 Hi, I'd like to welcome everyone back to our third and final session about how principles can support coaches and vice versa with Jim Knight. At ERLC, we are so pleased to have Jim with us. It's been a wonderful and valuable learning opportunity for all of us. I'd just like to mention again that the session has been co-developed with Jim as a result of a grant from Alberta Education to support implementation. Without further ado, I'll turn the mic over to Jim and we'll get our session started today. Welcome everybody on this cold, cold day and thanks Jim. I don't want to tell you that it's about 17 degrees here in Kansas, but I can't withhold that little bit of information. Hi everybody. I'd like to just sort of set the stage for today. What I wanted to do was go through sort of a review of what coaches do, to identify six different simple questions that you could use to look at how effective your coaches are and what your coaches are doing. In the past couple of, really the past five or six years, we spent a lot of time with different programs. And there are a few simple things that would tell you your coaching program is on the right track or that you have some work to do. So those simple things I've articulated as questions, and these are simple things you could ask a coach about what they do to see how effective they are with what they do. How do the coaches get people on board in the first place? How do you identify what to focus on? Do you have a one-page summary? Have you created a checklist for the practices you're sharing? How often do you model? And how do you explore data after observations? And I want to go through each of those questions one by one and then give you a chance to respond in one way or another as we work it. I think the answers to these questions would give you a pretty clear understanding of how effective your coaching program is and whether or not it's going to make a difference for teaching practices and for ultimately student achievement. There are seven big ideas that I've talked about throughout our conversations and I'd just like to review them quickly and then turn specifically to those questions that I mentioned. The first one is of this idea of partnership. Coaching is an adult-to-adult conversation. And that just means simply that the coach treats the teacher the way any of us would want to be treated if someone was telling us how to do our work. That is, we feel like we're treated like an equal. We have choices in what happens. We have a voice in what happens. We are focused on real-life activities that matter and the conversations we have are back and forth. If someone is telling me what to do, there's a sense that I have a real input and ultimately I feel that the person enters into this conversation expecting they can learn something from me. It's not all just going in the one direction. That's that partnership philosophy. We work with people in ways that genuinely respect them as professionals. I think that's a critical thing. The second big idea is that the approach to professional learning is focused on a specific number of important high-leverage teaching practices. If there isn't clarity and focus on what's going to happen, it will be hard for the coach to accomplish what they have to do and we'll talk more about that concept as we work our way through today. The third thing is the importance of precise explanations that the coach has to be able to lay out exactly what this looks like so the other person will clearly see it. And a lack of precision on the part of the explaining part of coaches probably means you won't get implementation. So we'll talk about specifically how that happens. That follow-up to any kind of professional learning is key and coaching provides that follow-up. Without modeling, not a whole lot will happen in terms of high quality implementation. And then the part of what the coach does is make it easy for teachers to implement. The two critical variables for the dissemination of innovations, at least according to some people who study it, are A, that it's powerful and B, that it's easy to use. Something that's powerful and easy to use is something that's going to spread. And the last thing is the distinction between push versus pull coaching. Pull coaching is where your coaching is pulled along by the concerns of the teacher and their thoughts about what their students need and what they need. Push coaching is where you're trying to get teachers to do something that's good for them and you've made the decision and you're trying to get them to go. And we found that pull coaching is more likely to lead to significant change. So those are the seven big ideas behind this and now I'd like to turn specifically to those questions that would indicate how effective a program is. But before I go there, what I'd like you to do is think about the partnership principles. This notion that we would treat people the way we like to be treated, that we see adults, professionals as people who can make their own decisions, that we give them choice if they have a voice in what they do. I was wondering if you could tell me if you, when you've heard me talk about this a lot, what's your sense just generally speaking? Do you agree with the partnership principles or disagree with the partnership principles? And you can just give me an X or a check mark on your column there to let me know where you stand on this. I'm not sure if this is time to talk, but I don't think it's as simple as a black and white question that we could discuss. I'm just kind of wondering and thinking out loud. I basically agree that we've got to have people that have what their focus is, but sometimes they don't know what they don't know. So sometimes we've got to bring some ideas in front of them that could match where we think they need to go. Yeah. You might want to put the mic on mute for a sec. There we go. I agree completely that most professionals who do their work don't really know what it looks like when they do their work. And we'll talk through how we approach it. What we do is we gather data on the classroom and share with the teachers for the use of video so they can see exactly what happens. I think whatever works, you should do. And so if there's a way of moving the school forward that violates the principles, but nonetheless improves instruction and student achievement goes up, I'd say go for it. We really just think that the trouble is when you don't take the partnership approach, there's a danger that you're going to engender resistance. And so it actually slows the process down rather than speeding up the process. But I think in every situation, it's different. One size doesn't fit all. One size fits one. And so there's going to be situations where the teacher says, just tell me what to do and you do and you're off to the races. But my sense is based on Edgar Schein's work and our experience with teachers