At
this time of year, pressures from external testing can drag teachers down. But once testing is behind us, coaches can
offer an injection of hope into the school climate by taking a strengths-based
approach to their work.
Optimism
and a can-do attitude create contagious confidence. They encourage resilience and a desire for
continuous improvement. One of the ways
to promote a sunny disposition is to build on teachers’ strengths in your work
with them. Surprisingly, areas of
struggle become easier to address – and sometime disappear entirely – when you
and the teacher you are working with are focused on making what is good even
better.
Recently,
I was working with a teacher who had so many areas for improvement that it was
hard to know where to start. So I
flipped the situation and started with the area where she showed the most
promise – mathematics. I could tell by
her responses during class discussions that she had a deep, conceptual
understanding of math. Asking her about
this, I discovered that she loved math and had taken high-level math courses in
college. She truly understood where the
basic concepts she was teaching her young students were leading. So the next coaching cycle focused on her math
instruction. We planned around building
the important concepts she recognized; we had thoughtful discussions about
specific student needs; we talked about the approaches that seemed most
successful. Over the course of the
coaching cycle, I more frequently saw a smiling countenance when I was in the
teacher’s classroom. Both she and
students were more engaged, and she adapted powerful practices that were part
of her math lessons to other academic areas.
These changes felt good to everyone involved.
You
might consider these other suggestions for building a positive atmosphere:
*Create
opportunities to tap imagination and creativity
*Do
one thing (no matter how small) that adds beauty
*Encourage
empathy
*Celebrate
successes
*Promote
wonder
Take
these broad suggestions and make them specific to the needs of your school. Your own buoyant attitude can support a sense
of connectedness, trust, and possibility in your school. Your hopefulness can encourage the
hopefulness of others.
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It’s
national poetry month! This week, you
might want to take a look at:
Integrating
math and poetry:
An
online interactive tool for creating acrostic poems:
A
student handout for how to summarize a poem:
A
lesson plan for composing a “found poem”:
Learn
about “Poem in Your Pocket Day” on April 24:
A
Pinterest Poetry Board:
Thoughts
from Diane Sweeney about strengths-based support:
That’s
it for this week. Happy Coaching!
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