Lean In to Question: Coaching Outside Your Content Area

What do you do when you’re an instructional coach for a chemistry teacher and don’t remember chemistry? If you don’t have the content knowledge – or pedagogical content knowledge – for the subject, it changes how you coach.
 
During a coaching-the-coach session, I talked with Elias, an instructional coach who is responsible for all content areas in his high school. He’s a former English Language Arts teacher, and it’s been a long time since he did any trigonometry or calculus, but he’s working with the math teacher. It’s been a long time since he balanced any chemical equations, but he’s working with the science teacher. He is also working closely with an ELA teacher, and he feels pretty confident in that role! We talked about how Elias’s own background knowledge and experience are impacting his use of the GIR model for mentoring and coaching (below).
 
Elias wouldn’t want to stand up in front of a group of high school seniors to model a lesson on infinite sums in the calculus class, even though he is confident with instructional strategies that would work well in that lesson. Instead, Elias found a video clip online where students were working in small groups to compare their different problem-solving methods. The structures that the teacher in the video had in place were ones that the math teacher could incorporate. The video provided a model. Elias also made recommendations about creating heterogeneous groups for the lesson, recognizing that learning would be enhanced by students’ differing approaches to solving the problems.
 
When working with the chemistry teacher, Elias leaned into the coaching move of asking questions. During their planning conference, he prompted with questions like, “How will this lesson connect with what students did yesterday? “How will you grab students’ attention in a purposeful way?” and “What support might students need to be successful?”  Elias knew that asking these questions would be productive; he didn’t have to be an expert in the content to be able to support the planning of an effective lesson.
 
Of course, Elias finds lots of opportunities to affirm and praise teachers in all academic areas. It’s easy to spot effective instruction, even if you haven’t taught the content. When coaches watch students, they know what is working.
 
The GIR model is a flexible guide for instructional coaching – pliant enough to be useful whether or not you are experienced in the subject being taught.
 

This week, you might want to take a look at:
 
Read this to consider why it’s helpful to do assignments before assigning them and all the places for agency and professionalism in what you think might be a complete, packaged curriculum!
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/doing-the-writing-in-a-unit/
 
This learning/PD/collaboration tool – Box It Out:
 
https://www.thecoachingsketchnotebook.com/2021/09/a-new-tool-for-pd-box-it-out.html
 
 
Learning walks with teachers as a coaching practice:
 
https://ashleytaplin.com/2021/09/17/instructional-scouting-a-new-practice-for-learning-walks/
 
Student authority during classroom discussions:
 
https://www.teachhub.com/teaching-strategies/2021/10/classroom-discussion-the-importance-of-student-authority/
 
 
Problems with the 5-paragraph essay:
 
https://blog.heinemann.com/why-the-five-paragraph-essay-is-a-problem-now-and-later
 
That’s it for this week.  Happy Coaching!
 
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