Coaching with Fewer Meetings: Texts, Video, Ep. 165 Instructional Coaching with Ms. B

Coaching with Fewer Meetings: Texts, Video, Ep. 165 Buzzing with Ms. B: The Coaching Podcast

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Hey Coach, I know you’re out there hustling to get into classrooms and provide feedback that actually improve instruction. But meeting your teachers needs when you’re looking at a stack of sticky notes is just about impossible. I want to share a coaching tool that I know you’ll love. Digicoach is an app you can use on your phone designed for busy coaches like you and your administrators to it’s the perfect way to record your observations and notes when you visit a classroom. Collect data about what’s going on at your school and differentiate your coaching support based on the patterns you see. Some of my favorite features include the reports, and digit coaches pre written strategies and coaching tips to provide specific feedback and help in those moments when you just don’t know what to say. Ready to check it out and make your workload so much lighter, head to digicoach.com And tell them Ms. B sent you to try it out for free and provide actionable feedback to your teachers.

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Coach, I know you’re trying to figure this all out on your own. You’re investing in your own learning on your own time, because you want to show up for your teachers in the best way possible. Building your coaching program is a huge challenge. And it’s even more difficult when you’re asked to know about literacy practices and how to support them. That’s why I created the confident literacy coach. This self paced course gives you the knowledge strategies, processes and downloadable tools that you need to be confident in your coaching work every single day. Check it out at confidentliteracycoach.com And stop reinventing the wheel.

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You’re listening to Buzzing with Ms. B the coaching podcast where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach. And every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an instructional coach, resource creator and coffee enthusiast, and I’m your host, stay tuned for practical tips and honest coaching talk that will help you coach with confidence.

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Hey, Coach, today we are talking in Episode 165. About coaching with fewer meetings. I recently shared an Instagram post about coaching cycles. And teachers responded to it. They were not my audience, I was talking to coaches. But they felt very strongly about my post about coaching cycles. And one teacher said not if it means more meetings on my time.

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And I get it, they are busy, they are swamped, they are being asked to do stuff that is unreasonable.

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However, learning still has to happen.

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Every teacher deserves a coach to help them grow because the kids in those classrooms deserve a teacher who was figuring out how to better support them. So we can’t just say, Well, I’m not going to do coaching cycles right now, because my teachers are stressed or I’m not going to coach my teachers in any way, because they just are not interested in working with me. If that’s not what we can do. So I wanted to share today about how to conduct coaching cycles with fewer meetings. So this won’t replace PLCs or like, like any kind of meetings that you have with your team. But it will help you identify some ways you can work with individual teachers that you’re coaching, if they don’t have anywhere to kind of squeeze you in, we’re going to talk about some things that you can do to replace the meetings and kind of technology obviously is a great tool that you can use that will take the place of person to person meetings or even virtual meetings. And we will also talk about a couple of ways that you can think about your coaching work that will help you kind of think beyond the traditional coaching cycle.

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So let’s first off talk about how we’re going to do coaching cycles. But with you we’re meeting so teachers are spending less of their planning time prep time after school time meeting with you, because that is often a huge obstacle. And one of the reasons that teachers are reluctant to start working with their coach. So basically, we’re going to share some technology that can be supportive in this way. One of the tools that I really love for this is Voxer Voxer has a free version. I think it doesn’t save messages beyond a certain time. You but basically Voxer is a short Voice Memo app. And you can save the conversations for a certain amount of time on the free version. And you can only I think it’s up to one minute on the free version that you can record you can do longer ones if you are doing a paid version, I think so if you don’t have time to sit with a teacher and have a like a debriefing conversation after you’ve done some classroom work together. Voxer is a great tool to use. You can send messages back and forth you can respond to what you’re saying. It’s all kind of like streamlined in this one little app. It’s not like another text message that they have to sift through. And it’s got you know, the recording that you’re making which voice is so much easier to to communicate with than writing

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Teachers are tired of reading lengthy emails, they just don’t read them. They leave them on, you know, they’re even open a half a time. And once they do open them, they scan and they pull out what’s essential that they ignore what’s not. So we want to make sure that we are communicating in a way that’s going to reach our teachers. Voxer is a great tool for doing that. Be careful of what you say, because it is recording, right. So if you see something that’s really negative, or something that is

