Patience and Time: The Most Important Aspects of Coaching Teachers

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Every year, during the holiday season I like take a moment to reflect on how grateful I am for the job I am allowed to do everyday.  How many people can say that there job is to sit down and get to know their colleagues? I learn about their families, their students, and all the ways they want to be better teachers in the classroom.  There is not a day that goes by where I am doing the same lesson over and over again.  My job is constantly changing as the teachers I work with are growing and evolving themselves.

When I first started in this position, I was asked to help teachers infuse reading, writing, and vocabulary into their content area classes.  In the beginning, I was able to get a few "jumpers" who were ready and willing to become "reading" teachers in their content. Little by little, with a lot of patience and gentle nudging from teammates and me, I have gotten more and more teachers to join the literacy bandwagon. Teachers are thinking about purpose and skills and modeling and scaffolding more than ever before.  And because of this, our students are being asked to read and write and critically think and discuss arguments more than ever before.  I would be lying if I said every teacher in our school has changed.  That isn't realistic.  But what is important is that more and more teachers are now talking about these skills in their daily conversations.  They are asking each other for help and coming to me to create new lessons when they reflect on ones their students struggled with in the past.  They now see the importance of combining skills and content to help push their students to a higher level.

When people ask me how we do this at our school, the first words that come to my mind are patience and time.  This change has taken time - lots and lots of time.  It has taken four years of hard work, weekly meetings, and an abundance of in-house staff development to patiently help teachers see the importance of disciplinary literacy skills.  Now that we have gone 1:1 with Chromebooks, I feel like I am starting all over again with a new focus on digital literacy.  It is never ending, but that is where patience comes in.  Some teachers I work with are able to incorporate the skills into their lessons right away and for others, it has been a slow yet positive and encouraging process.

If I can offer one piece of advice, I have learned, please don't ever give up on the teachers who are not ready to work with you right away or those you meet with each week that don't seem to be doing anything different in their classes.  One day it will click - your voice will pop up in the back of their head as they are planning a lesson and they will take your advice and try something new in their classes.  You may even get a surprisingly email from a colleague who you have quietly been asking to work with you for years, all of a sudden ask, "Can we meet to talk about_____?"  It does happen and I am starting to see it more and more often.  Just be patient, encouraging, and give them time to ask for help in their own accord.