Instructional Coaching
Provide teachers with personalized coaching cycles that support them to grow and develop their teaching practice
Topics:
Overview:
Instructional coaching is increasingly recognized in education as the most effective form of on-the-job, relevant support available to teachers. Great instructional coaches use a student-focused lens to provide a continuous improvement system for teachers via goal-setting, formal and informal observation, feedback, reflection, and collaborative action planning. By supporting teachers to reflect on and improve their teaching, effective coaches can change teacher practice, improve student achievement, build teachers' content knowledge and content-specific skills, and help facilitate whole-school improvement initiatives. Just as they support teachers to refine their skills, even the best instructional coaches need up-front training and ongoing opportunities to improve their practice, including professional development opportunities in which they can share challenges and reflect on what's working in their practice with peers in similar roles.
What We Believe:
We believe that instructional coaches must put in place a productive, collaborative, and non-threatening observation and feedback cycle that supports teacher development and growth. This cycle should facilitates sustainable, continuous improvement for educators by aligning incremental, measurable shifts in educator practice to a desired student outcome.
We believe that instructional coaches must support teachers to set meaningful goals that promote student learning and growth, and implement high-leverage instructional strategies in service of those goals.
We believe that coaches must take stock of their and coachee's mindsets and values as a key aspect of exploring instructional practice and to better deploy facilitative, directive, and transformational coaching practices.
BetterLesson Blog Posts:
Bertrand, Romain. Looking Back to Better Look Ahead PRO: A 3-Step Collaborative Protocol to Support Meaningful Reflections. December 20, 2018.
Lu, Tina. How one school leader used BetterLesson Coaching to Catalyze Practice Change. October 4, 2018.
Rucker, Katya. How to Maximize (and Limit) Coach Effectiveness. September 11, 2018.
Rucker, Katya. Four Indicators of Strong Instructional Coaching. August 9, 2018.
Mason, Julie. 4 Tips for Making your Coaching Experience Impactful. July 23, 2018.
Kravetz, Meirav. The Coach and Teacher Dance. July 10, 2018.
Rucker, Katya. Three Factors that Make or Break Instructional Coaching. July 3, 2018.
Belknap, Cheryl. What Makes Coaching Effective? 7 Tips for School Administrators. June 7, 2018.
Mason, Julie. Worth Every Penny: Three Reasons Why Instructional Coaching Is More Effective Than Any Other PD. May 3, 2018.
Kennefick, Kelly.Backwards Planning: A Powerful Strategy for Instructional Coaching. May 1, 2018.
Bertrand, Romain. Three Ways Coaching Helps Change Habits. February 7, 2018.
External Sources:
Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., Gardner, M. "Effective Teacher Professional Development." Learning Policy Institute. 2017.
EL Education. "Coaching for Change: Student-Centered Coaching."
EL Education. "Two Approaches to Coaching." 2015.
Killion, Joellen. "Meta-analysis reveals coaching’s positive impact on instruction and achievement." The Learning Professional. 2017.
Knight, Jim. "Coaching." National Staff Development Council. 2009.
Knight, J. & Cornett, J. "Research on Coaching." 2008.
Kraft, M.A., Blazar, D., Hogan, D. "The effect of teaching coaching on instruction and achievement: A meta-analysis of the causal evidence." Brown University Working Paper. 2016.
Sweeney, Diane. "Student-Centered Coaching Toolkit." Diane Sweeney Consulting.
Sweeney, Diane. "What is Student-Centered Coaching?" Diane Sweeney Consulting. 2010.