Instructional Coach Archives

Flipped Classroom Mini-PLC

This year I’m not in a classroom as much as I was last year. I’m not teaching a core content class, I’m only doing small group intervention. That means that I have more time to coach, but I still miss the classroom. A lot. So, when I went to a workshop about using flipped classroom methodologies along with mastery-based learning, I was really excited. But I was also really disappointed. Where could I possibly use this? Certainly not as a coach.

But then! A math teacher I work with, Robin, came to me with a problem: Her students had a wide range of abilities, and she had exhausted her toolkit of differentiation techniques and activities. We talked for a while about what she wanted her students to achieve, what she had tried already, and why she thought it wasn’t working. It came down to students being in very different places in terms of their content mastery. No matter what type of instruction Robin tried, someone always felt frustrated. Kids who got things quickly didn’t feel sufficiently challenged. The kids who struggled were overwhelmed by homework and needed more coaching and support to do things correctly. Jumping in and trying to put together a flipped classroom and looking at mastery learning seemed like a great idea.

Reading About the Flipped Classroom: Starting a Mini-PLC

Our first step was to do some research together. I had dabbled in using flipped classroom techniques, but had never done it fully. She had never done it before either. After some quality time with Google and looking through the resources that I had from the workshop, we settled on the book Flipped Learning for Math Instruction by Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams (ISTE, 2015). We each ordered a copy and agreed to read it over winter break.

If you are a math teacher and thinking about using the flipped classroom model, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is clear and concise, and gives plenty of real examples from classrooms. The book is organized in a helpful manner, taking a teacher through a logic progression of beginning to implement the flipped classroom model and all the way through extending the model to using it as a part of a mastery learning environment.

Taking The Next Steps for a Flipped Classroom

As Robin and I mapped out how she would implement the flipped classroom for math, I started thinking about how I could apply it to my own teaching. I’m still not sure if I can make it work for intervention, but I can try it out in my graduate class. So we’re trying it out together and supporting each other along the way. I’m excited to work together with Robin, even though we’re implementing the flipped classroom model in vastly different settings!

New Beginnings

I finished my first week of school. Every year brings a number of new beginnings, but this one is coming with a lot of changes. And I’m excited about all of them.

New Room

New beginnings: Changes in Room 470 — Same room number, but wait until you see the inside…

It looks like the same door as last year (with an added name. We’ll get to my new teammates later), but when you open it up and look inside (I got a picture before the blinds and clock went up, but you get the idea):

Looks a little bit different than last year, right? The school knocked down a wall between my room and an office next door and we ordered all new furniture. We put a lot of thought into colors, the types of chairs (they’re really hard to tip back on, but when you lean back on the chair, the back leans a little bit and the seat slides forward), the table, our desks. It’s an amazing space. As one of my little M1s (5th graders) said: “Your room is so small, but it has everything!” What I’m most excited about though, is the Idea Paint. The tables and the wall that you can’t see in this picture are all painted with Idea Paint, so most of the surfaces in our room are whiteboards! Students can work out math problems on the table or jot down notes and ideas. It’s also a much brighter and friendlier space than last year.

New Colleagues

I’ve mentioned my colleague Pooja Patel before. She and I have presented together before and teach sections of the same course at Teachers College and now we’re collaborating as Middle School Learning Specialists. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am. It’s really exhilarating to work with a colleague who both challenges me and helps to build my ideas. Collaborating with someone in a new way comes with challenges, but I can’t wait to see what the year has in store for us.

New Roles

There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening this year in the evolution of my job. The two biggest are the expansion and formalization of instructional coaching as part of my job duties and the addition of a co-taught English class to my teaching duties. Last year, not much was done in the way of introducing the coaching role that the learning specialists were taking on. The rest of the faculty didn’t know what we were doing and didn’t really understand what coaching was. This year, our roles are being introduced right from the beginning. And we’ve already started working on building relationships with teachers and introducing our new roles (thanks to a brilliant suggestions from Pooja and some amazing baking by my friend Amy’s bakery).

The treats and the welcome notes that accompanied them seemed to be a big hit.

