smoothly as you implement your powerful student-centered learning goal. We look forward to partnering with you.  

If I'd Had a Coach

I wear many hats in my job as an instructional specialist. One of them is the hat of the instructional coach. Despite my best efforts to communicate what I do in this role, I find that the job of an instructional coach is frequently misunderstood. There’s a widespread misconception that instructional coaches only work with teachers who are struggling or are doing an unsatisfactory job (AKA “bad” teachers).. Another “alternative fact” is that I report my interactions to others—that I’m some sort of spy for the curriculum department or the building principal. The truth is that most of the time, the work I do is with some of the strongest and most growth-minded teachers in the district. Furthermore, the work I do with any teacher is between me and that teacher; I focus on helping teachers improve in areas where they want to improve, not on getting teachers in trouble.  

When I had a classroom of my own, I didn’t have access to an instructional coach. Most of my professional improvement occurred as a result work I did on my own. Now that I know about instructional coaching and its benefits, however, I can think of so many ways my life as a teacher would have improved if I’d had a coach.

Every teacher knows what it’s like to have “that one class” where all the time-tested disciplinary techniques fail to produce results—the class that seems to last forever, tries your every last bit of patience, and populates your nightmares. If I’d had an instructional coach, I could have reached out for help with my classroom management woes. The coach could have observed my class, documented student behaviors and my attempts to refocus them, and helped me come up with a plan to minimize disruptions so that learning could occur. The coach would have been able to help me pinpoint the root of the problem and what I could do to fix things. The coach could schedule a follow-up visit to take more data to see whether the problem was solved and offer more assistance, if needed.

I’m one of those educators who gets unusually excited about the things I learn at professional development. For instance, after I attended a district-sponsored training about encouraging self-selected reading in English classes, I rushed back to school enthusiastic about implementing reading workshop in my classroom. For several weeks, I bounced ideas off of coworkers, friends, family members, and unsuspecting strangers in the checkout line at Kroger. If I’d had an instructional coach, I could have called on my coach to help me identify how to bring my ideas to life successfully in my classroom. We could have met to brainstorm and troubleshoot, and the coach could have offered useful professional resources to help me realize my vision. Once my reader’s workshop was up and running, the coach would returned to see how things were going and to help me tweak the procedures to continually improve my results.  

In a district with a common curriculum, I sometimes found that there were lessons or units that made better sense to me than others. Despite my best efforts to study the curriculum online, at times I worried I was missing something that would be helpful to me in delivering the highest quality instruction to my students. An instructional coach could have met with me to talk about how to implement the district curriculum with my students. After all, our curriculum provides valuable direction for a teacher but isn’t intended to be a rigid, inflexible script. In our meetings, my coach could have helped me customize the lessons for my teaching style and the unique needs of my students without sacrificing the integrity of the unit design. If I were struggling with a particularly tricky lesson or concept, the coach might offer to model the lesson with my students or co-teach the lesson with me.

Research shows that teachers don’t always have a clear picture of what’s really going on in their classes. I always thought I was doing a pretty good job of putting the workload on the students so that they were doing more talking than I was. I suspect, though, that I did a lot more of the talking—and thinking— than I was aware of. If I’d had a coach, I could have asked the coach to video record one of my classes to help me see what was really going on. After watching my video (as soon as I recovered from the natural awkwardness of seeing and hearing myself), I would have conferenced with the coach to see if I was satisfied with the level of student talk in my classroom and, if not, make a plan to improve it. It’s likely that watching the video would have made me aware of other pressing issues I wanted to work on, and the coach would’ve be happy to help me by offering suggestions, guidance, training, encouragement, and support to reach my self-identified goals.

Our district’s teaming approach presents its own set of challenges. One of them is actually sitting down to plan with a team. WIth busy schedules, time constraints, and ever-increasing demands on teachers, efficient planning is both a challenge and a necessity. In my own past experience, planning sometimes involved thoughtful contemplation of learning goals and the alignment of instruction and assessment, but more often it entailed one of the team members handing everyone else a calendar and doling out responsibilities for getting copies made, tests numbered, and materials distributed. If my team had met with an instructional coach, the coach could have helped us refine our planning practices so that our time spent as a team was productive and instructionally useful. The coach could have worked with us to learn how to unpack curriculum documents, thoughtfully align lessons, deliver instruction with intentionality, and develop a unified vision for our team. Effective planning benefits teachers and results in better learning for all students. I can think of a few planning meetings in my past that would have been much more productive if we had asked an instructional coach to join us.

I’m a little sad that I didn’t have access to an instructional coach to help me be a better teacher when I was in the classroom. Now that I have the opportunity to help other teachers, I hope I can do something to alleviate frustrations and feelings of helplessness and assist teachers in continuing to improve the learning experience for their students. I dwell in the world of teacher success and stand firmly rooted in my belief that teacher success leads to student achievement. If you’ve read this and anything sounds appealing to you, I encourage you to contact a coach or instructional specialist to work with you.  I don’t want you to look back in regret someday that you didn’t.  

