Avoid “Random Acts of Coaching”

Random acts of kindness are good. Random acts of coaching are not.

In their book, Coaching Toward the Common Core, Elish-Piper and Allier describe how coaches are often frantically busy doing things like organizing book rooms, running from meeting to meeting, and managing assessments. They call these “random acts of coaching” and suggest that having a clear purpose statement will help to alleviate this haphazardness.

Even after coaches have clearly defined their purpose, however, they can increase their effectiveness by being more intentional about how they turn responsibility over to teachers. That’s what is described in the Gradual Increase of Responsibility Coaching Model. This blog explores the decreasingly-supportive scaffolds of modeling, recommending, questioning, affirming, and praising that coaches can choose and use with deliberation so that teachers’ instructional proficiency increases, reflection is internalized, and collaboration is ongoing.

As an instructional coach, you have many demands on your time and many teachers with whom you could be working. Beginning each coaching cycle with a clear purpose, gradually increasing expectations for what the teacher will do on her own, and then moving toward a collaborative stance will enable you to shift your attention to other teachers, making your work more impactful.

Coaches have told me that filling out the GIR Conference Plan (below) before coaching meetings helps them shift their coaching approach to encourage increased teacher autonomy.

If the length of your to-do list has you racing around performing random acts of coaching, you might consider using the GIR Conference Plan and testing this out for yourself. If you’d like a Word version of the document, just email me at collet@uark.edu and I'll send it your way.

Taking a planned approach to scaffolding teachers reduces randomness and improves results!

Elish-Piper, L. & Allier, S.K. (2014). Coaching toward the Common Core: Strategies to help teachers address the K-5 ELA Standards. New York: Guilford Press.

This week, you might want to take a look at:

Teacher books for summer reading:

https://twowritingteachers.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/readthese/

Whack it: Place value math game that incorporates movement (take a look at the video):

http://creeksidelearning.com/how-to-teach-place-value/

End-of-Year Projects:

http://christine-readingisthinking.blogspot.com/2011/07/end-of-year-projects.html

http://k6educators.about.com/od/junelessonplans/a/Wrap-Up-The-End-Of-The-School-Year-With-Fun-Projects.htm

http://www.teachingheart.net/endoftheyearpage.html

Putting a positive spin on “rigor”:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/webbs-depth-knowledge-increase-rigor-gerald-aungst

That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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