that if you take the role of being the parent telling the teacher what you've decided they need to do and you're going to make sure they do it, there's a good chance they might resist. Not always in every situation, but that's the thing. And I do agree that it's not just a yes or no question. It's that every situation is different. But generally speaking, I think to treat professionals like professionals, by giving them choice, by letting them have a voice in the process, by going into the conversation as an equal, in my opinion, it's the fastest way to get there because it decreases the likelihood of resistance. Let's... Thanks for clarifying, Jim. Thanks for clarifying and I do agree with what you said. And I was kind of thinking more in regards to beginning teachers. Well, just to follow up, well, yeah, I think that there are situations where the person says, just tell me. And there are situations where you say, I've got to move in and do something that violates the principles because I think in this case it will make a big difference. It's a dynamic situation when we lead change and so there are situations where it might not fit. But generally speaking, in the vast majority of cases, we're quick to take the parent role with teachers and when we do, we run the risk of having them resist because they don't want to be put in a position where they're one down in terms of status. Well, I want to talk through what the coaches do and we'll pause as we have it here at different times to look at different things, but this will get us into our six different questions. The first thing I'd say is that there are many components of coaching and we'll kind of walk through them pretty quickly because most of you have seen these before. What I want to focus on is sort of the critical variables in terms of making change happen. Now when the coach is enrolling teachers, I think they should be doing all of these different things. They should be having one-to-one conversations. They should be giving larger small group presentations. They should be working with teachers who are referred to them by the principal. But coaching should be attached to the workshops, to the team meetings, to the professional learning communities. That is, if we have a workshop at the end of it, there should be time for teachers to sign up with the coach to implement because without that follow-up after the workshop, chances are it won't happen. The coaches should be sending out newsletters and the coaches should engage in informal interactions that lead to teachers working with them. Basically, they should be doing everything they can think of to get people on board and interested in working with them, but still working from the choice perspective. So let's look at the principal referral piece because that would involve most of you and how would that work. In my experience, if the principal says to a teacher, your engagement data is not good enough. You're at 60% engagement. Every time I go in time on task, between 60 and 70% engagement, we need to get up to at least 90% engagement and you have to work with the coach. If that happens, in my experience, the teacher goes to the coach and said, look, the principal wants me to work with you, so come on, fix me, you've got 15 minutes. The principal, when they tell the teacher they have no choice, they have to work with the coach, the teacher sort of sees the coach as a punishment. But if the principal says you're at 60% engagement, you've got to get up to 90% engagement, let me give you some options. If you go online, I can give you some websites to go to. I've got a book on instruction that looks at engagement. You can read the book. I've got a video series from the downtown office you can look at on engaging instruction, or you can work with the coach. She's a proud engagement. How you do it is up to you, but somehow, you've got to get that engagement up to 90% and then work with you. When the principal provides the teacher with choices, they're way more inclined to get something beneficial out of the coach because they see the coach not as a punishment, but a lifeline. So all of these things need to be going on, one-to-one conversations, larger small group presentations, and so forth. But in the heart of that, there's a critical piece and that's developing a one-page document that the coach can share that says, this is exactly what I'm all about. These are the things I can do. This is a sample from our group of coaches in Beaverton, Oregon, and they enlisted their things under the big four practices of content planning, assessment for learning, instruction, community building. So every time the coach does one of these things, a one-to-one conversation, a larger small group presentation, the coach sits down and says, here are the things I can do and lays this one-page document. When they do the larger small group presentations, they've got that one-page document that lays out everything that they do. Now, the one-page document that describes all the things the coach can do serves two purposes. One of them is that it clearly communicates to the staff exactly what the coach can do. But a more basic purpose of the one-page document is for the coach herself or himself to be clear on what he or she can do. In my experience, when I ask coaches to sit down and write this one-page document that describes all they can do, they often struggle because they're not clear on all the areas in which they can provide support. What are all the things they can do? And if the coach isn't clear on what he or she is going to do, then they're not going to be able to communicate. And they're going to waste a lot of time kind of bloundering. So for my money, one of the most important things, if you're supervising a coach or working with a coach, this is another example of a one-page document. This is an instructional improvement target. That's what we call it. One of the most important things you can ask is, you have a one-page summary that describes what you do. Our thing is, if it has a staple in it, it doesn't get read. So it's a good idea to have the coach create that kind of document. And what we suggest is they list all the teaching practices to share with teachers. They list other information that they wish to communicate about maybe they take the partnership approach and so forth, and they can add contact information, but they lay out all the stuff they have to do. So my question to you is, right now, as you look at what your coaches do, the first question is, we have two of them. The first question is, do you think your coach has anything like a one-page document that describes what they do? And that would be a little green check mark or a little red X. Check mark for yes they do and X for no they probably don't. So one thing you could do that I think is, and what would be really useful is I see a lot of Xs coming up, which is exactly what I