Friday Reflections - Coaching

Coaching – “Every teacher can get better every day”.   What a powerful message for us – it’s a positive message about one’s ability to grow as a teacher.  It’s safe to say that we won’t grow without reflecting on what is working and what is not working to help our students achieve.  And, coaching can and should help teachers hone lessons and implement direct instruction strategies that will increase student achievement.

Goodwin, Gibson, Lewis, and Rouleau in their recently published book –UNSTUCK How Curiosity, Peer Coaching, and Teaming Can Change Your School supports the case for bringing in a coach in a small team setting to help teachers such as our second grade math teachers plan and improve math instruction.  One of their basic premises is that “teachers need to learn new ideas and see them modeled, often over and over again.  They also need support and lots of feedback as they transfer new ideas into practice’.  Let’s be honest – most of us never receive this type of input, support, modeling, and feedback as we strive to improve ourselves.

Coaching – along with small team work – offers promise to helping all of us become better teachers. Kudos to our second grade team - Hannah, Maddie, Rosemary, and Kelly for diving into meeting with our district math coach, Annie Bacol.  It seems obvious that such conferencing with an expert coach in a grade level team setting will benefit them more than many isolated math professional development workshops. Why? 

  • The power of the small group – we are more apt to try new instructional approaches if the idea comes from within our “group”
  • Coaches offer guiding questions for collaborative conversations and protocols for observing one another’s lessons
  • Team work - along with coaching - enables teachers to be curious about how their approaches are working and also helps teachers stretch practices that will improve student achievement

Have a great Friday

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