Coaching Strategies for Classroom Success
Welcome back to the TLC (not so) Weekly! We have missed you and want to kick off second semester with a new blog series on instructional coaching. In this post you will read about a quality Internal U course District 214 has to offer, next week I'll blog about my experience being coached by Dawn, and then future posts will talk about the impact of TLC and exciting new professional development opportunities. Keep reading!
Along with Nichole Anderson, Denise Chapman, and many other district colleagues, I took an Internal U course this fall called Coaching Strategies for Classroom Success, taught by Gabriella Stetz Jackson and Kate Glass. The goal of the course was for us to learn about instructional coaching and how to use it as a resource to improve teaching and learning. We also applied our new learning to our classrooms in order to evaluate ourselves and enhance student engagement.
As part of this course, we spent a lot of time reading and discussing two texts by instructional coaching guru, Jim Knight. The first, Better Conversations, is a book that our own administrative team has been reading this year. The basis of the book is exactly what the title implies - how can we have better conversations (with really anyone in our life, but specifically) as we reflect on our teaching? The second, High-Impact Instruction: A Framework for Great Teaching, is written for educators and is a succinct collection of strategies and ideas for great teaching.
Throughout the course, we used these texts to think about our own classroom and how we affect people around us within our PLTs, our departments, etc. The beauty of the course was that as we were thinking about elevating our instruction, we also talked about an established framework for critically thinking about our own teaching and how we can use others, especially someone like an instructional coach, as a resource to continue to push ourselves.
One of the assignments that we had in class was to videotape ourselves teaching a class. Jim Knight is a huge proponent of using video as a powerful tool in our practice. Check out this video for his thoughts on it. The general idea is that by viewing our own videos, we are able to see a clear picture of ourselves and use that to be even better at what we do. And who doesn't want to get better? I know I do.
Along with Nichole Anderson, Denise Chapman, and many other district colleagues, I took an Internal U course this fall called Coaching Strategies for Classroom Success, taught by Gabriella Stetz Jackson and Kate Glass. The goal of the course was for us to learn about instructional coaching and how to use it as a resource to improve teaching and learning. We also applied our new learning to our classrooms in order to evaluate ourselves and enhance student engagement.
Throughout the course, we used these texts to think about our own classroom and how we affect people around us within our PLTs, our departments, etc. The beauty of the course was that as we were thinking about elevating our instruction, we also talked about an established framework for critically thinking about our own teaching and how we can use others, especially someone like an instructional coach, as a resource to continue to push ourselves.
One of the assignments that we had in class was to videotape ourselves teaching a class. Jim Knight is a huge proponent of using video as a powerful tool in our practice. Check out this video for his thoughts on it. The general idea is that by viewing our own videos, we are able to see a clear picture of ourselves and use that to be even better at what we do. And who doesn't want to get better? I know I do.
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