More Coaching Lessons from the Olympics

When you were watching the Olympics this month, did you get some practice making judgments? Even though I don’t know much about diving, I love watching the graceful moves the divers execute between board and water, and I get caught up in the experience. In my enthusiasm, I start shouting out scores as soon as the diver hits the water. I comment on how tight the tuck was or how smooth the entry was, making my evaluation before the judges post their scores. Sometimes I’m close to the actual scores, and sometimes we’re miles apart. It’s laughable that after a few minutes of watching I have become an arm-chair expert, when in reality I know almost nothing about what is going on!

Sometimes the same thing happens when I visit a classroom. It is easy to jump to judgment after spending a few minutes in a classroom. Easy to notice what is not happening. Easy to feel myself expert when I know almost nothing about what I am really seeing. When I find myself jumping to judgments, I remind myself to observe first, listen next, and judge last. Observing means I am using my eyes and ears to notice and note what is happening. Listening means that, during debriefs, I start by asking rather than telling and by take an inquiring stance. After I have noticed and wondered, any evaluations I make, and any recommendations that grow out of those evaluations, will be more grounded.

Making judgments is easy when I have only surface-level knowledge. Understanding deepens when I know more about what is going on beneath the surface. When I am quicker to listen and slower to judge, my coaching is more likely to hit the mark.

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

Planning for what really matters:               

https://www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2016/08/11/new-year-greatest-fear/?utm_source=newsletter20160813/

The importance of building agency at the beginning of the school year (video with Kim Yaris):

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid5043572966001?bckey=AQ~~,AAABlTNHE7k~,oIicl_E-tmh-P1MYnYtUFKA3vxntu_8N&bctid=5085458127001

Gradual release of the classroom library at the beginning of the school year:

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=2337

Lessons for using mentor texts to teach memoir:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/grades-6-8-mentor-memoirs

An inspirational video about mentoring:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtr--uo_WMc

That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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Advice from an Olympic Coach

Bob Bowman knows something about coaching: He has coached swimmer Michael Phelps to his record 28 Olympic medals. Bowman offers some advice about coaching that applies in educational settings, too.

1. Abandon the “one size fits all” mentality. Swimmers have different approaches and gifts, and so do teachers, so coaches should individualize their support. The Gradual Increase of Responsibility Model for Coaching (described in previous posts), can help instructional coaches pick an effective coaching tool.

2. Determine the gold standard. Bowman suggests being process-oriented and focused on the things you can control. “Be a little better today than you were yesterday,” he said. Doing that day after day leads to remarkable change. As coaches, we can focus on individual goals (for ourselves and others) and also organizational goals (for the school or district). Establishing clear targets and keeping them in focus is an important coaching task.

3. Continue to develop your skills. For Instructional coaches, reading professionally and being part of professional networks supports continuous improvement. Then find opportunities to put these new ideas into practice. If you don’t have students of your own, don’t be afraid to borrow another classroom. Modeling, even when things don’t go as planned, is a learning experience for everyone involved. Bowman points out that we learn more from mistakes than from successes, so don’t be afraid to take a risk. And encourage risk-taking in teachers and students as they develop new skills of their own. 

4. Accept that there will be daily challenges. “The more successful you are, the more headaches that come with it. The stakes are higher,” Bowman says. “The fun is overcoming (the challenges).” It is easy to sit back and be satisfied with the status quo. Difficulties come with quests for change. So expect it, accept it, and view the challenges as problem-solving exercises.

Like Bowman, instructional coaches can sit on the side, cheering and supporting those we are working with. By keeping Bowman’s four tips in mind, we’ll also have victories to celebrate!

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

Video shorts of classroom makeovers:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/film-festival-learning-spaces-classroom-makeovers

Tips for starting the new school year:

https://www.stenhouse.com/author-tips/

The story of a recovering first grade reader (and the interventions that got him there):

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=1971

A video showing collaborative planning, with reflection for next steps:

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/analyze-team-teach-socratic-seminar-nea

Tips for coaching new teachers:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/coaching_teachers/2013/09/tips_for_coaching_new_teachers.html

That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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Coaching Lessons from Haiti

This week I am in Haiti with 30 amazing educators who are part of a teaching exchange. It is my second experience participating in a professional learning experience with Haitian educators, and, like last year, I will be going home with new insights and more humility.

One memorable experience happened on the day we asked teachers to chart questions or challenges related to classroom management, since that was an area they said they wanted to address during the exchange. Working with grade-level peers, each group wrote three questions about challenges they were facing. Then we asked them to come up with two possible solutions for each challenge. At first, many of them looked at us with bewilderment. “You thought someone else would be providing these solutions, didn’t you?” I asked, reading the surprise on their faces. There were many nodding heads. “Well,” I continued, “the very best people for solving these problems are sitting around the table with you. You know your students, you know your situation. You can come up with solutions. Be creative. Think of the impossible solution and it might lead you to the possible.”

As these teachers collaborated, I realized some coaching truths. Often, the best answers will come from the teacher herself, or from the teacher in collaboration with her team. I can ask questions to support their problem-solving, but they know their own context best. They also know their own capabilities, what factors are within their control, and what they are actually willing to try. Often, I can best support a teacher by reflecting her own thinking back to her as she becomes clearer and clearer about solutions.

