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.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
For Learning's Sake!
So, true confessions today. I have started to hate running. It usually happens about this time of year when ice and snow prevent an old person like me from braving slips and falls outside. I can only endure the treadmill for so long. This year, I made a deal with myself. If I get up early to exercise, I can walk. And while I walk on the treadmill, I've found these amazing treasures on Radiolab's great podcasts. It's like opening a great book every time. This week, I learned about how raising whooping cranes to prevent them from becoming extinct can also create problems.
I learned about a man named Bliss who tried to change the world with an invented language. My favorite treasure this week was about Mel Blanc and how Bugs Bunny actually brought him out of a coma.
I LOVE learning! I love learning about fascinating things that may not help me with any particular skill, but definitely help me to think about life, how I fit into this world, and how I might make an impact.
How often do we let our students (and teachers) express their love of learning? What are they interested in? How does what they learn about make them think about their life, how they fit into this world, and how they might make an impact?
Try to learn about something new today. Reflect on how it changes you as a person. Love learning for learning's sake.
I learned about a man named Bliss who tried to change the world with an invented language. My favorite treasure this week was about Mel Blanc and how Bugs Bunny actually brought him out of a coma.I LOVE learning! I love learning about fascinating things that may not help me with any particular skill, but definitely help me to think about life, how I fit into this world, and how I might make an impact.
How often do we let our students (and teachers) express their love of learning? What are they interested in? How does what they learn about make them think about their life, how they fit into this world, and how they might make an impact?
Try to learn about something new today. Reflect on how it changes you as a person. Love learning for learning's sake.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Who "Owns" Truth?
One of our New Year's resolutions as a family this year was to spend more time reading the Bible together (in saying this, anything over reading a single passage together would be nailing our resolution). So the other day, one of our questions was this, "Many people seem to have all of the answers as to who Jesus really was. Who is right?" Imagine my husband and I picking our jaws up off the floor after our seven-year-old responded with this:
"Well, everybody is right, and everybody is wrong."
"What do you mean by that, buddy?"
"Well, nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something. So all you can do is share what you know and learn from each other. You think about what you already know and think about what everybody else is sharing."
Wow! So many connections for such a young soul. And he's absolutely correct. We all hold a little piece of the truth. Our truth as we know it is a little bit different from somebody else s' truth. Our job is to listen, think, and reflect.
As I continue my reading through Crucial Conversations, I continue to practice listening to other people's truths. How they perceive a situation isn't incorrect or wrong. It's just different. We need to draw out everybody's truths so we can get a clearer picture of the collective truth. Have you shared your truth today?
"Well, everybody is right, and everybody is wrong."
"What do you mean by that, buddy?"
"Well, nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something. So all you can do is share what you know and learn from each other. You think about what you already know and think about what everybody else is sharing."
Wow! So many connections for such a young soul. And he's absolutely correct. We all hold a little piece of the truth. Our truth as we know it is a little bit different from somebody else s' truth. Our job is to listen, think, and reflect.
As I continue my reading through Crucial Conversations, I continue to practice listening to other people's truths. How they perceive a situation isn't incorrect or wrong. It's just different. We need to draw out everybody's truths so we can get a clearer picture of the collective truth. Have you shared your truth today?
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Sowing Seeds
I hate metaphors. Unless they are used in poetry or really great fiction. Perhaps this is because of the sports analogies my husband tries to use when he explains his point of view to me (trust me, they are all lost on me which makes our communication that much more difficult). Yet I couldn't resist using the metaphor of sowing seeds to later reap the harvest. Let me explain...
One of the most difficult aspects of coaching is that you rarely reap immediate benefits from your daily work. This is unlike the classroom where you are continually seeing growth students make as a direct result of your work together. So it took me over a week before I made the connections between all of the conversations that had to happen in order for one particular instance to take place: a teacher inviting me in to look at how her students were responding to instruction. As a coach, these are the dream type of situations that you hope for. Teachers wanting to talk about and examine instruction. Unfortunately, it's taken me years to realize these opportunities rarely just "fall into our laps". So here is how the seeds were sown.