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about an issue that could be confidential, that’s probably not a great place to do it. In person is going to be better for, you know, any kind of confidential conversations. But Voxer is a great tool. If you’re talking about how the lesson went, you know, I had some thoughts today we did this lesson we co taught. And I was thinking about, I noticed so and so was doing this, maybe tomorrow, whenever we teach again, we can do this, it’s a great way to communicate without having to sit next to your teacher, if that’s not something that’s available to you. Another tool that you can use for this is Flipgrid, you can start a new conversation, and then you can respond with videos back and forth. So it’s similar to Voxer, in that you’re recording yourself, but you’re recording yourself talking about something, you can share that with your your, your coachee. And then they can respond in the same medium. What’s nice about that as if you have artifacts or something that they’re going to show you they can literally hold them up, they can say, Okay, this is the sample that I have from the student, this is what I was thinking. So they can respond to you with the video, they can, you know, use it to hover over a student’s desk after school and show their writing response with you. And that way, you can actually see what happened in the classroom, they can say, Look, this is the anchor chart that we made today. Tomorrow, I’m going to do this, it’s a great way to build a coaching relationship and communicate with teachers over time without being there in person. It’s also great if you have like PD or something you’re going to be off campus for for a few days, your teachers can still communicate with you and share with you what it is that they’re working on. Another place that you can have ongoing conversation is in Google Docs. Google Docs are great tools for learning and processing together. Okay, you can actually put your questions in a doc and then your teachers can just respond when they have time. So let’s say that you are going to meet with them for a lesson in which you are going to talk about what you’re going to do for your classroom work together. So you’re going to meet with them for your pre conference, you’re going to do some classroom work, and then you’re gonna have a post conference, but you only have maybe 15 minutes to plan with them for that lesson, instead of maybe a full planning period, because you both have things going on, what you can do is say, Okay, we’re going to have a really short planning session, we’re just going to kind of check in before the lesson because essentially, you check in before the lesson somehow. But to get us started, I put in kind of like a simple template. And we can do a little bit of CO planning. In that Google Doc, you talk about some questions that we want to make sure we get answered during the session today, what it is that we’re looking for, I put some things in for us to think about so that whenever we come to our planning session, we’ve already thought about these things, and maybe even shared a little bit about it back and forth using the Google Doc, I can’t recommend that enough. Google Sheets is another great place. So let’s say you’re doing some co teaching, you can have a planning template in Google Sheets. And you can both collaborate and edit the sheet at any time. So let’s say you’re at home, you have like 30 minutes that you want to you know, you’re gonna sit and do a little bit of work on a Sunday evening or on a Monday night or whatever. Or even in the morning, before you go to school, you can open up your Google Doc Google Sheets, and then you can add in, you know, whatever details you would like to add in, whenever your teacher goes to open that up, they will open it up, see what you’ve added, they can add questions, they can change it, they can, you know, add whatever details they want to add. And you then before your lesson, you can meet briefly to review the plan without having to actually have worked through it in person step by step. So this is often once you’ve got a good relationship with the teacher, you can use a tool like this, because you already kind of know what’s up and you’re not starting from scratch.

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Another really good place to go is to build a shared Google folder. So I use Google Drive some places use OneDrive if you have like the Microsoft 360, or whatever it is. So what you can do is you can have a shared folder. And if you’re both working on one thing, let’s say that you’re talking about something that you’re going to do in the classroom. In November, we are looking at formative assessments and different kinds of data. And you know, talking a little bit about the definitions and how we use those things. So let’s say you and your teacher are working on assessment, and you’re talking about how to better use assessment and data to affect the teaching impact to change the teaching that you’re providing to your students. What you can do is if you see a really cool video, or a really cool article, or maybe even she’s just, you know, like a meme sometimes or, you know, give us something to think about. You can drop those in a shared folder. And then when the teacher has time, they can learn about it through those tools. They can respond to you. They can even have a shared Google doc in there where you can say, hey, I actually dropped a couple of things in there, check it out, and then they can respond if you have some maybe some sort of reflective question.

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shins, basically we’re using technology to lever leverage our, of the time that we spend collaborating and communicating about things without being in the same room. So I really do challenge you to think about how can we reach our teachers in ways that meet them where they are, which might be at home in their PJs, right, or they have three minutes before a meeting, and they’re going to, you know, watch the short little video that you sent. That’s only like, one minute long. If we can do that, if we can meet teachers, where they are using whatever tools that we have, we are more likely to impact their teaching, rather than if we say, we have a formal coaching cycle that we follow. It’s going to require a 40 minute 45 minute pre planning, you’re going to take these questions respond to them. And we’re, it’s like this whole thing, right? It’s overwhelming. And teachers are very reluctant to commit to that. So think about what kinds of learning cycles you could do with your teacher that may be involved the traditional coaching cycle, but that’s not the only way you’re working with your teacher, right?

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We want to think about also how we’re maximizing the time when we are with a teacher during classroom lessons. Now, if they’re modeling, or if you’re modeling, it might look a little different, right? If they’re modeling, you may not want to interrupt them the middle of the teaching, although I have had teachers tell me to stop me and tell me if I need if you want me to think about something, tell me right away, they want that. That’s not always the case, you kind of have to gauge where they are, if they’re comfortable with that. But if you are modeling, you can stop and do a think aloud that tells the teacher why you’re making certain decisions in the moment. And you can point out things that you are seeing that maybe you would have failed to point out in a debriefing conversation. So that way, when you do debrief, it doesn’t take the whole session that just takes a small piece, because you’ve already been having this ongoing conversation where you’re thinking aloud, and you might even say, hey, remind me to mention this to you later, so that your conversations are more targeted.

