Coaching

SOTW:  Hierarchical Analysis

Want to have your students think about the concepts you are teaching at a higher level?

Try having them rank them in hierarchical order of importance… 

I came across a video of the strategy in action on the Teaching Channel: 

Directions: 

Student Example from a Spanish 1 Class

1. Students read a text highlighting important words/concepts (give them a specific purpose).
2. Individually students list the most important concepts found within the text in the boxes.
3. Students partner up and discuss rationale for why they included the concepts in the boxes.
4. Students join another partnership and together place the concepts in hierarchical order of importance (triangle) and provide rationale on the lines next to it.

Graphic Organizer Link

Want Teachers to Grow? Provide In-House Professional Development and Instructional Coaching 

For the past three years I have offered monthly hour long workshops to our staff during their planning periods. Because we are on a 4 x 4 block schedule, the teachers voluntarily attend this workshop and still have between 30-45 minutes of plan time to get ready for their next class.  I do this along with meeting individually with about six to eight teachers per week.  

The workshop model can be a crucial element for teacher growth.  We all know that our teachers care about their students and want to help them in any way they can.  Attending outside workshops can be difficult for teachers because they don't want to write sub plans or lose a "day of content" being gone. Workshops outside of school are also tough for teachers because they are run with a "one and done" approach.  There is no follow-up, no presenter who they can run to with questions after they try something in class for the first time.  The teachers who attend my workshops love them because they don't have to miss school and usually walk away with one idea that they can use in their classroom that day.  Providing in-house workshops for staff has given them an opportunity to work with me without committing to weekly or bi-weekly individual meetings.  They come with a willingness to learn and know exactly where to find me when they have questions or need help.  

When I first proposed offering these workshops to our staff, my focus was strictly on infusing reading strategies into the teacher's classrooms.  The teachers were being told that they must teach reading in their content area courses. Many came to me frustrated that their students were unable to comprehend these complex texts, and they had no idea how to teach students to summarize or synthesize materials.  Sound familiar?  This was something that as teachers they assumed the students had been taught in middle school and reality proved that even if they have been taught, they simply were unable to transfer their skills to new courses.  The workshops evolved over the years from a reading and writing focus to a digital literacy focus since our school has gone 1:1.

Each workshop follows this same simple format:

• Introductory activity to get teachers thinking 
• Workshop objectives
• Quick review of the research (why we need to teach these skills)
• 2-4 strategies - we will model and practice at least two specific ones
• Closing debrief - thoughts and take-aways

Planning Ideas:

Over the course of three years doing this I have learned a lot about what makes a worthy workshop for teachers.  

#1 - Don't share too much research or talk at them for to long.  We aren't supposed to do this with our students so I know better than to do this with teachers.  Teachers need to be engaged and doing things.  They don't want to hear more than 30 seconds on why it is important to teach our students these skills.  They need to know how to do it.  

#2 - Narrow down to your favorite strategies to share in the workshop.  Don't overwhelm the teachers with too much.  Have you ever been to a conference where you received an enormous packet of materials that they presenter never went over or rushed through at the end to make sure you got it?  I have been to plenty of them and I always walk away with my head spinning.  It is important not to do this with staff.  Pick a few and save the others for another year or when you meet individually with teachers.

#3 - Pick two strategies to model and then have them practice.  In one of my favorite workshops on vocabulary, I had the teachers in small groups moving around the room completing a carousel brainstorming activity using ACT vocabulary.  Of course they grumbled at first about having to get out of their seats, but by the end of the second round of brainstorming, they were engaged and having fun learning the vocabulary.

#4 - Plan out your workshops ahead of time.  I am already starting to think about what workshops I want to offer our staff for next year.  After spring break I sit down with my department chair and the curriculum director and organize the future workshops based on staff needs. At the beginning of the school year, I share workshop topics and dates at our first staff meeting and remind them to block their calendars for the ones they are most interested in. Teachers are organized by fault and giving this information to them on day one reminds them that I am here to support them in any way that they need.

