How are you Coaching?

Photo by Nirzar Pangarkar on Unsplash

This week our coaches explored the question: What drives you as a Coach?  What do you believe is your role as coaches?  What affects a teacher-coach relationship the most?  Trust? Credibility? Acceptance?

Using the article, “Are you Coaching HEAVY or LIGHT?” by Joellen Killion, our coaches had the opportunity to take a stand for what they believe their roles truly are.  After reading and discussing the article, some of us had our beliefs challenged.  What resulted was a thoughtful discussion around our identity as a coach. 

Photo by Debra Barry

Using the dots strategy, coaches took turns commenting on the article and their beliefs on heavy or light coaching.  Each coach was given a handful of dots and as they speak they put a dot on an index card.  The coach then needs to listen to other responses and cannot speak again until others have put a dot on the card.  This strategy allows each person a voice and helps all participants focus on listening set-asides.  Instead of formulating your next response, you are focusing on the speaker and what he or she is connecting with in this article.

 Sometimes what we think we value, and believe is true to the core, and other times the swords we pick to fall on are the wrong swords.  I’ve often felt this way as a parent.  Does my child need to eat all the food on his plate, or is it a victory, if I get him to try one bite of everything.  I think it depends on the child, the parent, and your values, beliefs, and the situation.  Coaching is the same.  How we coach is tied to who we are and what we believe.  Sometimes those beliefs can interfere with what we hope to accomplish. As a parent I have learned to pick my battles, and swords carefully.  In coaching, I’m working on it.  

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

We have to master the art of coaching and find the delicate balance of coaching heavy, versus coaching light.  By utilizing our cognitive coaching skills and asking deep, mediative questions, teachers will reflect on their current teaching practice and explore new learning.  A coaches’ primary responsibility is student learning.  How they impact that learning is through coaching and adult learning.  The challenge is to not lose sight of the students in this equation. 

"Coaching heavy holds all adults responsible for student success and engages them as members of collaborative learning teams to learn, plan, reflect, analyze, and revise their daily teaching practices based on student learning results."

                                                                                 ~Joellen Killion

Not Your Grandmother's Professional Development

While I thrive on prepping for my first day of school and attending professional development, I am aware that not everyone shares that perspective.  For years, I have heard several of my teaching peers grumble about sitting through professional development when there is so much to do to be ready for our most important commodity:  students.

As Erin Watts and myself prepared for our back to school professional development for our teacher leaders, we wanted to make the day action packed and content relevant.  Our goal was to shatter the stereotypes of traditional professional development. It doesn't have to be boring and it doesn't have to feel like a waste of time. Our biggest question was, "How do we demonstrate we value their learning time?"  We know that everyone is busy preparing for the start of school.  We didn't want to send a message that they had better things to do. We wanted this learning to impact each step they made as soon as they entered their schools.

We spent several hours meeting, planning, and prepping for the day.  Our challenge was to cover all the information with strategies and tasks that would motivate, inspire, and energize our teacher leaders.

We knew the key would be to start the day off with team building and collaboration.  We chose ESCAPE THE CLASSROOM! Teachers had to solve a code to find out which group they were assigned.  As the clock ticked away groups worked furiously to solve the puzzle and unlock the boxes with more clues and puzzles.  

Instructional Coaches, Technology Integrations Coaches, Special Education Coaches, and Mentors working desperately to solve the ESCAPE THE CLASSROOM puzzles.

The first group to get to the KEY CHEST and escape the classroom won.  This fun and challenging activity was a great way to take the blah out of traditional sit and get professional training.  Although only one group won a prize, each group saw the entire task through and made it to the KEY CHEST! It was evident we had some growth mindsets in the room.

The first group to ESCAPE THE CLASSROOM!

All the other groups persevered until they escaped.  

Next we powered through housekeeping and management items in a timely fashion to get to the meat of our work centered on work with teachers to impact learning for students.  Our coaches were ready to focus on the goals of our fourth year of teacher leadership.  The focus of our year will be coaching with fidelity and a continued commitment to completing coaching cycles, reflection, and model teacher visits.  Resources we used to plan the day were Pete Hall, Alisa Simeral, Bruce Wellman and Cognitive Coaching.

Teacher leaders participated in a variety of activators and strategies to connect their learning with the content covered.  

The Power of Efficacy

Resources our leadership program has used for PD and training at Linn-Mar.

Our teacher leaders engage in a variety of professional development.  Cognitive Coaching, the work of Pete Hall, Growth Mindset, Visible Learning—just to name a few.  The concepts often touch on the toes of each other. With all these resources at coaches’ and teachers’ fingertips, it can be overwhelming.  This week we took the opportunity to dive deeper into the connections that collective teacher efficacy has with Cognitive Coaching, Growth Mindset, Visible Learning, and the work we are doing in our schools at Linn-Mar.

To help promote discussion among our coaches we implemented a strategy known at chat stations.  This strategy is credited to the Cult of Pedagogy and an in depth explanation of how to use this strategy in your classrooms and schools can be found here.  At each of our chat stations coaches were given the opportunity to think and reflect on their own efficacy and the efficacy in our Linn-Mar Schools.  They answered such questions as:

What does efficacy look like and sound like? 

Who are the efficacious people in our lives? 

What might be the behaviors he/she exemplify that has impacted us in our work? 

What types of questions might help produce efficacious thinking in our schools?          

A final piece of the experience was to discuss this article, by Jenni Donohoo.

Some of the discussion that stemmed from this article was the belief that teachers have about how students learn and how teacher provide intervention.  We discussed the Six Enabling Conditions (Donohoo, 2017) presented in this article.