A Discouraging Word

            Home, home on the range

            Where the deer and the antelope play,

            Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

            And the skies are not cloudy all day.

The range must have been a pretty happy place. Not only did the deer and antelope want to be there, but they also wanted to play. It felt like home.

 

Can the same be said about our classrooms?

It is so easy to notice the negative. I’m the worst.

I can read a wonderfully written essay and become fixated on one fairly insignificant comma error. I will sit through an exciting and engaging concert and come away thinking, “If only they hadn’t chosen that song as their encore. . . .” The one item out of place on an otherwise tidy kitchen counter makes me feel like the entire house is a mess. And that kid in the third row who is staring off into space while all the other students are reading makes me a little bit insane.

For most teachers, it’s so much easier to notice the students who are not meeting expectations than it is to notice the ones who are.

When we notice the negative, we often feel compelled to correct it. Once we start, it’s hard to stop. Our class becomes a dysfunctional family, and we are the nagging parent:

“I told you yesterday to bring your textbook. Why did none of you remember?”

“You don’t have a pen? What did you think we were going to do today, just sit here and do nothing?”

“What part of ‘Be quiet!’ was confusing?”

“You didn’t bring your homework again? You need to learn to meet deadlines and follow through. The real world has deadlines.”

“If you don’t start working and paying attention, you’re going to find yourself in summer school or taking this class again next year. And let me assure you, we don’t change it up and make it more interesting for those who come back a second time.”

“Stop. Talking.”

“You know where notebooks are stored. You’re not new. Go get yours. You’re holding up the entire class.”

“I’m waiting….”

“Susan, turn around and pay attention. Joel, we are on page 147. Get out your books, everyone. I don’t want to have to tell you again. Lisa, stop talking! Page 147, Jennifer! Michael, this is not gym class. Sit down!”

The discouraging words fly with such velocity and frequency that no deer, antelope, or human would want to spend time in this maelstrom of negativity.

It’s so easy to slip into the routine of letting the toxic negativity spew. This kind of negativity, unfortunately, permeates the lives of many of our students. They hear it at home; they hear it from peers; and then they get to hear it at school. Some of them have learned to tune it out. Others let it beat them into submission. No one thrives in its presence.

Some researchers believe that the human brain responds to negativity and criticism by shutting down. The “fight-or-flight” impulses of the amygdala take over, and the brain enters into a self-preservation mode during which no learning occurs. We can all think of times where criticism or negativity has affected us to such an extent that we could focus on little else. Teachers’ well-intentioned efforts to correct negative behaviors may be blocking student learning.  

Pay attention to the negative and positive comments you make in class. Perhaps you can record a class and count the interactions, noting the ratio of negative to positive interactions. Or ask a colleague or instructional coach to visit your class and tally them for you. If you’re like many teachers, the negative will outweigh the positive in a big way.

Once you notice that you’ve fallen into the rut of pointing out the bad, you can take steps to change your own negative behaviors. It’s time to become a celebrator of the good.

In his book High-Impact Instruction, Jim Knight devotes an entire chapter to becoming a “witness to the good.” He writes,

We are a witness to the good when we are attentive and intentional about noticing everything our students do--not just the misbehavior. We are being a witness to the good when we are especially attentive to the times when students are making the best of learning opportunities. We are being a witness to the good whenever we recognize and encourage students for acting in ways that are consistent with expectations. (316)

Becoming a witness to the good helps build connection with your students. Students who feel this bond of attachment, loyalty, and comfort will be more willing to do what you ask them to do in your classroom.

Praise should significantly outweigh criticism. Some experts recommend a six-to-one praise-to-correction ratio; some even advocate for more positive comments than that.

The type of praise matters, too. Praise can actually be harmful or counter-productive if students perceive that it’s insincere or hollow. One of the best ways to give productive praise is to make your comments descriptive rather than attributive. Praise students’ work, efforts, and behaviors rather than their traits and characteristics. Instead of saying, “You are such a kind person,” consider telling a student, “People seem to respond favorably to you,” or, “The words you use to speak to your classmates are very respectful.”  Telling a student that she is smart is less helpful than telling her that her thinking shows depth, that her analysis is specific and thoughtful, or that she understands the material and is able to think about it in a complex way. Thanking a student for having his materials on his desk will have more impact than giving negative attention to his neighbor for not being prepared.

Using praise effectively--becoming a witness to the good--can reduce classroom management issues while simultaneously transforming your classroom into a happy oasis of learning for the students...and any stray deer or antelope that might wander in. 

Thank you for keeping it positive and squelching the discouraging words.