Friday, April 11, 2014

Hope-Filled Coachin

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.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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!

No comments:

Post a Comment