Coaching Retrospective: What impact have we had in five years? A little over five years ago, I sat across the table from seven or eight of our school’s senior leadership team to be interviewed for a newly-created position: Teaching and Learning Coach. “Tell us about a time you helped others be reflective.” “What do you think about when you are planning instruction?” The questions weren’t hard to answer, but I had no idea what they thought of my responses. At the time, I really didn’t have a clear concept of what the role of Teaching & Learning Coach would entail or whether I would be a good fit. I went home thinking I had quite possibly embarrassed myself in front of the whole LLT. I guess I did okay in the interview though, because eventually I was offered the role, and became part of a cross-school team. The team has ebbed and flowed a bit over these five years, but one thing has been very consistent: the group of people I’ve been privileged to work w...
The coaches have titled this blog ‘Here and Now’ and I have to confess that I am not teaching a class this year so the challenges of the hybrid situation some teachers are faced with is a step beyond my own experience. I did, however, reflect quite a bit about what was working (and not!) for my students in the online environment last year.
The hardest thing? I think it was trying to continue teaching for understanding using a guided inquiry approach. Well, parts of that approach at least, were super difficult. Creating situations where students express their thinking, challenge each other’s thinking and negotiate meaning in real time is not as easy online. I tried to reserve the synchronous sessions to plan activities that would achieve this, but even then...as a teacher you can only be in one breakout room at a time, and can’t have your ear tuned to what is happening in the rest of the ‘classroom’. This makes probing student thinking in real time and identifying misconceptions very hit and miss.
So…. reserving the limited number of synchronous sessions for interactive inquiry activities meant other things had to be done asynchronously. As it turned out though, I found that some kinds of learning targets actually worked as well, if not better, asynchronously. Sometimes we do things at school just because we have 20 students in a small space. Removing that constraint let me think about what kinds of things I could personalise more. Competency learning turned out to be ideal. Why?
Modelling and deconstruction can easily be done using video, which may in some ways work better than in person since students can pause it, slow it down, watch it again, etc. Here's an example of one I used with my students.
You can also make multiple videos, so different students can view a deconstruction that focuses on different aspects of the model ( or even a different model)
Practice exercises can be 100% aimed at the particular strategy each individual student is currently working on
ISB Competency Cycle
The challenge was to try and reduce the teacher workload. Making multiple videos and creating a large variety of practice exercises for a variety of strategies is a ton of work, but once it’s done, it’s done. You can use them again and again. The key to freeing up the time to create videos and practice exercises was surely to harness the power of self-assessment as much as possible... to find ways for students to work through their practice and move on to application with less direct teacher guidance. Didn’t really crack this, I have to admit, but a couple of tools certainly helped:
A rubric - I focused on one critical task type in social studies - writing an effective argument, and created a rubric that described the skills a student would need to write an effective one. If you want to take a look, you can find it here.
A student tracker - I experimented with a student tracking sheet where once a student had identified a skill to set as a goal from the rubric, they could track their strategy use from beginning practice to application. On the tracker I could also see all the practice exercises the student had completed and their reflections on application tasks.
A long way from perfect, but it was definitely successful enough for me to want to carry over some of the strategies to the classroom next time I teach in person.
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