would have expected, is to sit down with the coach and say, let's talk through what are the things you can focus on. That provides the coach with focus, and it makes it much easier to enroll people because they lay out the kind of stuff that they can do. So to me that's one page your coaches could go, one way coaches could go a lot deeper. The first thing is, and thank you for doing the little check mark there. The first thing you have to do is get someone to work with. That's the enrolling part, and then you need to identify what you're going to work on. And as Will pointed out earlier on, often people don't see their needs. It isn't that they can't see the solution, they can't even see that there's a problem. So we've moved to using flip cameras as our way of doing it. We videotape the class and we sit down with the teacher and we have a conversation with them about what they see. What we found in those situations is that the teacher usually has absolutely no idea of what's happening in the class. When they watch the tape, they're blown away by what they see. And they're pretty motivated to want to make a change because they can see, well I had no idea that this was going on or that was going on. And one teacher, for example, said, I stayed up till 2 o'clock redoing all my lesson plans the first time I stopped it because I couldn't believe how bored my kids were. But it's powerful for them to watch themselves on tape. So to identify what to do, sometimes the teacher comes to us knowing what they want. Sometimes they've been referred by the principal. Sometimes they're in a workshop and at the end of the workshop they sign up for coaching. But about half the time, there's not a clarity about what they want to focus on. So we have the coach, the year records the class. The teacher watches the recording on her own. The coach watches the recording on her own. And they get together to talk about it and identify a specific goal they want to accomplish. For us, that goal is around one of the big four practices that you can download online at our NING. But it doesn't have to be that. If your school is focused on, say for example, Marisano or Fisher and Fry's Gradual Release Model or whatever it might be, you would try to find a goal that aligns with what the school is focused on. In the midst of that discussion, then the coach and teacher try to establish a goal they want to hit. This is to set up what we call pull coaching. So if I'm sitting down with the teacher and she's watched the video, and I might ask a question like, how close is this to your ideal class and what needs to change for it to be closer to your ideal class? The teacher might say, well, my kids just don't look like they're engaged or there's way too many disruptions. Or I don't think the students understand the purpose of the lesson. And so you set a particular goal that targets exactly what you and the teacher are going to accomplish together, driven by what the teacher saw in the video. So that goal might be, I want to get 90% engagement in my class. I'm really committed to doing that. What can we do to make that happen? So this is really a question you could ask your coaches. How do you go about identifying goals with teachers? And there's really a question I want to ask you guys with your little green and red check marks there is, are your coaches, do they have access to video, flip cameras, or other micro cameras that they could use to accomplish this part of the process, the videotape of the classes? How many have access to the video? Either a flip camera or some other kind of micro camera. So a lot of you do. Now, they're not that expensive. They're about $200. So if you don't have the flip camera on a highway, even an iPhone has the video capacity to do it. I wouldn't get a great big honking movie making video camera because it's too intrusive. But the little flip camera, especially you set it up on a little tripod. It captures great video. It's a really compelling way to help people get a clear picture of what's happening in the lesson. But anyway, our second question would be, how do you go about identifying goals with teachers? If you're setting up a pole coaching situation, it's one where the teachers have to be at least involved in the process of identifying what they want to work on. Moving on, the next thing is explaining what happens. I really am impressed by a tool go on these books. The checklist manifesto was a New York Times bestseller, which is crazy to think that a book on checklists could actually be on the bestseller list for, I mean, you wouldn't think of checklists as being a riveting topic. But nonetheless, it's really an outstanding book. Another book better, too, is great. Just to put a perspective, the potential for that book to make a difference. We had a conference here at the University of Kansas, and one of our presenters was Michael Pullen, and you may know what's a real matter of mind. And people asked the group, what are two books, our panel members, what are two books you'd recommend that we should read if we want to understand leading change? And one of the books Michael picked was a tool go on these, the checklist manifesto. That's a high praise from somebody who knows a lot about educational change. One of the things Gawande says is that if we are going to lead change, we have to have precise explanations. His book talks about how he did a study with the World Health Organization and found that simple little checklists used during surgery could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars because they clarify what's going on and they lead to precise explanations. And I would argue the same thing should happen with coaches. Your coaches should have precise explanations of the tools they share with teachers. It's the same with athletic coaching. What a good hockey coach does is tell the kids exactly how to do it. This is the way you hold the stick. This is the way you move it when the puck hits it. You give precise explanations, broken it down to tiny steps that the students can fall. The same thing in coaching. I think if you're going to teach a practice, in this case, the checklist you're looking at is just for how to do a pre-test as part of an instructional process. If you're going to explain a practice, you should be able to break it down into very clear steps so the person knows exactly what it's about. I've worked with thousands of coaches across Canada and the United States. In the United States, more often than not, the vast majority of the time, the coaches could improve their practices just by getting a deeper understanding of the tools they share by creating these precise little checklists to document exactly what it looks like. Here's another example of a checklist for the introductory part of a use of a graphic organizer for content planning, where it explains what the teacher does, how long it's going to take, the