The Instructional Coach Academy

Remember your college days, where you were assigned to a group of peers who did not always have your work ethic or attention to detail?  Did you carry that group to an “A” or mourn when they brought your grade down?  The outcomes were important then to your GPA.  The teams you lead now as an Instructional Coach have greater implications than those college cohorts, despite how important the GPA felt then.

This is a new role for me, and the challenges of a dysfunctional team require deliberate practice and reflection. We know all too well that not every teacher shows up ready to teach, fully understanding solid pedagogy, with a bag of engagement tips and tricks, and with the fervor needed to deeply understand the curriculum and its correlation to how developmental psychology says that students learn.

As an Instructional Coach, our emphasis must be to impact the teaching in the classrooms.  When our teams are not working together, it is our job to help fix it.  We know that collaboration in planning is important because it benefits those teachers who lack the ability to instill rigor into lessons, struggle with building engagement, or generally need that little extra.  We must bring our dysfunctional teams to a place of understanding of the RIGHT work.  Patrick Lencioni, the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, describes the hierarchy of issues that teams face when trying to accomplish a goal.

Trust

In a grade level team, the teachers have often worked together for some time, possibly even years.  As a new coach, I am an outsider.  I am also seen as the administration which means I could be evaluative, and possibly dangerous.  Establishing trust is the first step in truly joining the team to hold sway and make an impact.  Time together can help to ease these concerns.  Reaching out to individuals and meeting with subsets of the team are also strategies that can lead to a more cohesive team.  Ultimately it goes back to the old adage:  People don’t care what you know until they know that you care!  Establishing a safe environment where the growth mindset can truly exist is crucial.

However, teams have a history together which can lead to a lack of trust.  The more you know about each person’s style of communication, the better you can facilitate productive conflict.  Conflict is inevitable, and if you are not comfortable with handling it rationally, you can build those skills through practice and professional development.  Productive conflict can be healing because it involves changing perspectives and focuses on solutions.  Teams can express their emotions as well as their viewpoints.  This struggle creates equilibrium within the team if it is properly facilitated.  It is imperative that after a productive conflict, the team debriefs and reflects on the issue as well as the process, becoming metacognitive of the way they worked through the issue together.  This builds capacity in the team towards future communication.

Commitment

When dealing with teachers, it is not often that you run across someone who lacks commitment to their students.  However, for many reasons, you will find teachers who lack a commitment to their team, administration, or school in general.  Once the teacher loses commitment from the top-down, though, it can translate into a loss of commitment to students.  Then you have the teachers who are committed to their own performance over the actual performance of the students.  These are the teachers who give a little too much information before an assessment, putting their proverbial finger on the scale so that students perform better than they should or would.  These teachers may enter data towards growth that may not be solid or even true.  But since the culture shifts failure back to the teacher instead of diagnosing and remediating the problems of the students, it is no wonder that teachers feel the need to tip the scale so their performance appears highly effective.  Sadly, this cheats the students out of access to RTI, small group instruction, and thus leaving them stranded in their deficit.

In collaborative planning, those teachers who are busy doing the work begin to resent those who are disengaged.  In order to re-engage a staff member who has lost commitment, understanding why the disengagement occurred, developing a personal relationship, and rebuilding trust in the team is crucial.  There have been times in my 25 years of teaching that I have lost commitment.  While it’s disheartening to admit it, it is true.  Why this happened varied with the situation, but it has happened more than once.  For me, I’ve always been aware of the level of my commitment and exactly when it is lost.  I have found that many people are not, however, aware of when or where they lost that commitment, engagement, and focus.  Sometimes all it takes is bringing it to the attention of the team member for it to be corrected.  You may need to rebuild the team from the ground up, though.  It will be worth the work if it benefits students, and, as coaches, we are not afraid of hard work!