I’m also excited to be co-teaching an English class with my colleague Drew Murphy. It’s my first time co-teaching for an entire year. I’ve done units of study or helped introduce specific literacy skills, but I’ve never been a full-fledged co-teacher. I spent a lot of time this summer refreshing things that I had learned in my Special Ed coursework, reading books, and thinking about how things will work.

I’m also teaching a new teacher ed course this year. This time it’s a course about teaching reading to adolescents with LD. I’ve done two classes so far, and I’m enjoying it so far.

How was your first week back? What new beginnings are you excited about this year?

Checking-in in the New Year

Skyview Atlanta — The second-best picture I took in Atlanta. Again, there’s a metaphor here. I’m sure of it.

At the beginning of the school year I set goals for myself as a teacher. Right now I’m asking my students to check in on their progress toward their goals in their digital portfolios and the teachers I coach to reevaluate the goals they set at the beginning of the year, so I’m checking in on my progress as well. I also have finally set a coaching goal for myself after attending Pete Hall’s Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success workshop through ASCD.

Improve my behavior management for my “challenging” class

This is hard to admit, but I haven’t done a great job following through with this one. I’ve done many of the things that I said I was going to do, but in the more short term. The problem is, I know exactly (or at least partially) why things I’m trying aren’t working. I’ve been so focused on finding strategies to manage behavior and making those strategies work, that I’m not focused enough on planning engaging lessons to meet my students’ needs. I’m not walking into class with no plan, but I’ve been so focused on anticipating behaviors and what strategies I would use to manage these behaviors, that the content and concepts in the lessons I’ve been planning have been, well, less than stellar. So when my strategies work, the activities I have planned aren’t enough to hold the students’ attention and keep them on that good track. It hurts to admit that I dropped the ball here, but it happens and I can fix it. For the remainder of the year I want to keep implementing the strategies that are working, but refocus my efforts on lesson planning so that my students can be successful.

Better integrate the technology I have available to me into my lessons, including finding more ways to leverage “regular” technology as assistive technology for my students.

Here I’ve done much better. I’ve implemented digital portfolios for my students and I’ve been slowly refining them so they become spring-boards for student self-reflection and learning. Yesterday a student exclaimed as he had realized that our work with SRSD and Close Reading had been just as much about improving his ability to manage and regulate his attention as they had been about his reading and writing skills after going through a variety of digital and paper artifacts showing his work. I also am now able to very easily share student work with a parent who has moved back to Denmark ahead of the rest of the family.

I’ve also curated a number of resources for students on my Schoology pages for my learning support classes, including videos and interactive games (usually created by others), as well as graphic organizers (usually created by me). What’s even better is that some students are seeking out and using these resources. I think my next step here is to add more content that I’ve created (or that my students have created) to these resource pages, using podcasting, screen capture, and other methods.

Finally, the coaching goal: Go into classrooms regularly (1-2 times per week) for either very quick (30-45 seconds) or brief (5-15 minute) visits and follow up on these visits with teachers.

Or actually doing what Pete Hall calls “Rounds” and “Walk Throughs”. This goal sounds simple, but it involves a lot: coordinating schedules, figuring out “look-fors”, etc. But the biggest reason I haven’t done this is that I haven’t felt comfortable. I wasn’t given a clear description of what I would be doing as a coach at the beginning of the year, nor was it explained to teachers, so I spent most of the first semester in meetings with teachers, talking and building relationships. Now that I feel like I have a job description (even if it’s self-created with the help of a workshop and a book) and have built up fairly good relationships with many teachers, it will, I hope, be easier. The short workshop I led on Tuesday afternoon about checking in and reevaluating goals from the beginning of the year will also provide context for my visits.

How are the goals you set for your own teaching at the beginning of the year going?