co-constructed device with the students, and so forth. And then here's one for, excuse me, queued your reviews of process, excuse me, which is the way we use graphic organizers. We name the graphic organizer and explain kits, how it's going to help them learn, specify what the kids need to do. We walk through the device and so forth, and then we do a review at the end to make sure they've got it. Very Madeline Hunter-ish, I guess, but we lay out this example. The power of the checklist is two-fold. On the one hand, you can make sure that I fully understand the practice and that, therefore, I can clearly communicate, but it gives us a tool for us to discuss the practices. So if I sit down with a teacher to talk about queued your review, for example, I say, well, here's what research says. Let me go through it, and then you tell me what you think. Tell me if we need to make any modifications. When it comes to what Parker Palmer calls a third thing for the conversation, it's not really mean talking, and it's really something we go through together. So the two words that capture the power of this explaining part of coaching are precise. I have a really precise document that lays out exactly what it is, but the second word is provisional. When I compare with teachers, I recognize that this might not work perfectly well for their students or their kids. As I said before, one size fits all. It doesn't work in education. It's one size fits one. And so I might have to adapt things a little bit. For example, with one group of students in the queuing part, the teacher might say, you know, if these kids are going to understand this particular graphic organizer, we're going to have to give them some prior knowledge in the queuing part. Let's add that in that we make sure they've got prior knowledge. In other situations, the teachers may need to make modifications. So the way I approach it is I always am precise but provisional. One more thought about that is it used to be that I would tell teachers, it has to be done exactly the way I say. Let me say it and you do it with fidelity. And when I took that sort of a top-down approach, what I found is the teachers would nod their head, yes, and then they would just go off and do whatever they wanted to do anyway. So now by saying to the teachers, let me explain it precisely. And you need to tell me if you need to make any modifications. In my experience, teachers are way more inclined to do it the way I say. And if they want to make modifications, we can have a discussion about it right there, right then, rather than have them pretend one thing and do the other. They're going to do whatever they want anyway. So we might as well have the conversation out in the open and talk about it before they leave. But the next big question then is this one, have the coaches created checklists? The first thing is, do they know exactly what they're doing? That is, do they have a one-page document to describe what they're doing? The second thing is, have they got a way of helping teachers identify what they need to do? And the third thing is, have the coaches created checklists? One last thing about the checklists is sometimes people say, well, isn't that kind of dumbing down what you're doing? And what Tuglotti says is, what the checklists do is they take care of the simple stuff so you can focus on the more important things. We can make sure we do the precisely things that have to be done that are precisely described and focus on instruction. So I guess the next question I'd ask is, I know these questions are a little illuminating, but it's part of the medium here. Are you, I guess, what are your thoughts? Do you think this kind of precise clarity would be helpful to your coaches to do? Would it be helpful for your coaches to create these kinds of checklists? What are your thoughts as you're working through? And do any of you have questions about this before you move on to the next piece? So I've got applause at the check work, that's very, thank you, Collette. Okay, I'm going to roll along, but please use the chat to make any questions you'd like to make. And we'll move on to the next thing. To sum up, there are a couple of things. They have a one-page document that describes all that they can do which requires them knowing what they're going to do. Are they gathering data in some way in the classroom ahead of time that would enable them and the teacher to identify what to focus on? And the third thing is have they created checklists or at least precise explanations. In some cases a checklist might not work, but in most cases you want them. Checklists for all the tools that are listed on that one page somewhere. I should add that if your coach is a .20 position, it may be that they don't do the video recording of the classroom. They ask the teacher to do the video recording and they just watch it afterwards. That's just one way of moving things forward. Well, then there's modeling. And when we interviewed teachers, we interviewed 13 different teachers about their work with a coach in one school. What we heard in those interviews was from every person we talked to, it wasn't until the coach came in and modeled in the classroom that they could actually grasp whatever the practice was that was being learned. Modeling, it seems, is absolutely vital. And we know that from instruction. We know that modeling is a big part of teaching. Again, if you look at athletic coaching, someone has to show you how to do it and you can do it. And in fact, if the other parts have been done, that is that we've enrolled the teacher in coaching. We've identified a goal they want to focus on. We've explained it precisely. After the explanation, in most cases the teacher is going to say, you know, be really hopeful if I could see this. If I could see it, it would be helpful. In my experience, if the teacher is just asked, do you want me to come in and model in the classroom with all of the other parts happening early on, though, chances are the teacher is going to say, either no thanks or yeah, how about all next week because I could stand a break and maybe I'll do some grading while you model. But in both cases, they don't see it as a learning experience. All of the pieces have happened and the teacher has a goal they want to focus on and a clear practice of trying to implement and a clear explanation of it. In most cases, they're going to want the teacher to come in and model in the classroom. So another way to sort of look at what's happened is to ask your coaches how often they're modeling for teachers. Now, just one more thing about this. If your coach has limited time, they could use their own classroom as a setting for modeling or they could take a day where they model throughout the day and go to different people's classrooms and people come in on their planning time to see what happens. But the ideal scenario if you have the time is