Accountability

Everyone resents accountability to some degree.  Don’t believe me?  I can prove it.  How do you feel when you are getting pulled over while driving?  Are you easy going, relaxed?  Do you say to the officer, “Yes, I was speeding, and I welcome the chance to pay for this ticket!”  Our administrators, district office, state laws all place requirements on us.  Our curriculum has guidelines.  Parents of students have expectations that are often seem unrealistic.  How we respond to accountability depends on our personality and life experiences.  It is often a strong trigger for some people.  Reflection on our own level of accountability is useful in creating change, but calling out an individual or even a team related to a lack of accountability will backfire. Ensure that clear expectations are established and communicated clearly and in advance.  The lack of clear communication of expectations can lead to administrative dissatisfaction of the teacher’s job performance and to the teacher’s dissatisfaction with the work environment and culture.

Creating change in others begins with a self reflection.  Hypocrisy in this area can create further dysfunction in communication and teamwork if the coach is not viewed as persistent and has a history of not following through.  Negative emotions related to accountability can be changed, however, when people understand the ‘why.’  It is not enough to say that district requires that data to be entered or that administration wants it done.  What does this task lead to?  How will it assist the teacher in being more productive? What impact will this have on student achievement?  When people are treated professionally and provided with a ‘why’ that they can buy into, the resentment of accountability can be lessened.  You will run into people who hate being accountable no matter what.  Continue to build relationships with these teachers.  Continue to hold them accountable in a respectful or professional way.

An interesting subset of teachers lack accountability because of their own lack of executive functioning skills.  Teachers who are persistently late to work or meetings, disorganized, unfocused, or generally flustered often suffer from their own need to strengthen their brain in the area of executive functioning.  The brain is malleable, even if it is a slower process as we age.  Communicating the the employee that improvement in a specific, focused area is critical and why, can lead to that teacher improving.  With adults, we know that they learn more slowly, but also more deeply and in a transformational way.  If a teacher sees the need and commits to a small change, a coach can encourage and be a cheerleader to solidify the change.

Acting on Results

In teaching, we consistently  make data-driven decisions.  We plan instruction based on the results of our data.  We engineer CFAs and exit tickets to ensure that learning occurs.  This is a behavior that should be a habit for educators.  However, do we always act on the results of our knowledge of other team members?  Are we sensitive to the fact that Mrs. A is pregnant, Mr. Y’s wife is in the hospital, and Ms. Z’s test results are not back yet?  We, as coaches, must be sensitive to the changing needs of the team.  We must acknowledge the little steps of growth more than we attempt to remediate other behaviors.  We must be the guide, the facilitator, the mediator, and the cheerleader, all rolled into one.  Deliberate planning for your teams will make your life tremendously easier.  Your coaching plans for individuals may need to be expanded to coaching cycles for teams.  Just like in a classroom, you may not reach every child, remember that we may not reach every teacher.  Those educators with issues beyond your and your administration’s abilities to reach and teach will probably move on next year.  That doesn’t mean stop trying, but keep a realistic goal so that your own sense of success is reasonable.  At the end of the day, if you have given your all to the teams, you are making a difference.

Core competencies in business are typically “soft skills.” Core competencies in academics have potential too. This year, I have the opportunity to facilitate curriculum writing through the lens of core competencies.

I define core competencies as the 10-15 essential skills a student can expect to master during a course. These should be meaningful and transferable skills aligned to relevant state standards. In addition, they should be written in language students are able to comprehend on the first day of class.

Each core competency is broken into component skills that are more content specific and might use subject-specific language that may need to be explicitly taught. Component skills are necessary for mastery of the core competencies.

The process of crafting core competencies is different from many other curriculum writing exercises with which I am familiar. Though I premised this format on backward design, some teachers have opted to work inductively based on their existing knowledge of curriculum to establish core competencies.

Teachers have been given the opportunity to collaborate and develop, either inductively or deductively, a deep understanding of what students will learn.

It has been an interesting process to facilitate so far. Teachers are demonstrating remarkable thoughtfulness and consistent open-minded thinking as they design a curriculum that meets the needs of our students.

By focusing on skills, we have been able to avoid content arguments and the inevitably imprecise language of state standards. Instead, we are talking about what we want students to be able to do and why. We are engaged in a dialogue about what proficiency means and what skills will equip students for their chosen futures.

In addition to consensus and standards alignment, teachers in each subject area will also be required to come to a genuine consensus on the core competencies for all courses in their field.