Over the summer and through the beginning of the school year, I read John Hattie's book Visible Learning. The more I read of the book, the more passionate I became about the work I needed to do in order to make the most impact on student learning. I was so motivated that I put together a short presentation for our leadership team. At the end of the presentation, it sounded a little like this. Then the conversation went in a direction that I had not intended. Team members were asking the administrator, "So your expectation is that we all work with the coach." What I was hoping to hear was, "So our focus should be on what students are getting out of instruction and how we can learn about this."
Fast forward to three months later. Right before holiday break, a teacher approached me to work with her (yay!) and asked for ideas on what we should work on together. I asked the teacher what she was curious about and what she wanted to learn about her students. I didn't put the pressure on for an immediate reaction and didn't hear back for several weeks.
Then, during a professional development session, the same teacher asked if I could work with her team to observe students during independent practice times. She and her team would use the observations to determine if what they were having students do was the best approach and work as a team to tweak what they are doing.
These are rare coaching moments when all of the conversations you've set up fall into place. I can't wait for the "reaping" of student learning benefits as we work together on this!
One of the most difficult aspects of coaching is that you rarely reap immediate benefits from your daily work. This is unlike the classroom where you are continually seeing growth students make as a direct result of your work together. So it took me over a week before I made the connections between all of the conversations that had to happen in order for one particular instance to take place: a teacher inviting me in to look at how her students were responding to instruction. As a coach, these are the dream type of situations that you hope for. Teachers wanting to talk about and examine instruction. Unfortunately, it's taken me years to realize these opportunities rarely just "fall into our laps". So here is how the seeds were sown.
Over the summer and through the beginning of the school year, I read John Hattie's book Visible Learning. The more I read of the book, the more passionate I became about the work I needed to do in order to make the most impact on student learning. I was so motivated that I put together a short presentation for our leadership team. At the end of the presentation, it sounded a little like this. Then the conversation went in a direction that I had not intended. Team members were asking the administrator, "So your expectation is that we all work with the coach." What I was hoping to hear was, "So our focus should be on what students are getting out of instruction and how we can learn about this."
Fast forward to three months later. Right before holiday break, a teacher approached me to work with her (yay!) and asked for ideas on what we should work on together. I asked the teacher what she was curious about and what she wanted to learn about her students. I didn't put the pressure on for an immediate reaction and didn't hear back for several weeks.
Then, during a professional development session, the same teacher asked if I could work with her team to observe students during independent practice times. She and her team would use the observations to determine if what they were having students do was the best approach and work as a team to tweak what they are doing.
These are rare coaching moments when all of the conversations you've set up fall into place. I can't wait for the "reaping" of student learning benefits as we work together on this!
Friday, January 4, 2013
Tech Integration or Ed Reform?
An overall concept I've been struggling with this academic year is technology integration. Dr. Scott McCleod has been working with a group of our school and community members on how best to approach this with our school system. As a building that is trying to integrate a small amount of iPads at the elementary level, we have been struggling with what this should look like for our students. As I originally feared, this is not a topic that can be simply addressed.
At the same time, as other districts and states are, we struggle to incorporate the Iowa Common Core State Standards into our teaching. Just as we can't simply incorporate iPads into the way we currently teach, we can't "do the Core" and do what we have always done.
Today, a couple of amazing instructional coaches presented what they learned at an assessment conference. One of the resources they shared with us was sample items and performance tasks from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. I am convinced that if teachers were exposed to tasks like this for students, they would immediately begin to change the way they think about what they have students doing in the classroom.
While I would love for someone to just place in my lap the learning we need to do as educators, I know it will not be this easy. And so our journey begins.
At the same time, as other districts and states are, we struggle to incorporate the Iowa Common Core State Standards into our teaching. Just as we can't simply incorporate iPads into the way we currently teach, we can't "do the Core" and do what we have always done.
Today, a couple of amazing instructional coaches presented what they learned at an assessment conference. One of the resources they shared with us was sample items and performance tasks from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. I am convinced that if teachers were exposed to tasks like this for students, they would immediately begin to change the way they think about what they have students doing in the classroom.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Silence or Violence?
As I continue my journey with the book Crucial Conversations, I am starting to notice people's patterns of communication more and more. Trying to separate myself and my reactions to a conversation can be very tricky. I have known for a while that my own method of reaction when I don't feel safe is silence. I withhold information and cease communication. Others who are close to me react differently by trying to emphasize their ideas and point out the weakness in my own. The trick to being able to turn things around is by stepping out of the situation and examining what is truly going on.
