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.  

Breathe!

Based on nearly every interaction I have had with a human being in the last two weeks, I’d conclude that February is a terribly abusive month. Thank goodness it’s over. In schools, especially, stress is thriving. Students are getting antsy and are feeling the academic and personal pressures that always come with the spring semester when they’re ready for everything to be over but can’t quite see the still-distant end. The honeymoon period wore off months ago, and now students and staff are wondering if divorce is an option. Teachers seem buried in mounds of grading and paperwork. Open house, field trips, TELPAS samples, make-up work from illness outbreaks, required professional development, and oppressive pollen counts have turned normally cheerful and upbeat teachers into grumpy zombies. At an Ed Camp event last week in our district, the most highly attended session--with standing-room-only crowds of teachers spilling out into the hallway outside the packed room--was the one on Stress and Teacher Self Care.  Staff, students, paraprofessionals, and administrators all seem to be competing against one another in a giant game of Wheel of Unfortunate. Everyone is overwhelmed.

It’s time for us all to take a moment to breathe. Stop what you’re doing. Forget about the e-mails, the voicemails, the stack of papers to grade, the lesson plans, and the disciplinary referrals. Don’t worry about your to-do list. It’ll get done. Just breathe. Breathe deeply. Close your eyes if you’d like (though that’s going to make reading the rest of this a bit of a challenge). Try doing nothing but concentrating on your breath for a full minute. When you’ve mastered that, try two. Think of it as a service project; you’re creating carbon dioxide for the plants and flowers that are trying get us out of this wintery, brown funk. Relax your jaw. Let the tension out of your forehead. Simply breathe.

There. Feel any better yet? Sometimes, taking that time to slow down and take care of ourselves by filling our needy cells with restorative oxygen makes tensions seem less tense.

The O in AVID’s WICOR acronym stands for organization. We teach our students to organize many things: their binders, their time, their study routines, their writing. Isn’t it equally important for us to teach them to organize the clutter that is swirling around in their brains and causing stress and tension? Organizing one’s inner life may even be more important than organizing one’s exterior self because once we are facing the world calmly, we can put things into perspective much more clearly and focus on what needs to be accomplished.

Consider what you can do to help students calm the turmoil in their lives. For one thing, you can begin by acknowledging and normalizing the stress they are feeling. So often we feel that we are alone in our feelings and that everyone else must be navigating life much more skillfully than we are. Maybe my opening paragraph above made you feel better knowing that the stress you are feeling right now isn’t atypical. Talking about stress and anxiety and allowing your students to talk about them lets students know they aren’t alone.

We shouldn’t stop, though, with merely acknowledging the existence of stress. The next step is to teach some ways to cope. One of the easiest, as you may have realized, is breathing. On days of particularly stressful tests and exams, I often asked my students to take a moment at the start of class to breathe together, to slow down, to clear their minds of stress, and to tell themselves that they could succeed. I shared my confidence in them and asked them to believe in themselves. The change in the stress level in the room was palpable. Students went into the test with a newfound tranquility and renewed focus. I don’t have empirical data to prove that their test scores improved, but I think my students would tell you that the extra oxygen helped them think a little more clearly.

I think it’s so important that we, in our highly influential roles as educators, provide our students with every tool for success in life. The ability to recognize their emotional stressors and to try to combat them is a skill that will help them forevermore. We need to remember, though, that it’s tough for us to teach what we don’t practice ourselves.

It’s really hard to teach self-care, however, if we don’t practice it. Before we can extol the virtues of stress management, physical activity, getting plenty of sleep, downtime, adequate nutrition, and positive peer relationships, we need to experience those ourselves.

With Spring Break looming just around the corner, I invite you to take some time to recharge yourself. Leave your work stresses behind for a week and practice self-care. Breathe a lot. And even when the break has ended and it’s time to return to school, continue to take care of yourself as needed so you can be the best you can be for your students. They need you more than they will ever admit.

And don’t forget to breathe.