How Did We Get Here?

I am not watching Game of Thrones.

I tried my best to get into the show over Winter Break over a year ago, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it all. For a person who can’t remember whether he turned the oven off or what he got his mother last Christmas, Game of Thrones is an overwhelming experience. I can’t tell a Snow from a Stark, a Targaryen from a Lannister. There are too many kingdoms, too many relationships, and too many long-ago conversations in heavily-accented English for me to keep track of.   

If you’re lucky like me, you have others in your life who are thoroughly invested in the final season of the show, so you get to overhear the post-show analysis. “Wait—so she is the one who, back in the first season, killed the guy who—we found out in season three—was really the one who. . . .Since the dragon let him ride it, that means that now he will be the one who. . .and because she is third in line to the throne, after so-and-so and whatshisname are killed. . . .” There’s a lot of discussion of the backstory, figuring out all the moves to explain how they got to this point.  

Whether or not you are keeping up with a fantasy series on HBO, you are in real life nearing the end of another school year, a time when it’s useful to spend a few moments considering how you got to this point. Do your own post-show analysis. Take stock of your classes—what your students are doing or not doing—and reflect a little.

I’m sure there are things that are going well. Perhaps your students have become a tight-knit community of learners. Maybe they are reading and analyzing text at a sophisticated level. Or they are using academic language stems and switching appropriately from a casual to an academic register when having classroom conversations. Whatever they may be, take note of these things you want to replicate, the behaviors or skills you want next year’s students to exhibit, too. Then consider the teacher moves you made to get your students to this point. Examine the backstory. Jot down what you did so you’ll remember to do it again next year. Consider what you might do differently (or earlier) to get your students to the desired point more quickly or to move students even further along.

I assume that there are also things in your classroom that aren’t going as well as you hoped. Your students seem unmotivated. Earbud and cell phone use has spiraled out of control. Fewer students are completing work in a quality manner—if they are completing it at all. Now is the time to take note of those things so you can start planning now about how to solve the problems that are driving you crazy in the final weeks of school. How did you get to this point? What did you do (or not do) that created this problem, and what might you do differently to prevent its recurrence?

Instructional coaches on your campus or at the district level are excellent sounding boards to help you troubleshoot in advance for next year. Or find a willing colleague who would like to be an accountability partner. Putting plans in place now, when you aren’t in ready-set-go mode, lessens the chance that you’ll forget to make those plans next year.

Start preparing now so that next season is only a continuation of what you’d like to see in the future. August is coming.

Pressing the Reset Button

With only minutes remaining before we send thousands of excited students (and hundreds of even more excited teachers) out into the world for Winter Break, no one has much time or interest in reading a work-related blog. So I’m going to keep this short and sweet.

This is your seasonal reminder that the return from break at the beginning of semester two is an outstanding time to press the reset button to usher in a brand new focus for the brand new year. It’s the perfect opportunity to refresh your norms (or to establish them if that didn’t happen in the fall), to launch new procedures to help your classroom run more smoothly, and tighten up the reins if you’ve let things slip out of control. Blame it on your New Year’s resolution: “This year, my resolution is to be more organized, so I’ve decided to….”

It’s also a great time to press reset on your relationships with difficult students, those kids who enter your room and are already one eye roll or snarky comment away from being sent to the principal’s office. Those kids deserve a fresh start. Let bygones be bygones. Give them the opportunity to impress you with their new-year selves rather than having to lug the baggage of the first semester along with them.

Give your students the opportunity to press reset on their school year, too. Remind them that their first-semester missteps don’t have to define them henceforth. Help them set some lofty goals for their lives and speak them into existence. When you know their goals and dreams, you can assist students with the tiny goals that will help them make those dreams a reality down the road. Make it clear that you’re ready to be part of their support system. Offer help on organization, study skills, note-taking, and other academic-readiness skills. Be there for students as they strive to become the best versions of themselves.

Don’t hesitate to contact an instructional coach if you want help pressing the reset button. It’s our job and our pleasure to help you help your students succeed. Whether you’d like assistance with creating a classroom climate to maximize learning, building engaging lessons, planning for instruction, gathering in-the-moment data to shape your teaching, implementing strategies for student talk, improving writing and reading, or, well, pretty much any other instructional goal, we are here to help.  

Thanks for all you do to make your classrooms welcoming spaces for students to challenge themselves and grow. Have a safe, fun-filled, restful, celebratory, invigorating, playful, comforting, relaxing, jolly, and re-energizing holiday. See you in the New Year.

Defining Your Vision for the Start of School

 I’m going to suggest that you do something in the next few days that you don’t have time for but that will make a huge positive difference for your school year.