#5 - Don't be afraid to send out reminders numerous times.  For each workshop, I send out at least four reminders and I ask teachers to RSVP to me.  This may seem like a lot, but I choose different times of the day to send out the emails and am amazed how I always get responses back from each email.  Teachers get bogged down with school so they may miss the first three reminders but then see the fourth.  

#6 - Provide some snacks for each workshop (my school reimburses me.)  I don't provide drinks too often, but the snacks always go a long way.  Bagels, fruit, granola bars, snack mix, chips, hummus and veggies, and of course - chocolate.  Teachers are so grateful for the little pick me up during the day.  

#7 - Offer to model or co-teach the strategies from the workshop in classes.  This simple gesture helps teacher's comfort levels and builds trust.  Not everyone takes me up on the offer, but they do appreciate my willingness to show them (and their students) the scaffolding process in class.  

In-house professional development has been essential for the growth the teachers in my school have made.  When they talk to teachers who work elsewhere about the professional development offered to them in school, they realize how lucky they are that our school offers workshops and coaches to meet with during the school day.

Book Love_The Importance of Reading Choice in a Secondary Classroom

As a former 4th/5th grade multiage teacher, I have always believed in using a readers workshop/ writers workshop approach to teaching English, but convincing high school teachers to read books like Donalyn Miller's, Reading in the Wild, and The Book Whisper and try it in their classes was difficult.  They had not been taught high school English in that way and many felt like this was an elementary/middle school approach.  That changed when I came across Penny Kittle's book, Book Love. From the moment I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.  My book is filled with post-it notes, highlights, and annotations. Here is a high school English teacher who approaches reading and writing in the same way was I taught and is finding success.  I was so excited about this book that I could not stop talking about it in the English office.  I carried it with me all the time and tried to share her ideas anytime I could during my literacy coaching meetings.  I honestly think my department chair thought I was crazy. 

Last spring, the best thing happened - a Heinemann flyer showed up in my mailbox. Penny Kittle was coming to Wisconsin, just an hour or so away from where I live.  My department chair sent me along with another English teacher.  We were so inspired by Penny Kittle's stories that we came back to school and had to share what we learned with our department.  We approached it by sharing clips from her YouTube video with the boys sharing their thoughts on reading.  These boys are like many of the students in our classes and we wanted them to see how this approach can change student beliefs. Once they saw the connections, we were able to share her philosophy and approach to reading and writing in English.

Our Presentation to the Department

Then the magic happened.  One of our junior English teachers asked for the book, read it, and took the plunge both feet in this fall.  He relied a lot on ideas from both Book Love and Penny Kittle's book, Write Beside Them.  Taking the reading/writing workshop approach was not by any means the easy route.  All semester long he felt like a brand new teacher and was spending a lot of time searching for meaningful mentor texts, redesigning lessons, and reading tons and tons of books.  He enlisted other teachers to come to class and share their favorite books too.  I began to hunt down other Book Love followers, like Amy Rasmussan and her crew of teachers who write a blog called Three Teachers Talk.  These teachers inspired me with their posts and I began sharing these posts with him.

Little by little, Book Love started to spread.  In addition to the junior teacher, a few other teachers started adding book talks and independent reading into their daily routines.  By the beginning of second term, two more teachers decided to take the plunge and redesign their classrooms as well.  The conversations these teachers are having with each other is inspiring to me.  Students are reading more books than they ever have before and many are beginning to see themselves as true readers and writers. One of these teachers had over 300 different books read in her classroom during term two. 300! Our students are picking up books that stretch their thinking and challenge them. They aren't just reading "easy" books or only YA.  One student read all of Kurt Vonnegut's books this term. Another junior who has dyslexia and hasn't read a book all the way through since grade school, read over twenty books this semester.  They understand the importance now of building a reading and writing stamina as they prepare for their future.  Above all, these students were thanking their teachers for igniting a passion for reading and writing that they had lost a long time ago. Now if that isn't the best holiday gift for a teacher, then I don't know what is!

Courtesy of Pixabay

Patience and Time:  The Most Important Aspects of Coaching

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.