Teacher-Initiated Coaching

What is your ideal working environment? I would describe mine as one where I am collaborating with educators who want to grow in their craft.  Therefore, teacher-initiated coaching is my coaching system of choice.  Marzano and Simms (2012) define this coaching system as "A teacher asks for a coach, and the administrator or district provides one. Alternatively, a teacher might independently arrange to be coached by another teacher or administrator" (p. 211).  When a teacher is seeking support from a coach, then the excitement for growth and openness to change is motivated from within the teacher.  

I had the opportunity to experience this after completion of the first session of a book study I am facilitating on changing teaching practices from static to dynamic. A teacher from the session approached me regarding supporting changes in her pedagogy through a coaching cycle.  

The teacher with which I am coaching teaches fourth grade. Since science will now be assessed in fourth grade through our state testing in the spring, we decided to enhance the instruction of the science content with technology. Liao, Ottenbreit-Leftwich, Karlin, Glazewski and Brush (2017) state "using technology to support students' learning processes can lead to improved learning outcomes" (p.523). We are already seeing students using more detail in their responses with the use of Padlet and Flipgrid compared to when they used only paper and pencil.  

We started our coaching cycle with pre-planning by looking at the unit of study (Animal Studies) and the standards that were to be taught through the unit.  We wrote a student goal and learning targets based on the standard.  From there, we created a pre-assessment to give us data to guide our next instructional steps. We sorted the student work into four categories ranging from emerging to exceeding.  We sorted the work through the lens of the teacher written learning targets.  The same learning targets will guide our instruction based on the results from the student work sort. Since beginning our work together, we have been able to incorporate the Result-Based Coaching Tool (pictured below) to help us see the impact of the coaching cycle on her student learning and on her instructional strategies.

Retrieved from Sweeney, D. & Harris, L. S. (2017). Student-centered coaching: The moves. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Liao et al. (2017) found that "teacher's sustained participation in PD had a significant impact on their technology integration skills, confidence, and practices" (p. 524). I see a coaching cycle, especially in this situation, as follow-up sustained professional development (PD) over several weeks with intense support that stemmed from a one time PD session.  Since starting our coaching cycle, we have planned together twice and I have co-taught in the classroom three times over a span of six school days. We will continue our work together towards the student goal that we wrote for about two more weeks and then look at student evidence from a summative assessment.  The student data will help us determine what our collaborative work will look like moving forward.