to do the model lesson right in the teacher's classroom with their kids so they can see what it looks like. So I've got the question here for your green red check marks and the question is, right now, if you have coaches, what are coaches modeling in the classroom as a part of their coaching process? Give me your little green and red red marks to let me know which way it's going. If you don't have coaches, you can just leave it blank. Any questions about anything I've said, but in particular the modeling part of this whole process before I move on to the next part. It looks like Steve is typing something in the chat box right now, but just going back, we'll make a comment that in the previous section about how it's the importance of doing these checklists because we're all at different stages and it helps to ensure that the coach and the teacher are on the same page, so it really helps with that alignment piece, which I think is a great comment. Yeah, if you could read me the other comment when it comes up that would be great, but in response to Will, in the best case scenario you would have a group of coaches who are working on the same things come together, prepare the checklist separately and then share what they came up with to make sure they've hit the right things. It's amazing how, it's kind of hard to describe this, but when you have communications like there's this big blob that stands between the speaker and the listener. And what's happening is the speaker isn't particularly clear in her or his mind and the listener isn't really listening all the time. And so when there's a miscommunication, what the speaker is hoping is that the listener will think they don't get it because they weren't listening, when in reality it was that I wasn't clear. So we can't really make the other person listen, but we can work on the clarity part. We can decrease the likelihood that there'll be a lack of communication just by being really clear. Was there another question, Jen? And just peeking. Yeah, Steve's question in the chat box says, are coaches seem reluctant to model as they specialize on an educational topic such as assessment rather than instructional pedagogy. So the question is, how do we encourage coaches to model or how do we select coaches who are able to model? Okay. There's a couple of good questions there. Let's talk about the select coaches first. We studied the characteristics of outstanding coaches. We did a study in Florida where they had 2,600 coaches from across the state from the pool of 26 to help the state identified 36 who were outstanding and from the 36 we picked 5 truly outstanding coaches. And there were certain characteristics those outstanding coaches had to have. One of them was though that they were comfortable going into classroom and teaching. They also had to be people who were hard or committed to the whole process. They really believed in the importance of improving instruction and they were learners. They're people who love to learn and they're people with personal discipline and people with credibility in the eyes of the state. So probably the most important thing you do when it comes to setting up any kind of coaching situation or program is to be careful that you pick people that others would see as people that they'd be comfortable listening to. They're the kind of people who when they speak at a team meeting and I speak all that much but when they do, people stop and listen to them. They have to be credible and they have to be comfortable with people teaching. But as far as taking the current coaches and getting them to model more in the classroom, I think modeling by itself isn't the solution though. We wanted to be doing all these things. They have a one-page description. They've identified a goal. They've got precise explanations and then when they do the precise explanations, it's going to be more natural for them to want to do the modeling or for the teacher to accept them to do the modeling because they've done all that preliminary stuff. But the easiest thing I would say is I'd want the coach who hasn't done modeling and isn't feeling comfortable doing it to find a teacher that they feel really safe with and comfortable with and just to get in and practice it a couple times with that one teacher in a sort of low-risk situation. That would be a teacher with good classroom management issues. Kids are responsive and have them just get in because after they do a couple lessons pretty quickly, a coach realizes, you know, I'm a teacher and this is just what I've always done. It's really no different to do modeling. That coaching book which probably most of you got has got some good suggestions I think from Patricia McHale on what to do like that. You're clear on who's going to be responsible for classroom management and you praise the teacher in the midst of the modeling. But the main thing is I think that the other stuff has been done, number one, and that you have the right person, number two, someone who's, they don't have to be the best teacher in the school but they really do have to be a capable and confident teacher. Because they have to go in and model the practices. And thirdly, that if they just do it a few times in a pretty low-risk situation, I think most teachers will realize this is what I've always done and what I like. I've always been a teacher so it's not a big deal. I hope that helps. And I like the questions. So moving forward now, so far we've talked about a few key things. Number one, have we got a clear picture of what we do articulated in this one page document? Number two, are we gathering data in some ways so the teacher can focus on a goal that matters to her with respect to her teaching or her kids? Do we have precise explanations of the practices? Do we know those practices really well and can we clearly communicate them and evidence of that would be the development of checklists? And then are we modeling in the classroom and modeling the practices so that other people can see them? So the next thing is observing. And what we do here, again, it's the same as what we did before. That is, we video record the class. We go in and record the classroom with the teacher and we see what happens. And then we share the flip. So the question would be, do the teachers use flip cameras for observations? But then we have a process we follow when we watch the video with the teachers. What we found is that it's important that the teacher and coach watch the video separately for a number of reasons, but main ones are that a person gets more out of it when they don't have another person besides them watching it unless you're kind of pretty vulnerable the first time you see it. So we suggest that the video is loaded onto the teacher's computer and it's on the coach's computer. And the coach watches it separately and the teacher watches it separately. Then the coach and teacher get together and