20 Thoughts on Instructional Coaching

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Thursday and Friday I attended an incredible training by Steve Barkley. If you haven't heard of him, get to know him. If you have heard of him and haven't attended one of his sessions then get going and attend one. As a coach, this is one of those must attend events.

What I learned is forever going to change how I look at the coaching process and teaching, in general. I know this is true and, from talking to the other coaches in attendance, I know others felt the same.

 Here are 20 things mentioned in these two days that caused me to stop and ponder:

1. How can your teachers trust each other if they've never been in each others' classrooms?
2. Are your teachers a franchise or are they a team?
3. Department Heads should be the model classroom.   
4. When using rubrics have the "top" line be created by the students.
5. Students cause student achievement. Teachers do not cause student achievement. Therefore, coaches need to focus on students when they observe.  
6. You can't teach a student math. You teach a student how to learn math.
7. Teachers should use their inclusion teachers to model expected behaviors, thinking, and discussions.
8. Schools should do Emotional Walkthroughs. On a 1 - 5 scale what is the emotional level of each classroom?
9. When you walk through your school, how many Wow!'s to you get?
10. If students complete the exact work assigned they should get a "C." Go Beyond that for a "B" and go above B-work for an "A."
11. A student's major work shouldn't be graded until the end of semester or year and students should have multiple opportunities to revise/edit.
12. Students should be exposed to more book options. One teacher put 5 books on each of 20 tables at beginning of the school year. Students rotated, table to table, and scored the books based upon interest. At the end of one class period they had seen 100 books and should have seen a few that met with their satisfaction.
13. The hardest part of teaching is when the students aren't there.
14. Coaches, you have been hired by your school to change kid's behaviors.
15. Homework should never be the same for the entire class.
16. Teachers should have a 3 year commitment to kids: Spend time with them the year before they come to you. Spend time with all of the students on your grade level. Then spend time with them the year after you have them to see how they are doing.
17. We tend to do vertical alignment without the students.
18. Instructional coaches should be evaluated on the teacher growth during the year.
19. We were hired to bring discomfort to our school. We want a culture where our teachers are comfortable with discomfort.
20. The biggest coaching mistake is to let teachers know what the coach is thinking before the coach knows what the teacher is thinking.

It's Great to Have Awesome Instructional Technology Specialists

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This week I was sitting in on our ELA teachers as they were working with the Heart of Texas Writing Project. A discussion came up about publishing student work.  There was the usual talk about creating a newspaper or a magazine. But I instantly thought of online opportunities for sharing student work. That's because I am farther along the SAMR progression than many of our teachers. (To find out more about SAMR, I like to show people what Kathy Schrock wrote about it here.)

I spoke up and suggested that they think about doing something where the students can get their work out for a much larger audience. These teachers are great at what they do but they need to start thinking about the S (substitution) in the SAMR model - start substituting technology for that paper and pencil item.

I wished I had more time so I could walk these teachers through possible options when it occurred to me that we have incredible Instructional Technology folks in our district and this is exactly what they get paid to do - help teachers (and their students) create with technology. A short email to these talented folks and we had something set for when we return from the holiday break.

Do you have Instructional Technology people in your district? Do you utilize them the way they should ( and what they would like to ) be used? Do you ask them for help or to come in and model teach? All I have to say is use them, use them, use them.

We are very fortunate to have 3 awesome people: Jacob (@jacobtech), Stephanie (@Ms_Cerda), and Lacy (@whatifclass) who have come together and really made our district move in the right direction. I am thankful for a great school district who is starting to "get it" with technology integration. I'm thankful for many of our teachers who are starting to "get it" with technology and those other teachers who are out on "the tip of the spear" (to use my military terminology), pushing the limits on what their students are able to do in their 1:1 classrooms.

UPDATE: Since writing this post I found out that someone I knew was in the district, and is doing good things, is actually part of the IT world. She's mainly over at Manor High School which is why I wouldn't have thought of her. So feel free to say hi to Allison too.

Decker Middle School is a pretty darn good school. We have a long way to go to be where we want to be and to a level our community deserves, but we recognize that and we are moving in the right direction. Technology, "the hidden tool," is helping us with that movement. And our instructional technology specialists deserve some of the credit.

Summer Reading Equals Summer Learning

I love reading lists of "books to read during your summer vacation." The only problem is I don't ever take time to read for fun during the summer. I save fun reading for during the school year when I need a break from the reality of the day.

So what is on my reading list this summer?  I took this picture of many of the books I thought about reading and put it up as a Twitpic and had a couple of comments about books that I could avoid and ones I definitely should read.

And so I have settled upon  6 books that will be my primary reading/research books and another 6 books that will be books to skim and/or collect additional information from. They mostly come from the field of instructional coaching although there are a couple that relate to my passion for PBL.

This list is in no particular order and is from top to bottom in the pile on my desk.  First up is Dayna Laur's new book Authentic Learning Experiences.  I had wanted to read it ever since Dayna told me it was coming out. I've had it for a couple of weeks and have skimmed the contents. There are lots of examples of PBL projects that include opportunities to present real world work to people outside of the classroom.

Next up is a book by a whole hockey locker of individuals and it came highly recommended by some of my fellow coaches in the #educoach chat on twitter.  It is Classroom Instruction That Works. I believe, at one time, I had the 1st edition and, I think, I read it but that was a looooong time ago and it is always good to stay on top of researched classroom management techniques.

The third book in my stack is Make Just One Change by Rothstein and Santana.  I've had it for 6 months now and I've read several parts but I need to finish it up as I prepare to use it for some presentations on questioning techniques in the classroom.  This book concentrates on getting students to ask questions to drive their learning.  It goes hand-in-hand with the Knows and Need to Knows found at the start of a PBL project.

The next two books are both by Jim Knight. They are Instructional Coaching (from 2007) and Coaching (2009). These two may only get skimmed for good stuff. A lot of people like to quote these books and, as an instructional coach, I feel I should be versed in their content.

The last book in the stack is Building Teachers' Capacity for Success by Hall and Simeral.  This concentrates on both the coach and the administrator and I've heard lots of great stuff about the book.

I'll just list the other six books here. Again, they are in no particular order.  And they are supplements to the first 6 books as I pursue knowledge in being a good PBL Instructional Coach. They include The Power of Protocols, Best Practice, Focused Assessment, Reflective Practice to Improve Schools, and A Teacher's Guide to Classroom Assessment.

With a couple of Edcamps, the ISTE conference, training with BIE.Org, training of my own teachers and the annual New Tech Network conference there isn't exactly a lot of time to read these but I'll do my best to get through them while taking notes and maybe writing a blog post or two on their content. You may be one who likes to read for fun during the summer but for me, I have to keep learning new stuff. The day I stop learning is the day I die.