Four Back to School Tasks for New Instructional Coaches

If you’re a new instructional or literacy coach, new to your school, or creating a coaching role where there wasn’t one before, there are a few things you’ll want to do to establish yourself right away!

While the roles of principal and teacher have been pretty consistent over the years, instructional coaches are fairly new in many places, and teachers are often unsure what they’re there to do.

Teachers who don’t know the coach or their role will probably not want to work with you!

But there are a few things we can do to change that and set yourself up for success in coaching.

1. Get clarity on your instructional coaching role first

When instructional coaches walk onto the job, they may have a vision for coaching…or they may not. Your administration may have an idea of what they want you to do…or they may not! It’s absolutely essential to have a clarity conversation with your administrator to discuss what responsibilities will be yours and how you will show up and work with teachers.

The Instructional Coach’s Book of Plans and lists includes a list of coaching responsibilities. It’s a great place to start your conversation with your administrator. You can work through the list together to see how you will serve your coaching role to teachers!

Get the Instructional Coach’s Book of Plans & Lists here!

2. Introduce your role to teachers

Now that you and your administration have a clearly defined role for instructional coaches at your school, it’s time to introduce it to your teachers.

There are several ways you can do this!

One way to introduce you and your supports is to can use a slide show presentation during a professional development meeting or PLC meeting.

Your presentation should include an introduction to yourself as a person, and then a description of how you can support teachers.

You can identify the supports you want to provide in advance and use them to build a coaching menu or another document that will explicitly share how you can help! This can include supports like co-planning, creating assessments together, looking at data, modeling, or co-teaching lessons.

It’s also important to clearly explain that you are not evaluative. Teachers may automatically assume that you’re there to evaluate them, and that will interfere with your ability to work with them. Teachers who are uncomfortable with coaches won’t want to partner up with them!

Get the Meet the Coach Slide Show Presentation & Coaching Menu here!

3. Organize your materials and create systems for documentation

Instructional coaches are responsible for a lot of things. Teachers will tell you things in the hallway that you’re supposed to remember, send you random emails, or ask you three months down the road if you have a copy of that document you sent in August.

Coaches have to be organized.

On top of that, you have to document your instructional coaching support to show (if only to yourself) how you’re working on various parts of your role.

The beginning of the school year is the best time to set yourself up for success!

Choose a system, whether it’s digital (Think: Google Drive, OneDrive, or another online system), or paper.

Create a binder or online system for tracking your teacher support, recording the outcome, and providing feedback to teachers.

The Instructional Coaching Binder MegaPack is a great way to start getting organized!

Get the Binder Materials here!

4. Build relationships with teachers

What’s the #1 rule of instructional coaching? No matter how you define your coaching role, it’s important to LISTEN!

At the beginning of the school year, instructional coaches have a great opportunity to figure out how teachers are thinking about their practice.

One easy way to do this is to use Teacher Surveys. These can be printed out and submitted by hand, or you can use technology such as Google Forms or Survey Monkey to get the answers you need from teachers!

You can find out what teachers want support in, what their challenges are, and how they would like to be supported.

These Teacher Surveys make figuring out what your teachers need easy! Printable and Google Forms versions included!

Feeling like you want to do all the things, but you need some guidance?

Instructional Coaching Start-Up is the online course for coaches that teaches you exactly what to do during the first 20 days of school.

Learn how to do these four things and SO MUCH MORE.

Click to go to Instructional Coaching Start-Up!