Coaching for Power

As instructional decisionmakers, teachers are given the responsibility to respond to the specific needs of their students. Even when following a tight curriculum, there is maneuver between the words on a curriculum resource and their enactment in the classroom. Helping teachers recognize the purpose, power, and impact of those maneuvers increases their efficacy and improves their practice.
 
In a district where I am coaching, the district has adopted new curriculum resources this year and expects them to be followed.  Because of the pandemic, district leaders decided it was important to have everyone literally on the same page, ready to pivot as needed to online instruction. There have been challenges as teachers work to fit the curriculum to their students. Illuminating the value of the decisions teachers are making about implementation has been helpful.
 
I talked with Penni this week about a scripted phonics lesson in her first-grade classroom.  They were learning about r-controlled vowels. I first asked Penni to list all the things she did during the lesson that were not in the curriculum resource. She thought of a couple quickly: She had added a picture of a shark to start off the lesson. She explained that her kids love animals, and since the word “shark” includes the targeted /ar/ sound, she thought it would get their attention, give them a chance to feel the /ar/ sound in their mouths, and get the lesson off to a good start. She was right!
 
Penni also described the sticky-note exit ticket she added at the end of the lesson, where students spelled words with the target r-controlled vowels they had discussed in the lesson. She talked about what good information that quick closure had given her. She had a better sense of who still needed support.
 
I prompted Penni about a couple of other self-initiated steps she had taken along the way. For example, rather than using choral response for all of the phonemic awareness activities (“Say store. Now say it again, but don’t say /t/”), Penni had occasionally called on individual Ss. This gave her the chance to differentiate (using harder examples with those who were ready for them), and it also kept students more focused.
 
After reading a poem chorally, rather than asking for students to raise their hands and tell her the words they could find that contained r-controlled vowels, she had students come to the Smart Board and point them out. Penni asked the other students, who were still in their seats, to point or give hints about where to find the words. These opportunities, which included movement, were important for first-graders.
 
The examples above were mostly planned for. Penni had decided in advance what would work best for her students. There were also in-the-moment decisions that went beyond the directions provided in the curriculum resource. For example, the lesson included a Smart Board word sort with different spellings for the /er/ sound. Penni quickly realized that students were having difficulty deciding which of the three pictures (spur, bird, fern) the words belonged under because they didn’t know the spelling pattern for the /er/ sound in these words. Once she labelled the columns by writing the word under the image, the sort proceeded smoothly. Penni used what she knew about students’ background knowledge to make an adjustment on the fly.
 
After talking about a few more examples, I asked Penni, “What impact do you think these extra touches had?” She described how frequent opportunities to talk with partners helped kids process the information and how overall she felt her adjustments increased student engagement, allowed her to differentiate the lesson, and gave her more information about students’ abilities.
 
Whether a teacher is using a scripted curriculum or creating lessons from scratch, conversations about instructional decision-making support their agency as they define and refine best practices for their students.
 
This week, you might want to take a look at:
 
Inviting the voice of all students into the classroom:
 
https://www.teachingchannel.com/blog/english-learners-voice
 
 
A podcast with strategies to help students develop self-reflection skills:
 
https://jackstreet.com/jackstreet/WASCD.EL.ventura.cfm
 
 
Using the reading notebook cover:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/using-reading-notebook-covers-for-reflection-and-goal-setting/
 
 
Caring for colleagues in crises:
 
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec20/vol78/num04/Caring-for-Colleagues-in-Crisis.aspx
 
 
Short video clips about using coaching in performance development:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XK_VTGJ12E
 
That’s it for this week.  Happy Coaching!
 
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