they talk about what happened. And the coach asks open-ended questions and listens carefully during the session. Most of our video of coaches has shown the coaches doing too much talking. And so the coach has to come in with a few simple questions like how close is this lesson to what you hoped it would be and what needs to change to get it to where you want to go or just a simple question like, given the time we've got today, what do we need to focus on? Given the checklist we created, where do you think you did well or what do you think you want to work on? And during that session, we think the coach should be our phrases, be a witness to the good, be attentive to what went well and want to communicate things that went well when they get together with the teacher. There's two reasons for that. One of them is if you're... our natural tendency is to see the things that didn't go well. So we have to train our brain to see what's going effectively. We see the things that don't fit, not the things that are going smoothly. And there's a whole lot of it, writing that by focusing on the positive, it's not a bad thing. What you're doing is you can say, when you were working with small groups, the kids were really engaged. What was going on there and how can we do more of it somewhere else? But you also want the teacher to know that you're on her side. You see her doing things well and that you're supportive. And if, for example, the teacher thinks, every time I see that coach, she just criticizes me. Chances are you're not going to have that process. By the way, I got this cold I'm coughing. Last time I was in Alberta, it's still here. So this is a Canadian cold you're here. Anyway, at the end of the process, the coach and teacher identify next steps. That is, okay, now that we've seen what happened, here's where we need to go. And it's driven by the goals they're both trying to get to. What we found is that if they identify a goal for students, what's going to happen is, although the practice they choose might not work, the goal for students remains and so they can try something else and try something else. If they identify a goal for a teaching practice, let's do the Venn diagram and see what happens. They can do the Venn diagram and it might not lead to a change in what students are doing. And so the critical thing is that you identify a student goal and model it. You record the teacher teaching and you explore how well the whole thing went. What questions do you have about the process as I've described it up to this point? What's still unclear and what are your thoughts about this? So Jim, I don't know if you can see Will's question in the tab. I'll just review it for you. He asked, we've worked on lesson study in our school, the time factor, can the teacher sit down to review a lesson right after teaching it? Is this okay? Yeah, I think that's the way to go. I think the closer you can discuss it to the lesson, the better. One thing is, Will, I'm assuming you don't video record the class, is that right? I don't know if you do or not, but I think you might... Sorry Jim, the answer to that is sometimes we do, but we don't always review the video because of the time factor. So we may review the video later, but not immediately after the lesson. Let me ask one more question. How does it work if it hasn't been videotaped? How does the teacher take it when you do it? How does the teacher respond? It probably varies, but... Are you able to do the discussion? I think it has worked pretty well. We've spent a lot of time over the last four years doing lots of peer observations, so our teachers are used to people coming in and watching each other, and peer observation is probably a really simple low-level form of coaching and observing, and then moving to this whole lesson study model, which I think has built up some of the safety. Yeah, I think there's also then as the recall factor, we recall if you don't watch the video, and I think that could be something that's... But generally, the outstanding points of the lesson, or yes, I noticed, there seems to be common agreement from teachers that, yeah, I did see that too. My question would be, it's been our experience that the teachers don't know what they look like when they teach unless they see it on video. And so while I think everyone else who did the lesson study could benefit from it, I'm not entirely sure how much the teacher herself or himself would benefit. But your experiences would tell you what's going on, and it sounds like it's pretty profitable for all members. I do think it's great for everybody else. I described on the blog radicallearner.com, and there's the link to the blog. A process called video study groups, and that's a little bit different, than what you described. What the blog is, or what the process is, is that the teachers record themselves teaching. You have a group of teachers who work together over, say, a semester. It could be, I don't know, six to ten teachers, something like that. And they're all working on the same thing. Let's say you've adopted a video, excuse me, you've adopted a vocabulary strategy that you want all the teachers to use, and they're working on it. So you have these, I don't know, six grade reading teachers, and they're all doing vocabulary strategy. They record themselves teaching the strategy, and then they edit the video, excuse me, they edit the video, and then they share it back with their group. And what we found is that the process of watching yourself on video and editing is also a powerful part of the learning. But this group comes together, once a month or every couple of weeks, and each teacher gets a turn to share their excerpt of the lesson to the group, and then they have a conversation about it. Anyway, that process is described on the Radical Learners blog. There's quite a bit of stuff there, actually, on how to use video. Now I'm reading Sandy's question. At a recent conference I attended, it was suggested that some of the most effective feedback happens during the observation, which signals your low-key conversation. I found this to be helpful, supportive, and effective. And I think you're on to something there, Sandy. One of our coaches is studying what they call wugging near, where you have a Bluetooth, like a cell phone Bluetooth thing, and you talk to the person why they're teaching. But I haven't honestly got much experience with this. I think it would depend on the practice, but I sure think it's potential. Using it, it's working. I think that's really pretty awesome. The way the bug in the air works is as the teacher is doing something, the coach is watching, and let's say they ask a particular kind of question and needs a certain kind of follow-up. The coach talks into the ear of the teacher. The hard part, of course, is for the teacher to be used to having a voice in their ear as they're teaching, but it's certainly worth