I realize that the first day is looming around the corner. Your to-do list keeps getting longer. You’ve been professionally developed and have watched your required e-learning updates about school safety, sexual harassment, and ethical behavior. Some of you have decorated your classrooms with this year’s hottest Pinterest-approved styles while others are still awaiting the go-ahead to unpack boxes after the summer’s renovation. There are IEPs to gather and digest, seating charts to create, Google Classrooms to set up, and curriculum documents to study. The campus Xerox machine is working 24/7 (or, perhaps, has stopped working due to exhaustion). Conscientious students who’ve come in early to walk their schedules keep poking their heads into your classroom in hopes of getting a glimpse of their new teacher. You haven’t slept soundly in days because of that recurring nightmare where it’s the first day of classes and you can’t find your own classroom.

I know you’re going to balk at the idea of doing what I’m about to suggest—and I wouldn’t blame you—but I’m going to suggest it anyway:

Take 15 minutes sometime before the first day of school to sit down somewhere free of distractions and list the core beliefs that guide the work you do every day.

  

Think of these core beliefs as tiny statements of purpose, as mini mission statements. These are the how, the why, and the so what for everything you do in your job. Articulating what you believe helps you sift through all the debris to focus your attention on what really matters. When you have a decision to make, these core belief statements can guide you. Most important, writing these beliefs down increases the opportunity that you will actually put them into action.   

There’s no magic number of statements that should be on your core beliefs list. Try to keep your list manageable because I don’t want it to be overwhelming or unwieldy. I started out with a goal of 5 beliefs but ended up adding a few as I continued to think about it. Your list is not an unalterable document; it probably will (and should) evolve over time.

Here’s what I came up with during my 15 minutes of brainstorming:    

    

My Core Beliefs at This Moment (Subject to Revision Because, Well, Things Change)

1. Infuse joy into all you do in the classroom. Learning shouldn’t be a drudgery.     

2. Students should view their teachers as lifelong learners, readers, writers, problem solvers, and curious questioners.

3. Relationships matter more than you think.   

4. Strategic decisions about what goes on during class time can eliminate a lot of ineffective, soul-sucking work outside of class time.    

5. It’s every teacher’s job to teach students to read, write, think, speak, study, organize themselves, and be decent human beings. These transferable life skills matter more than content.  

6. Every student deserves the best education possible. That means high expectations in a safe, supportive environment.

7. Students don’t know how far they can go. It’s up to you to spot their potential, help them see it, too, and give them a nudge to get there.

8. When given the choice between pointing out something someone did wrong and pointing out what they are doing right, give your attention to what you’d like to see more of.   

I’m planning to print and post this list on the bulletin board next to my computer so I can see it often. On the days when I need some refocusing, I will revisit that list as a reminder to keep me on track. Perhaps you’ll want to do the same.

I wish you a purposeful, productive, fulfilling year during which you keep your attention on the things that matter. Let me know how I can help.

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.  

The Value of Looking Back

Recently, my Facebook feed has been littered with posts from people about things that occurred one, two, or more years prior. “On this day one year ago” photos pop up, accompanied by comments like, “Hard to believe this was just one year ago,” “I forgot about this, “ “Wow, we’ve all changed so much,” “I was such an idiot then,” or, “Can you believe we were so concerned about that?” 

People are drawn to moments from their past that contrast to their present selves. “Throwback Thursday” photos often have the added purpose of highlighting the fashion and style atrocities of yesteryear with the implicit idea that we all look so much better now that we have the sense not to wear those parachute pants or style our hair in that once-fashionable mullet. 

The end of an academic year is an ideal time to have a Throwback Thursday of our own, to ask our students to project themselves back nine months into the past to see how they’ve grown and changed as a result of being in our classes. What do you know now that you didn’t know in September? What can you do now that you couldn’t do at the beginning of the school year? If you had it to do over again, what might you do differently?

This type of reflection belongs in the review weeks at the end of the school year. Ask students to create a graffiti wall displaying what they’ve learned. Have them compare a sample of recent work to a similar assignment from the beginning of school. Brainstorm a list of everything they wouldn’t know if they hadn’t taken your class. Let them reflect in writing about how far they’ve come, the obstacles they encountered along the way, and how they dealt with them. Encourage them to make some notes for themselves for next year so they don’t drive into any of the same potholes later.

Goal setting is a key aspect of instruction in our AVID classes as it should be in all our classes. Equally important is the time to look back at where we’ve been, celebrate our progress, and redirect our focus to the future.    

Like the Roman god Janus with two faces—one looking forward and one looking back—we  use our past experiences to steer ourselves successfully toward what is to come.

Thanks for all you do to help your AVID kids (and all your kids) make impressive strides on the road to success. 

Craig