When my Haitian friends were working, the group of first- and second-grade teachers  identified a problem of “students who don’t want to write.” When I stopped by their table, they were sure they could not come up with a solution. “We’ve tried everything, we don’t know what to do,” they said. “Let me ask you a question,” I responded. “Can any of you think of a time when you’ve ever been successful with getting even one student to write who didn’t want to?” After a thoughtful pause, one of the teachers said, “I started out by writing with them, and then they were ready to go on their own.” “You have one possible solution!” I said. Asking questions had moved this group beyond their stuck spot.

I also realized that sometimes we have to explore the extreme and be willing to dream before we can pull back to the realms of the possible. Only when we consider factors that might be outside of our control do we realize how much power we really have. As the Haitian fourth- and fifth-grade teachers consider problems of absenteeism, some of the solutions they listed might be beyond the realm of possibility (like providing health care for students whose illnesses kept them away from school), but others (like forming a committee to check in with students who were absent twice in a row) seemed more feasible.

Listening to teachers in a country so close to the United States but distant in so many ways, I heard them problem-solve about some of the same issues discussed in faculty lounges in the U.S.: unmotivated students, tardies, students who talk too much, lack of resources. Although the causes of these challenges are different and more heart-breaking, solutions can be found in the same way: thoughtful support and collaboration.

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

This Jim Knight video about creating relationships to build classroom culture:

https://studysites.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction/videos/v11.1.htm

Podcasts from a variety of education experts:

http://bedleybros.podomatic.com

Using Twitter in 5^th grade reading workshop:

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=2116

If you are fretting about the piles of student writing you’ll have to grade once school begins, here’s an idea to improve the feedback process and get rid of the piles!

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=2047

Pinterest ideas for beginning the school year:

https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=beginning%20of%20school%20year&rs=typed&0=beginning%7Ctyped&1=of%7Ctyped&2=school%7Ctyped&3=year%7Ctyped

That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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Be a Data Explorer

Are you vexed by student achievement data that doesn’t meet the muster? Get ready for some exploration! Successful solutions require thorough investigation, and that investigation works best as a collaborative activity. Your faculty will be more likely to buy into the solution if they were on the answer exploration expedition!

If you’ve used protocols for digging into the data, identifying causes, and looking for the issues underlying those causes, you’ve surfaced topics that are ripe for exploration. The Chalk Talk Protocol can come in handy again. Write topics that were identified as underlying causes in the middle of a big sheet of bulletin board paper, one per sheet. For example, your analysis may have revealed class schedules as a potential underlying cause of low student achievement data. Write this topic in the middle of the paper and do the same with the other possible causes that have been uncovered. Teachers silently move from topic to topic, jotting down thoughts, drawing arrows to connect similar ideas, and challenging ideas they feel are problematic. This protocol allows for multiple perspectives to be shared and all voices to be “heard.” It’s also efficient, since many conversations are occurring at the same time. (Tip: Divide the number of participants by 5 to get the # of sheets of paper that would work best. If you have fewer topics than that, you can divide the group in two and have duplicates of each topic. When groups are too large or too small, the written conversation is not as fluent.) Give everyone a chance to visit every topic and revisit to see where the conversation has gone. This process gets lots of possible solutions on the table.

With these possible solutions floating around in your heads, break into small groups and use the Peeling the Onion Protocol to flesh out ideas. In each group, the “Keeper of the Problem” poses the problem as it appears to them now. Other group members ask clarifying questions, paraphrase the problem, explore underlying assumptions, raise questions, and think about possible next steps.

Close on the heels of this protocol, we talk with partners about what we’ve heard. I like the Wagon Wheels Protocol for this, and I structure specific questions for the dialogues, with one question related to each of the topics listed during the Chalk Talk. We include the “Going Deeper” step of the protocol, giving participants one sticky note for each topic so that they can list their favorite idea.

By now our thinking is really deep……and sometimes tooooooo broad. So we narrow our potential solutions to the actionable using the Realms of Concern/Realms of Influence protocol. For each topic, we place the sticky notes we’ve generated in the right place on the target:

With a clear delineation of which solutions are potentially within our reach, it’s time to prioritize. Criteria used for sorting might be funding, time (Which could be done by the end of the semester? By the end of the year?), etc. Once we have our actionable list, we do a dot vote; each participant receives a few garage-sale dot stickers and places them next to the solutions they favor. The winners become the topic of discussion for focus groups, who meet and flesh out these ideas. Groups present their proposals. The final step asks for commitment. Participants reflect in writing about the difference they can make in this problem. Then they commit vocally to one action. A time is set to return and report.

The process described over the past 4 blog posts is time-consuming and can be condensed. Pick and choose those protocols that best fit your context, knowing that time you invest up front in determining the right solutions reduces time wasted in unfruitful change.

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

Classroom organization that supports collaboration:

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=1838

Building a class culture of respect:

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/attention-getting-signals

Sorting student work to plan for instructional next steps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFLleFkw_8E&feature=youtu.be

How-to Science Videos:

http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/videos/howto.html

Empathy book clubs – teaching compassion through books:

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=1359

That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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