Instructional Coaching: Plan, Observe, Reflect Transcript

Teacher: What do you do when you find the median?

Teacher: I could kind of see yesterday the kids that were struggling.

Teacher: How are you going to kind of address those specifics?

Teacher: This is players. I’m going to focus on teams—

Narrator: The first function of a coach is to make the team player better. Our coaches are coming in and bringing their own experience from the classroom and their own experience of how do you use performance-based assessment tools?

Teacher: How are you going to know that students get this today?

Teacher: Being able to see whether or not they’re able to analyze. That’s kinda like where the lesson will pick up.

Teacher: Whatever makes the most sense to you, because you’re the one that’s gonna have to interpret the data.

Narrator: Just the simple skills of how do I get the kids to work on a task that’s more challenging than what they’re used to? How do I step back and let the kids persevere in solving the problem without stepping in—

Teacher: You want them to make sense of it on their own.

Teacher: Yeah.

Narrator: Those basic skills which are new, the coach is coming in to help build those.

Teacher: What outcomes do you have in mind for your lesson state? What are students going to be learning?

Teacher: I serve as a math coach and work with teacher one on one in their classrooms outside of their classrooms and also support team meetings focused on looking at student work and making evidence-based decisions.

Teacher: You’re gonna show them a misleading graph and have them talk about why it’s misleading.

Teacher: We’ll talk about what their students are gonna learn, how they know that those students are hitting those targets and what to do when they don’t.

Teacher: I feel like my last lesson, it was so cut short, but I just felt like I had to get through it, get through it, get through it. Then that probably led to me being very rushed.

Teacher: We usually meet right before the lesson I teach, and it gives me another 20 minutes before the lesson in case I want to adjust anything that I’m teaching.

Teacher: You’re going to have the do now, the mini-lesson and then you’re gonna set them off on the work.

Teacher: We tighten the lesson.

Teacher: Every group is going to have two teams to compare and create two frequency—

Teacher: Exactly.

Teacher: - tables for that. Gotcha.

Teacher: We make sure that I’m going to be able, through doing it, to actually achieve the goals that I have.

Teacher: Like for your next steps, we were talking about speaking a little bit slower during whole group instruction and giving students the time to think and work during your lesson.

Teacher: I’m gonna give you guys 20 minutes to make both histograms. You guys may begin.

Teacher: They take that reflect that they’ve kind of established for themselves and they use that. I get a chance to capture what’s really taking place in the classroom and really focus in on those things that they’re working on and interested in and highlight some strengths and some growth that that teacher has experienced.

Teacher: So how—

Teacher: You did give more time.

Teacher: Yes.

Teacher: That was the move that you made.

Teacher: And more time for students to go work on their own, rather than having me talking.

Teacher: In terms of your speaking, you took some time to really think about students having that real time to work, so that they’re not like rushing through it.

Narrator: Walk into a classroom, look at what a student does.

Teacher: Why did you stop at 18?

Narrator: Sometimes you have no idea why. Talking about what that student did helps you get behind the work on the page, understand the student’s thinking and understand the way to push the student to think a little bit more deeply and a little bit further about the problem.

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