A Reflective Practitioner: What Have I Done to Provide Effective and Efficient Coaching?

Carrie Sand contributed today's post. Read Carrie's previous posts here.

In my November blog, I posed the question... “Small District + Big Goals = Varied Roles for a Literacy Coach: How to provide effective and efficient coaching when time is tight?”  Throughout the course of the year, I have used that guiding question as the foundation for much of my work and professional development as a literacy coach/ interventionist/ teacher. In addition, I have used this work as the inspiration for my blog posts, a place where I shared experiences and took time to reflect on my process. This mantra: “How to implement big change when time and money is tight?” has helped me focus my coaching process and initiatives. As the year concludes, I thought that this blog post would be a good opportunity to review and reflect on that process as a whole.

When trying to “Bring Back the Book Club” (January), I realized that any professional development works as long as it is timely and appropriate to your staff needs. It also helps to have a really great text that teachers want to read. For my staff, I have found that they enjoy books that are quick, easy, “how to” reads that provide short chapters, quick explanations, and ideas for easy implementation. Some of the tried and true favorites have been:

• Elementary: That Workshop Book by Samantha Bennett and Choice Words and Opening Minds by Peter Johnston
• Middle School: Text and Lesson for Content-Area Reading by Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Nancy Steineke and Mechanically Inclined by Jeff Anderson
• High School: Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines by Doug Buehl and Write Like This by Kelly Gallagher

Even using short chapters or excerpt as focus points helped guide our conversations and expand our knowledge base.

In thinking about initiating more purposeful PLC and coaching conversations, I addressed the need to give teachers a more academic language in “Centering Curriculum Conversations Around Learning Targets” (February).  From this initiative I learned that much in the same way we provide students with academic vocabulary to take part in the discourse of our content areas, coaches must do the same for teachers. Introducing the concept of learning targets and providing resources and development about learning targets helped to accomplish the goal of fostering  meaningful conversations centered around student learning.

Much like giving teachers accessibility to engage in rigorous discourse,  I thought about how to continue work with disciplinary content reading and writing at the secondary level. I modeled the professional development for “Disciplinary Literacy-A Science Focus” (March) around the Doug Buehl term “Discourse Outsiders.” Within his book Buehl claims that students in our content areas often feel like “discourse outsiders.” This phrase refers to the idea that many students come into our classrooms without the vocabulary, concepts, or experiences to proficiently interact with the content of our curriculum. Therefore, as the classroom expert, teachers must find the strategies to help students engage in our curriculum by, what Buehl calls, “bridging the gap.” By using this type of language with content area teachers, it helped them see the need for reading and writing instruction as part of their curriculum rather than in addition to their content area curriculum.

Finally, last month I thought about leadership and how different strengths can create different types of leaders (Utilizing Leadership Strengths for More Effective Coaching). In a small rural school where everyone has multiple roles in addition to their teaching assignment, I thought about how I can continue to use different strengths to create different literacy leaders in multiple buildings. This is something that I will continue to focus on next year, as fostering literacy leadership continues to be an important topic in my school district. In addition, I am thinking about other ideas I would like to focus on next year. Ideas like: common protocols at the high school for productive group work norms and how to maintain a focus on best practices in reading but also bring a renewed attention to best practices in writing. In fact, these ideas on my to-do list will probably be the place where I start to shape my next year’s focus as a coach. 

It is the never ending to-do list that helps keep me passionate and urgent about my work, and I am thankful that this blog has helped me to be a more reflective practitioner. I look forward to a summer where I can continue this reflection and begin sketching implementation ideas for next year!