I can remember the first time I consciously stepped away from a situation to problem solve this way. It was my first year of teaching. I had a very chatty group of first graders and, as a first year teacher, I still needed a lot of work on my management skills. In the middle of a math lesson, when I really needed students to pay attention, I stopped. I took a deep breath and looked around. I thought to myself, "What will really grab these kids' attention in a positive way so that I can carry on with instruction?" And that was the day "Mr. Shush" was born. I grabbed a dry-erase marker from the over-head projector (that might date me a bit). I quickly drew a smiley face on one of my fingers. With a deep breath and a smile on my face, I turned around and said, "Boys and girls, I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine. He will really only come out if everyone is very quiet, and he would really like to meet you!" With that, I put up my index finger and introduced those six and seven year-olds to Mr. Shush. Guess what? It worked! No joke. Now...please know that I worked from then on to preempt the need for Mr. Shush. But I realized then that in order to change a tricky situation, I needed to pause before I reacted and decide on the best way to procede.
How often does this happen when we find ourselves in tricky conversations with adults? How often do we let our own agendas and emotions take control and prevent us from contributing to the Pool of Knowledge? I think I will use Mr. Shush again. But this time I will use him for myself.
I can remember the first time I consciously stepped away from a situation to problem solve this way. It was my first year of teaching. I had a very chatty group of first graders and, as a first year teacher, I still needed a lot of work on my management skills. In the middle of a math lesson, when I really needed students to pay attention, I stopped. I took a deep breath and looked around. I thought to myself, "What will really grab these kids' attention in a positive way so that I can carry on with instruction?" And that was the day "Mr. Shush" was born. I grabbed a dry-erase marker from the over-head projector (that might date me a bit). I quickly drew a smiley face on one of my fingers. With a deep breath and a smile on my face, I turned around and said, "Boys and girls, I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine. He will really only come out if everyone is very quiet, and he would really like to meet you!" With that, I put up my index finger and introduced those six and seven year-olds to Mr. Shush. Guess what? It worked! No joke. Now...please know that I worked from then on to preempt the need for Mr. Shush. But I realized then that in order to change a tricky situation, I needed to pause before I reacted and decide on the best way to procede.
How often does this happen when we find ourselves in tricky conversations with adults? How often do we let our own agendas and emotions take control and prevent us from contributing to the Pool of Knowledge? I think I will use Mr. Shush again. But this time I will use him for myself.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Great Day of Learning
Today was a fabulous day for our building for building relationships. Just coming back from a nice long break, we were ready to engage in some learning. Our focus today was people, PLCs, and student learning. Embedded within this was trust, collaboration, and learning. Our instructional leader (i.e. principal) took us through some fun team-building exercises as well as meaningful conversations as a group.
This is the first year our teams have been able to drive their own learning. Many were excited to dig in and created a plan based on student needs/teacher learning needs. What an exciting day! This can only result in better instruction and quality education for our students. How lucky are they?
One of the books I've been reading is Crucial Conversations (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler). A key element you must have when communicating with others is trust. I sat with a team as they looked at student data. One of the newer teachers was visibly uncomfortable with what she saw in her students performance as compared to her peers. I knew I needed to make this a safe place for her to feel comfortable in asking questions and seeking opportunities. We were able to pinpoint the spot that her students had trouble. Another teammate pointed out that this was something her team had worked on in previous years and how they had addressed this. Immediately, the newer teacher looked relieved and began asking questions.What a perfect example of one teacher creating a safe environment for her team!
This is the first year our teams have been able to drive their own learning. Many were excited to dig in and created a plan based on student needs/teacher learning needs. What an exciting day! This can only result in better instruction and quality education for our students. How lucky are they?
One of the books I've been reading is Crucial Conversations (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler). A key element you must have when communicating with others is trust. I sat with a team as they looked at student data. One of the newer teachers was visibly uncomfortable with what she saw in her students performance as compared to her peers. I knew I needed to make this a safe place for her to feel comfortable in asking questions and seeking opportunities. We were able to pinpoint the spot that her students had trouble. Another teammate pointed out that this was something her team had worked on in previous years and how they had addressed this. Immediately, the newer teacher looked relieved and began asking questions.What a perfect example of one teacher creating a safe environment for her team!
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