I wouldn’t call this a tedious process…meticulous perhaps. The teachers have become deeply engaged and are questioning what they teach and why.

I doubt most instructional leaders have are able to devote the kind of time to this process that I am incredibly lucky to have. Nonetheless, I believe that spending more on the conceptual end of curriculum development has several significant positive impacts:

1. Teachers develop a deeper understanding of what they are teaching and why.
2. A culture of collaboration.
3. Well-defined, flexible, and meaningful curriculum.
4. Students held at the center of the curriculum process.
5. Teachers are treated as professionals and experts.
6. Alignment is increased within courses, across courses, and across teachers and sections.

I think core competencies have the potential to help leaders manage the curriculum writing process in a meaningful, effective way.

It is vitally important to have systems to manage coaching tasks effectively. Every coach needs systems to give teachers feedback. Without systems in place, coaches can easily become overwhelmed by other tasks and lose track of observations, feedback, and coaching conversations. Coaches also need tools to manage the paperwork needed to track coaching activities.

My recommendations for a strong system to manage coaching tasks include the following:

1. Keep private notes about each teacher and how best to communicate with them.
2. Develop a coaching plan collaboratively with each teacher that can guide your feedback.
3. Create a simple, consistent format for taking notes while observing.
4. Provide descriptive feedback to teachers in a timely fashion.
5. Use a system to track observations, notes, and coaching conversations.
6. Document everything with minimal time and effort.

Finding a system that works for you to manage coaching tasks can be challenging. Fortunately, Google Tools provides numerous time-saving opportunities.

These are the Google tools I use to successfully meet all six of the criteria above:

• Google Docs: For note-taking and collaborating, Google Docs is incredibly valuable. I can create a Doc to keep detailed private notes. Also, a teacher and I can collaborate to complete a coaching plan template we can both access. I then have a record of any added information and can always retrieve deleted information. In addition, I can access and edit my Docs on any internet-capable device.
• Google Drive: Drive is the folder structure for all my Google creations. By intentionally creating nesting folders and naming things clearly, I can easily organize my materials. Folders also give me an added layer of control over who can view, comment on, or edit various documents.
• Google Forms: Observation forms tend to range from ridiculous to cumbersome to downright useless. Forms allow a coach to create a customized format for consistently collecting specific information and recording descriptive feedback for teachers. As with Google Docs, Forms gives me significant control and easy access.
• Google Sheets: Compiling information is both important and potentially tedious. Too often, coaches spend much of their limited time generating records of the work they do. Sheets provide opportunities for coaches to create systems to give teachers feedback and conduct record-keeping activities easily. When a Form is made, the coach can automatically generate a Sheet of all submissions that can be manipulated for data analysis purposes.
• Certify’em: Certify’em is an add-on for Google Forms that has been a life-saver for me. I have written about it in more detail here. This add-on automatically generates certificates for submissions and emails them to each person who completes the form. Gone are the days of creating certificates so teachers have documentation of their PD hours. This handy little system automates the whole process AND creates a spreadsheet for the coach’s records.
• Simply Send: Simply Send is another add-on for Google Forms that is a game changer. This add-on will generate a PDF of answers submitted on a form and email them to whomever the creator designates. I have the PDF sent to the observer (me and my principals). The observer can then forward the PDF to the teacher. The teacher receives feedback almost instantly. The observer and the teacher both have a permanent electronic record of the observation notes. The observer has the record in email and in an auto-generated folder in Drive.
• Sheet Go: Sheet Go is also an add-on, this time for Google Sheets. If a coach, like myself, is not an expert at writing scripts(??) to make spreadsheets do magical data transferring things, then this add-on is the answer. Sheet Go allows the user to create connections that feed data from one spreadsheet to another without having to know the details of how computer language works. The free version allows for a limited number of connections. If you need more than that, the small cost of the upgrade is well worth it.

Google isn’t the only option for using technology to streamline coaching. These suggestions show just a fragment of the options to manage coaching tasks using Google tools. No matter what tools you use, make sure they actively improve your workflow. It can be a challenge to find time to coach in an instructional coach position. Managing coaching tasks effectively is an important part of the job.