pursuing. In fact, this year's NSDC conference, one of our coaches is going to be there to talk about that. Alrighty, so another question is, how do the coaches explore data during coaching? How does that take place? And if it's not taking place, chances are you're not having the kind of impact you'd like your coaches to have. It's always messy, this business of coaching, usually because of scheduling. But simple things make a big difference. If you're not observing and providing feedback on what happens, if the teacher is not watching what they do in some way and getting feedback on what happens, there's really not going to be that much growth. It's kind of like the same as being in the classroom. Students have to get feedback on how they're progressing to make the whole thing happen. So let me sort of just add one piece and then kind of revisit the questions and see if you have any questions for me. The last piece in the process is just that you keep it going. Sometimes that means it's more modeling. Sometimes that means it's more explanation. Sometimes that means it's more feedback to the teacher after you've observed the classroom. So it could be any number of different things. If you have a new teacher, probably they're going to like benefit from a lot of modeling. If you're focused on classroom management, it's probably going to be observation and feedback. If you're focused on planning, the bulk of your time is going to be spent on explaining. So it really varies. But the goal is to provide the support necessary to get the teacher out to being fluent in their use of it. Sometimes the refining support is just what we have a technical name for it. It's called nagging. You're just making sure the person is doing what they said they're going to do. Much like a person who wants to start running might like to have somebody who's kind of really partner to make it happen. It's helpful to have some of them who they're actually research on this that says that it's helpful to have people who hold you accountable, who help you do it if it's something you want to work on. So let me sum up the things we've talked about and then let me see what further questions you have. The first part of coaching is the idea of enrolling the teachers, getting teachers on board for the practice. We do that through large group or small group implementation or presentations. The most powerful thing is the one-to-one conversations with teachers. But the critical thing there is that one-page document. You can identify what you're going to do. Sometimes the teacher comes to you with something they want to do. They say that thing that Allison's doing with sentences I like to do it too. Sometimes it grows out of a workshop or a PLC and there's planning where they're going to use the coach. Sometimes they're referred by the principal in the way we talked about. Then there's that precise explanation of the tool. Once you've identified a goal, you say, let's go through this in a really critically clear way. Those two words are precise but provisional. The mediation part, we didn't talk much about, but mediate means what you're doing is you're making it fit the teacher's classroom. Part of what a coach does is take something that's set in a certain way and they're tweaking it to make it work in the classroom. Then they model it. When they model it, they bring in a copy of the checklist of what it's supposed to look like so the teacher can watch what's happening with the checklist. Then they observe the teacher by recording the teacher on video and then they sit down and explore what the video shows and then refine and support. Now it doesn't always involve video and it doesn't always involve any of these things. It can be a little bit different every time but these are sort of the big things that we talked about. The questions to ask are these ones right here. I think if you get good answers to these questions, your coaches are probably doing a good job. Call it, I see your question and I'll tackle it as soon as I just straddle off these questions. How do you enroll teachers? You want to know what are the coaches doing and how are they getting people on board? Are they having one-to-one conversations? Are they presenting to large groups and small groups? Are they getting referred by you? You want to put everything you can into getting people on board in the early process. If you don't have it, the chapter on enrolling teachers and instructional coaching lays out lots of strategies you could use. How do you identify what to focus on? Are they using video? How do they set the goals with teachers of what they want to focus on? In particular, are they using video as a way to observe or gathering data or how are they doing that? A one-page summary describes exactly what you do. Have you created checklists for all the practices you're teaching? How often do you model? And how do you explore data after observations? If the coach has a one-page summary, if they've created those checklists, if they're usually modeling when it's going on and if they're frequently getting together to talk about what happened in the classroom after it happened, there's a good chance that you're making a difference. So we have about six minutes, according to my computer here, for additional questions. What questions do you have about this whole business of putting coaching in place? And I see Michelle's got a question. Some teachers still feel the video. Should we try and be respectful of their wishes or push and make them have the videotaping done? I'm hesitant to say you should do the push part, Michelle, because it might lead to a lot of other negative side effects that they resisted, they wouldn't want it. But there are sort of three options for the video. One is that, and I should say too, it's not that easy to be videotaped. Almost everybody, the first time they see themselves on tape or recording, I guess it's not on tape, but they just don't like it and they're not happy with the way they look. They don't like their clothes. They don't like their hair. They want to go on a diet immediately. I haven't shown video to a person who says, man, I'm better looking than I thought I was. Usually people, they just have to deal with a lot of those kinds of issues. And I often talk to people who say, boy, I wouldn't want to have to watch myself on video. So I understand people's hesitancy. But what you can say is, what if I was to record your students, but not you? I said, at the front of the class, we'll record the students and we'll see what they're doing. If the teacher doesn't want herself to be videoed. And if the teacher's not okay with that, you could say, well, what if I was to do a model lesson and you record me and we get a look at your students when we talk about that. Some way to kind of get in there and do it. Now if you think you could push your teachers to use the video and they would accept