The Coach ADVenture. Amy Illingworth
the following questions from your own context:
What is (are) your school’s student achievement goal(s)?
What are your district’s student achievement goals?
What specifically do you want to see students saying or doing that they aren’t yet saying or doing?
What instructional moves can teachers plan to help students meet those goals?
What supports have you provided teachers around those instructional moves?
Does your system have clarity around what the instructional moves look and sound like in planning and delivery?
The teacher from the second scenario in Chapter One had a clear focus: He wanted to improve his students’ use of academic language during structured talk opportunities. With this clarity, he was able to research possible strategies and ask his instructional coach for specific support. The coach was able to collaborate with the teacher to provide the support the teacher wanted and needed in order to help his students be more successful.
A Word on Observation and Notetaking Tools
As a coach, you will be observing a lot of lessons. Don’t feel you have to be a content expert in every subject taught at your school. Your role as a coach is to facilitate the growth and development of peers, who do have the content expertise, and to support their learning of new pedagogy that will help them reach their students. A variety of tools are available for taking notes during an observation, so choose one that meets the needs of your coaching work. If you are working with a teacher who is struggling with classroom management, for example, you want to be able to take note of what student behaviors occur, which of those behaviors the teachers addresses, and any behaviors the teacher does not address. It might be helpful to keep track of which students shout out answers or get out of their seats and how the teachers addresses misbehaviors. [See Appendix A for sample note-taking guides.]
You could be in a very different coaching situation with a teacher who wants to improve her questioning techniques. A simple T-chart note-taking guide might work well. If you keep track of the teacher’s questions on the left and how students responded on the right, you can use your notes to have a coaching conversation with the teacher. As a coach, I would often write down as much as possible while observing in a room, then I would make a copy of my notes for my discussion with the teacher. In this case, I might ask the teacher to read through the notes, then I might ask some of the following questions:
What types of questions did you ask?
What kinds of responses did you hear from students?
Which student response demonstrated mastery (or what you wanted to hear)?
What type of question got that response from students?
What student response surprised you?
Was there something you wanted to hear from students that you didn’t hear in this lesson? If so, how might we craft a question or task to elicit that response?
Sometimes you begin a new coaching relationship by observing a classroom just to get a feel for the teacher’s style and how students respond to him or her. I often have colleagues ask me, “What do you look for in classrooms? How do you notice so many different things?” First, I remind them that I have had many years of practice as an instructional coach. It takes a long time to hone your observation skills. This coaching work is an evolving process for us all!
Before I share with you some of the things you might observe in a classroom, let’s take a moment for a quick journey together. Let’s visit a classroom at Principal Martinez’s high school from our Choose the Coach ADVenture. Imagine that you and I are doing a walkthrough with Principal Martinez. She decides to take us into a tenth-grade math class. Here is what we observe:
As we walk into the classroom at 10:25, we notice there are thirty-two students. The students are sitting in desks that have been moved to form groups of four. The students have notebooks open in front of them as well as their math textbooks. The teacher is standing in front of the class using her iPad to write and project her work on the front board for students to see. On the board is a problem the teacher has just finished working on. Nothing else is written on the board. At 10:30 the teacher tells the class they should work on the next problem. She says they can work with their group. The students begin to work. At 10:31 there is total silence in the room.
I walk up to one student, lean down, and whisper, “What are you learning today?” The student looks up at me and whispers, “Math.” I continue, “Yes, I know we are in your math class, but what specifically are you learning today?” The student begins to squirm, and he points down to his notebook and says, “We are doing this.” I look at the book, and I see quadratic equations. I whisper, “I see that this section is about quadratic equations. What can you tell me about quadratic equations?” The student mumbles something I can’t hear, then the student sitting next to him pipes up with a definition of quadratic equations. I thank that student, and I step back from the group.
The three of us walk around the room, and I ask a few more students what they are learning and have similar conversations. At 10:45 we exit the classroom and step outside to debrief what we saw. I ask you and Principal Martinez what I always ask when I leave a room: “What can we celebrate? What is going well for students in that room?”
Principal Martinez shares with us that the teacher is using the adopted curriculum, which has been a struggle in this department. She also shares that she likes the fact that the students are sitting in groups. I pause here to push back on the language of “I like . . . .” I explain to you both that if we were giving this teacher feedback right now, and we said, “Your principal likes when the students sit in groups,” she would have it in her head that she needs to have group seating whenever the principal comes in. Instead of worrying about how to impress the principal, I want the teacher to know why group seating is beneficial for student learning; therefore, if we were talking to her, I might say, “I appreciated that your students’ desks were moved to create a group structure. When students have opportunities to work with their peers, they can develop their speaking and listening skills, their use of academic language in context, and their ability to problem solve and collaborate.”
After we share some celebrations, I ask you and Principal Martinez, “What else did you notice? What wonderings do you have?” We were only in the room for about fifteen minutes, so we can’t make assumptions, but we can generate wonderings about which we could talk to the teacher in a future coaching conversation. You look to me and say, “I wasn’t a math teacher; I’m just not sure what to look for in a math class.” I thank you for your honesty and remind you that you have pedagogical knowledge and that even without content expertise, there is a lot to see in a class; for instance, how many students spoke during the fifteen minutes we were in the room? You say that the only student voices we heard were when I spoke directly to students. “Exactly,” I say. So that makes me wonder about when and how students are given the opportunity to speak in this class. It also makes me wonder if there are roles or a structure for group work. When the teacher told the students to begin working, she said they could work with a partner, but none of the students did that. Have they had prior partner or group experiences in this class? Are there group roles that students know or to which they could be exposed that would help them work together as a group?
This is just a snapshot of what I look for and think about when I visit a classroom. Below is a list of possible instructional, environmental, and cultural items you might observe in a classroom:
Instructional
Number of students present
Number of girls vs. boys (though I caution you to be careful with this as we move into a less binary gender world)
Number of students by race or ethnicity, English learner status, etc.
Break down of minutes of teacher talk, student talk, and silence
Learning tasks—What are students actually saying or writing?