Skyrocket Your Teacher Coaching. Michael Cary Sonbert

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      Introduction

      When I was a new teacher, I had a coach. She was great. Friendly and supportive and knowledgeable. We talked about my lessons and she gave me a lot of ideas to incorporate into my teaching. One piece of coaching she gave me was about the volume of my voice: it was too loud as I was instructing, and it was likely off-putting for the students sitting in front of me. At the time, and in hindsight, she was right. So, I lowered my voice. But it wasn’t an earth-shattering shift. It didn’t change me as a teacher. It didn’t change what my students did or what they produced, even though it was helpful.

      When I was a more advanced teacher, I had a coach as well. He, too, was equally friendly, supportive, and smart. He shared ideas and materials, and I really enjoyed working with him. He provided me with sentence starters, and as a result, my students started using academic language in response to my questions and their classmates’ answers. Again, that was very helpful, but again, this coaching didn’t radically change my practice or what my students produced.

      I eventually became an instructional coach myself. I wasn’t half bad: a solid relationship builder with a strong ELA background and the ability to motivate teachers. Still, if I’m being totally honest, most of what I coached teachers on early in my tenure didn’t drastically change their practice. It was what I call “suggestion-based coaching.” I thought of something, and I shared it. I shared it in a “Hey, it would be cool if you tried this” type of way. And I have no doubt I made some helpful suggestions at the time. Likely my material-share and my support around lesson planning were appreciated. And, I believe my teachers enjoyed working with me. Still, something was missing.

      If you’re reading this, you likely agree that teachers need to be amazing for students. And we know that, in many places, principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, lead and master teachers, site-based teacher leaders, and so on, all coach teachers. But, too often, like me or the teachers I coached early on, the teachers aren’t improving quickly enough.

      The question is, why not?

      I eventually became the director of strategic partnerships at Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia, and after that, the founder of Skyrocket Educator Training, through which I have trained school leaders and teachers from district, charter, and faith-based schools from over eighty cities around the world, and have provided significant onsite support to leaders and teachers in places like Detroit, New York, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indiana, Delaware, Dallas, and Connecticut, to name a few. Through this work, I have witnessed things like what I described earlier happening in schools and classrooms nearly everywhere: well-meaning and passionate school leaders simply weren’t moving their equally well-meaning and passionate teachers nearly as quickly as they needed to. And while, when it comes to instructional coaching gaps, it can seem like every school is different and every challenge is unique to that building and those leaders, teachers, and students, there are really only three key trends that are appearing nationally.

      The first trend exists in schools where school leaders don’t have any grounding documents or shared language around instruction and teacher coaching. There isn’t anything they can point to that lays out precisely what excellent teaching or excellent coaching looks like. So, often, after an observation, leaders speak to teachers from a place of what they like or think or feel versus using unbiased data and proven best practices to drive their feedback. Meetings often sound like, “I really like the way you did X. Maybe next time you should try Y.” In these schools, there’s little to no mention of student data, very little modeling or training, and the feedback is either acted upon or not. Because shared language is lacking, even the most well-intentioned and passionate leaders can’t speak succinctly with other leaders about teachers, students, or their progress; and, because teachers aren’t clearly being told what to do to be more impactful, some teachers are frustrated. However, most simply have an inflated sense of their skill level and effectiveness. Which makes sense, as their “coaching” meetings are usually very general. The leaders talk a bunch about what they like and make a few suggestions, but they rarely give any actionable next steps. As a result, teachers think they are excelling, when in fact they would benefit from intense training on basic to advanced skills. But the truth is, in many of these schools, observations and feedback rarely happen anyway. These leaders spend most of their days in their offices, responding to emails, organizing field trips, handling operations issues, and meeting with parents. And often, poor instruction is accepted as the norm.

      The second trend exists at schools that do have certain frameworks or rubrics around teaching and coaching. In many cases, leaders attended trainings on those models, and in other cases, the trainers came to them. The problem here is that these frameworks and rubrics are very dense, and much of the language is gray (“most students, some students”). So, often, the leaders aren’t experts at the very thing they’re attempting to train their teachers on. They have these impressive frameworks, but they’re barely being used; when they are being used, they aren’t being used effectively. I observe leaders from all around the country speaking very generally and hesitantly about instruction while flipping through multiple-page documents that they themselves haven’t fully internalized, and neither have their teachers. Leaders in these schools try to observe teachers and provide meaningful feedback (though the “feedback” often comes in the form of emailed “action steps,” which the teachers need to have real training on, rather than just an email about), but it’s often so broad and across multiple domains, so their meetings aren’t as intentional as they can be. Also, teachers can feel totally overwhelmed by the amount of feedback they receive, sometimes being told they need to tighten up their entry routine, write more meaningful objectives, and have students working in groups, all in one meeting. I call this “feedback shrapnel.” It doesn’t make teachers better. They just duck to get out of its way, all while potentially feeling like they’re failing miserably because they’re getting feedback on so much at once. Without leaders and teachers hyperfocused on what good instruction is, without leaders narrowing in on every teacher’s most important next step, and without significant training and follow-up on those next steps, these docs (which I do believe contain a lot of the “right” stuff) are as useless as the most decadent cheesecake is to a person who is lactose intolerant.

      The final trend is around leaders’ cherry-picking of skills that aren’t the most important next step for their schools. A powerful example of this occurred at a school I visited in Detroit. The leaders had just run a training on Cold Call that they were very excited about. They’d read about Cold Call in a text and decided that it was exactly what their school needed. The problem was, they missed the mark. This wasn’t the school’s most logical next step. Because when I asked teachers in the building if it was an effective training and if they felt like it was what they needed, many responded that they simply wanted to know how to get their students to sit down. I get that no one becomes an educator so they can practice giving directions or designing routines for handing out papers. They get into it so they can ask deep questions and share their passion for their content with young people. So, I get why these leaders defaulted to Cold Call before some of the more foundational classroom culture skills. But in doing so, they risked totally disinvesting their teachers and their students. Think about a teacher who’s having trouble building a strong culture in his class, asking a question that no one is listening to, and then cold calling on a student—who likely didn’t even hear the question—to respond. I witnessed this. As you can imagine, the more the teacher pushed, the angrier the student got, until eventually he erupted and stormed out of the room. Interactions like this lead teachers to lose faith in their leaders, and students to lose faith in their teachers. And then, in some cases, teachers default to saying toxic things like, “That doesn’t work with my kids,” when it’s time to try executing that skill again.

      These СКАЧАТЬ