it and it could work positively, I'd say do it. But I'd be really hesitant to go there unless I'm pretty confident that they're going to be okay with it. All right, Kathleen Murphy House's question is, how can you be an effective coach in an area that is not your area subject to expertise? I think it depends on what you're sharing with the teacher. If you're sharing classroom management tools, then the classroom management is going to be the same whether you're teaching English or trigonometry or Japanese. And so there you can teach the classroom management. It depends on what the tool is. Our coaches in Beaverton have told us it's actually a bit of an advantage to not be the content expert in some ways because what it does is it means they can elevate the teacher in the partnership and they can put themselves down a bit by saying, okay, you're the expert on your content. I've got the unit planning tool, but you tell me how it works and I'll play the role of being a student that we can work it through. Still, in a high school classroom, you're going to have classes where it would just be impossible for you to model. And so then what I would say is you would co-teach with the teacher and say I'll show them how to use a graphic organizer but you make sure I'm on track with the content. I'm not going to be able to go in and model trigonometry or Japanese, which are about the same for me. I'm going to have to co-teach it with you. But what I would say is the coach probably doesn't have to be an expert in the content area, but the coach does have to be an expert in what they share with teachers. If they're helping teachers with classroom management or they're helping teachers with effective questions or they're helping teachers with form of assessment, they need to know what a good assessment looks like. They might not know the content, but they can have, again, checklists would say can we create these informal assessments that have to be done like this? Let's go through it and let me make sure that it works. All I have to say is that there's no doubt that having content expertise is helpful in a conversation because you have a common denominator with the teacher and if you're really a content expert you can move the teachers forward in their content knowledge. But the critical thing is that they're experts in what they share with teachers. If their job is to be a content-focused coach, then they need to be experts in content. They're not going to be helpful unless they can do that. But if their job is to be an expert in teaching practices, then they need to know those teaching practices and make sure the teachers learn how to use them. That's what distinction I mean. I'm reading Michelle's content. Another reason for the coach to have a list of practices they can share with teachers so they know their role in the agent. Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think the coach needs to be really careful about what they can and can't do. And that's the idea of focus, that you want to make sure you're focused in on a few key things. In the ideal scenario, if you remember one of my first sessions, the whole school would be clear on what the focus is. That's what I call that instructional improvement target. I've got time for about one more question if anybody has any other questions. Jim, I just want to go back to something Sandra said. She said at a recent conference she attended it was suggested that some of the most effective feedback happens during the observation. So usually through a series of signals or low key conversation in that she's found this to be helpful, supportive, and effective. So Sandra, I wonder if you want to elaborate on that or if Jim would like to comment on feedback, providing feedback during the observation itself. Hi. Lovis suggested that the closer to the time of observation the more effective the feedback. I have been working in classrooms with some staff. And I found that it's not with a Bluetooth in the ear, but just a series of acknowledgments when things are going. Even something as simple as a thumbs up, when things are going really well, or when you've seen something demonstrated that you were looking for. And if students are working and they start working just one little comment or as I'm circulating and she's circulating in the classroom, I find it really reinforcing. And it's just so immediate that I can see more of what it is I'm wanting to see. Yeah, I really like that idea. And do you remember who it was that you saw Sandra that talked about that? You know, I can't remember the thing. It was that the essentials for leadership, leadership essentials were put on through the ATA, the administrator's wing of things. And he was a local actually, an Alberta boy, doctor somebody or other, not being very helpful. But he gave the keynote at the end of the conference. Well, I'd love to learn more about that. I mean, we talked about the bug in the ear idea with the Bluetooth, but we should get as much out of that time when the teacher's in the classroom. So why wouldn't we want to try ways we can communicate during the lesson instead of just sitting there and recording? So if you happen to come up with it, I'd love to hear more about that as well. I'd be happy to email the name and the information. Thanks, Sandra. Marina, go ahead. Hi, I attended the same session. His name is Dr. Phil McCray, M-C-R-A-E. Thanks, Marina. Great. Well, I think we've come to our close, Jan. I hope everybody's having a great year, and keep moving forward. If you haven't got my email, I'm going to type it in right now, and this doesn't have to be the end of our conversations. I'll be back in Alberta quite a bit. There's the email. Just remember, it's Jim Knight, and I use a Mac computer, and you're good to go. But if you want to follow up with any questions or comments, that would be great. Jim, I just want to say on behalf of all of us, ERLC, and all of us in attendance here today, thank you so much for this series where you've shared practical wisdom, your support and your resources, inventory and coaching, our instructional coaches. I know it's been most helpful. Yes, let's give him a round of applause, virtual applause by clicking on our applause button. It's been awesome, and thank you for your willingness to continue the conversation, sharing your blog and your email. I would also ask folks to consider checking out the blog and providing comments and feedback that way, because that's also a good way to keep the conversation going. Thanks, everybody. I, too, hope you're having a great year, and I'm going to ask that you would do a little survey at the end. Yes, Sandra, webinars are actually ongoing right now for coaches, but we can look at, you know, if you have a request or if there's a need for your coaches, we could certainly look at doing something again after Christmas, so we could talk about that. So thanks, everybody.