Six Enabling Conditions of Collective Efficacy

1.      Advance Teacher Influence

2.      Goal Consensus

3.      Teachers’ Knowledge about One Another Work

4.      Cohesive Staff

5.      Responsiveness of Leadership

6.      Effective Systems of Intervention

Our final question to our coaches was:  Which of these conditions do you have the

greatest influence over in your role as a teacher leader?  The responses varied from the

types of coaches and depending on the work they do in each of our ten buildings. 

This is a reflective question I plan to ask myself often, as a Program Coordinator.

If you have not read this article it is a short read and we highly recommend it.  The bottom line in all of this is:  Do you believe you have the power and willingness to make a difference in your students’ learning?  Because this article says Hattie’s research shows that CTE (Collective Teacher Efficacy) has three times more influence on student achievement.  It’s a no-brainer.  The way we believe and think about how we teach and how students can learn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—either positive or negative. 

Collaborative Coaches

Have you ever had a lesson go differently than you had planned?  Almost every teacher I know would answer, “YES” to that question.  Having an occasional lesson that flops isn’t a bad thing.  It can provide opportunity for reflection, feedback, and new learning.  Just ask Katie Schafer, first grade teacher at Linn-Grove Elementary. 

Katie had a successful implementation with Seesaw in the spring of last year, so in the fall she contacted both Jessica Zimmerman (Technology Integration Coach) and Tiffany Kinzenbaw (Instructional Coach) to implement iPads during reading rotations. With continued coaching interactions, Jessica and Tiffany were able to support the integration of more technology into Katie’s everyday routines.  Rather than work in isolation, the three professionals collaborated together during their coaching cycles, capitalizing on collective intelligence.  They truly were stronger together. 

Katie was eager to learn about more technology, so she attended a TQSA class for coding and robots, taught by Jessica, which is where she learned about Bee-Bot. She was able to explore Bee-Bot in the class and then proceeded to further explore Bee-Bot on her own time.  When searching for curriculum connections, she realized it would be a great tool to enhance her next writing lesson.  What she found was that Bee-Bot was a catalyst to many things:

“What started out as an experiment in programming has resulted in a springboard/explosion for the students’ enthusiasm and engagement during writing.  Every single student in my class was engaged in writing, revising, and sharing a sequential story that involved Bee-Bot. Their enthusiasm for writing has amazed me and I am more than excited for my near daily collaborating mini-sessions with my Instructional Coach about the next steps in guiding their learning.”

Another key piece to the successful coaching conversations was the impact on teacher reflection, teacher practice, and student learning.  Katie was eager to receive feedback from students, which flowed over into students accepting feedback from their peers in regards to their writing and how they could make it better.  




Giving constructive and timely feedback takes time.  Once teachers make small tweaks to direct instruction and daily practice the payoff can be tenfold.  In this case, Katie’s increased reflection impacted the learning environment for all students in her classroom.

 "The students are willing to let their classmates make mistakes without pointing them out. I can then guide them to give and receive appropriate and helpful feedback." 

 

The above quote is a great connection to the work Linn-Grove has also been doing with Growth Mindset.  Getting feedback and using it in a positive way is a healthy way for students to continue learning even with mistakes, or bumps in the road.

Throughout this entire process, Katie has been open to the coaching cycles while being reflective on her own learning. “After teaming with my Instruction Coach and Technology Integration Coach for an extended amount of time I find myself trying to coach myself through my lesson planning. They both have a direct but helpful way of questioning what the purpose of each aspect of the lesson or plan is."

The bottom line for educators here is that Coaching really can impact everything we do with and for students.  We often hold the answers we need to be more successful in our classrooms.  Coaching helped Katie be a self-directed learner, build her efficacy, and be more mindful of what work makes the greatest impact on students. 

Making Reflection Part of What We Do

“The more reflective we are, the more effective we are.”

                                                                                      

                                                                                                   ~Pete Hall

Linn-Mar Teacher Leaders had the opportunity to ZOOM with Pete Hall at a recent teacher leadership meeting.  The focus of the learning was centered on his work in the book:  Teach Reflect Learn. 

The ideas discussed were as coaches, our job is to influence or mediate the thinking of teachers.  This change in thinking will increase reflection, and then influence teacher practice to impact students. This work pairs nicely with Cognitive Coaching and has been the topic of discussion over the past couple of years.

This year with Linn-Mar teachers completing coaching cycles with our Mentor Coaches, Technology Integration Coaches, and Instructional Coaches we see movement toward a more reflective practice.  Pete Hall has found that teachers really fall into various stages of reflection.  He has broken them down to the Unaware Stage, Conscious Stage, Action Stage, and Refinement Stage.  The idea is for coaches and teachers to work collaboratively on a goal to build the reflective capacity he or she is working toward.  The question we need to be exploring is:  "How do teachers think?" And the next question after that is:  "What can we do to support teacher's thinking?"

For so long in education, teachers have been isolated from collaborative opportunities, and time to reflect, discuss, and think.  There just has not been adequate time in the day.  Pete Hall was quick to share how reflection is a skill that should be part of what we are already doing.  Weaving reflection time into our professional conversations, PLC meetings, and other district initiatives will help us embed this skill into our relevant work.  It’s not one more thing; it’s a vehicle to drive our work.  Just like coaching.  Coaching is another professional conversation that helps teachers think, reflect, and improve instructional practice.  While some teachers may think a coaching cycle has to be a one and done event, it doesn’t have to be, nor should it be.  Coaching cycles should move fluidly from one goal to the next.  The more coaching cycles teachers are entering into, the more opportunity for new thinking.