Instructional Coach Training: #BTCFS

Atlanta Metro Station — One of the best photos I took in Atlanta. Not sure what it has to do with my post. There’s a metaphor there somewhere. I’m sure of it. CC-BY-NC

At the beginning of the school year I wrote a post about my students’ goal setting as well as my own. When I wrote that post, I only talked about my goals for myself as a teacher, but didn’t discuss the goals I set for myself as an instructional coach. That’s really because at the beginning of the year I wasn’t sure what the standard was for instructional coaches. Where was I going? I really wasn’t sure. I didn’t have a job description to help focus me, and while I have been a literacy coach before, it was in a completely different school environment where that was my only role. In my initial meeting this year with my principal, she suggested that I look around for professional development opportunities about becoming a better instructional coach. Excited to learn more, I immediately started researching and came up with the Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success workshop with Pete Hall through ASCD. I knew that the title sounded extremely familiar, and that’s because I picked up the book at ASCD last year after my principal had first suggested that being an instructional coach might become part of my job.

Reading the book was eye opening, but the workshop with Pete was 1000 times better than reading the book. If you ever get the chance to see him present, I highly recommend it. He’s passionate, energetic, and friendly (he also has good advice about running routes in Atlanta and possibly in the other cities where he presents. Warning though: he did try to convince me to run the stairs in the Georgia Tech stadium. Not happening). I’m still processing everything that I learned over the two days, but I think I have a “Top 5” list of things I learned, all of which led me to the coaching goal I set for myself at the end of the workshop. For things that others learned , check out #BTCFS on Twitter.

5. Find the “Green Stars”

You know the teacher down the hall? The one who seems to have taught the same lesson for the last 20 years? Or the one who seems to have no control of her class? Even when we’re trying to be supportive, sometimes working with these teachers can be frustrating. But there’s good there. And as coaches and administrators we need to see that good and remind ourselves of it. Then we need to use that good–that green star–to spark change and growth. This helps us to have a growth mindset with our teachers just like we have with our students.

4. Self-reflection is the key to teacher growth

If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time you know I’m a fan of self-reflection. For me, for my students, for educators in general. And I think on some level I understood the idea that in order to develop as educators we need to reflect on our teaching. I was also on board with the idea that teachers need to be taught how to self-reflect. What was new was the idea that we can put the ability of teachers to self-reflect on a continuum, and that where they are in terms of their ability to self-reflect determines how we interact with them and the role we take on as coaches, mentors, and administrators. For example, I would take on a totally different role with a teacher who is able to easily reflect on their instructional practice to improve it (a teacher in the Refinement Stage) than I would a teacher who isn’t really able to see the connection between what they’re doing and student outcomes (a teacher in the Unaware Stage). I’m also wondering how I can use the Continuum of Self-Reflection with my grad students and with their practicum supervisors to help support them in their development toward becoming more self-reflective educators.

3. Building teachers’ capacity is the key to student growth and success

Teachers matter. They matter a lot. There’s tons of research on this. Too often, however, we try to get teachers to improve their practice by using carrots and sticks, rather than actually guiding and supporting them in improving their practice. In order to ensure student success we really need to support our teachers in their professional learning and growth based on where they are on that Continuum of Self-Reflection. And to do that…

2. Instructional coaches and administrators need to work together to support teacher growth

Instructional Coach & Admin work together to support a teacher — A visual representation of how the administrator and the coach work together to support a teacher in the Refinement Stage. CC-BY-NC

Administrators and coaches really need to be partners in helping to teachers to improve their faculty’s level of self-reflection and their skill as educators. If administrators and coaches are on the same page with how they work with teachers and are clear about their individual roles and transparent with the staff about those roles, they can be really effective in fostering professional growth in an environment that is supportive rather than punitive. Again, I’m wondering if I can stretch this model to apply to working with my grad students. Maybe with me as the instructor in the role of the administrator with my practicum supervisors in the role of coach.

1. And not but

Of everything I’ve learned, this may be the smallest thing that makes the biggest deal. While there were a number of “ah-ha” moments during the two day workshop, this one was the biggest. And it’s such a tiny change to make when I interact with teachers (and with students and parents). As educators, we like to use the “start with a compliment” format. Then comes the “but”. However, the word “but” can make people defensive and angry. “But” can make the compliment feel like lip service. “And”, though. “And” says, “You really are doing these things right. Here’s how you can grow.”

I’m really excited to start implementing this framework, and I hope I can get others on board as well. Next week I’ll share my goal for myself as a coach and how I plan to achieve it.

What are your strategies for coaching teachers? How do you foster self-reflection with faculty?