Do you ever have one of those days when you are so excited what you've learned about that you just have to share? Today, Steve Barkley presented for several instructional coaches and administrators in central Iowa. It was an amazing day for learning and making connections. If we are able to do this again next year, I'm hoping we can have an in-house lunch so we can mingle with other coaches and districts.
There was so much content covered, so I will stick with my two big take-aways. First and foremost, you MUST have a common definition of student achievement for the principal and the instructional coach. All of your work should stem from this...your work with your leadership team, with your PLCs (or rather teaching teams), with individual teachers. What is it that your students in your building need? What behaviors must they show in order to reach this student achievement? What teacher behaviors need to happen in order to get the student behaviors we need What changes in PLCs and peer coaching need to happen to get the teacher behavior? And finally...what changes in leadership behavior need to happen?
My second biggest take-away is that the instructional coaches job is to build the quality of the teams in the building. In my own mind, the things that I need in place in order for this to happen are all of the pieces in the paragraph above. Definition of student behaviors<-----teacher behaviors<------PLCs and peer coaching behaviors<-----leadership behaviors. I stated this earlier this year, and this thinking has been confirmed today, that ultimately I should be coaching myself out of a job.
Days like this make me so excited to dig in to my work!
If you attended the conference today, hopefully you are already signed up on the Instructional Coaching Group page on Facebook. Also, be sure to join Twitter fans on #educoach on Wednesday evenings at 9:00 p.m. Central Time.
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