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If you’re co teaching together, this is a really great tool, you can actually check out student centered coaching the moves by Diane Sweeney, I really love the section on co teaching. And I’m going to share a little bit about how you can use this to ended up having fewer meetings afterwards. So like avoiding that debriefing conversation, after a co teaching session by doing the strategy, what you do is you plan a lesson beforehand, whatever method you choose, then you co teach the lesson together. And during the lesson, you’re going to respond to what you’re seeing in real time. Because what you’re going to do is say, Okay, kids just did this quick response, I’m going to pull the student responses, let’s pull the teacher over to the side and quickly observe what we see on the responses do a little bit of sorting, like, okay, these seem to be on track, they seem to need some more work. These are like, Oh, were they here for this lesson. And then you can have a dialogue about how to respond based on what you see in that moment to say, Okay, next, the next lesson, this is what we need to do. This is happening during the class time. Maybe we even told students okay, you finish this up, let me have your response. Excellent. I want you to talk about this question, we’re gonna come back and talk about it in a second while I talked to miss so and so make sure you’re focused and having a dialogue about this, because I’m coming right back to you, and everybody’s going to share, or you give them all little exit ticket or you give them all sticky note and have them write what they learned, you do something that helps them engage and stay focused on what they’re doing. While you have a sidebar conversation with a teacher looking at their work, dividing it up, or you collect their work at the very end, maybe it’s an exit ticket along those lines, you send them out to PE or whatever if it’s you know, if there’s a time where you can actually have a class change, and you can send them away, you very quickly have a conversation with the teacher at the closing at the tail end of that lesson with the kids gone, you do the same thing, sort through their work, have a quick dialogue about adjustments that you can make for next time to your plan, and then move on and everybody goes about their day, it didn’t take a whole full session, it’s a very focused on one specific thing. And you just look at student work and use that to determine what’s coming next. I think that’s a really great method to use. And it’s more likely to get buy in from the teacher than if you say, Okay, make sure you leave me a 45 minute timeframe to have a conversation about how it went. That can feel like a lot. If you do it quickly. If you look at student work quickly make a plan to respond to it, you’re more likely to get buy in from the teacher because it’s realistically going to fit into their schedule. Something else I want you to think differently about is coaching isn’t just coaching cycle. We are not just a coaching cycle person, that is not what we do. We don’t fill up our day only with that traditional coaching cycle of pre conference, classroom work, you know, post conference, that is not what everyday looks like. In reality. Coaching is a lot of things. And coaching cycles are a tool in that toolbox. So let’s say that the other tools in the toolbox are getting teachers to visit their colleagues. That is a form of coaching. You are facilitating teacher learning in a specific area. Maybe it’s getting them to learn from video

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Right, learning something from a video, whether that’s a colleague, a video you found online, wherever you find these resources, providing them to teachers and helping them guide their thinking in a direction that’s going to impact the students in their class and add to their toolbox is a tool in your toolbox. So we have to remember that coaching doesn’t necessarily mean other things that teachers are not doing in their jobs, it doesn’t mean just the coaching cycle, it can mean supporting them in the work that they’re doing by helping them think better or differently or reflect reflectively about it. Okay. So that’s why I love to share a coaching menu with teachers, it tells them all the different kinds of ways you can support them. And they are not always a traditional coaching menu. If they’re planning a lesson for the next week, you can say I would love to sit with you, while you’re planning and just kind of see your process and start from there, they’re already going to plan, they’re going to plan some time, they’re going to figure out what they’re doing lunchtime, unless they’re the kind of teacher there’s just opening the book and doing the next page, right. But that’s not what we’re talking about today. They’re gonna plan some time. So say I would love to sit with you and observe your planning and just kind of see how it goes and then help you in any way that I can. I want to be a resource for you. So if we can approach our coaching work that way, and say, coaching cycles are a tool in the toolbox, but I have lots of tools in my toolbox. Look at this coaching menu, these are the different ways I can support you, I can help you look at a resource that you’re trying to figure out how to use, I can help you find a text that matches the complexity and topics that you’re looking for, I can help you build that assessment that you’re trying to build. Let’s sit together and look at it, we’ll do it in a brief time, we’ll but I’m adding something to your toolbox because I am supporting you with my knowledge. And I am helping you reflect on what you know and apply it to this moment. Coaching doesn’t only mean coaching cycles, it means a lot of things. So we want to consider that, as you’re figuring out ways to support teachers with fewer meetings, and consider this as a very real challenge. Because teachers are overwhelmed, they’re inundated, they’re leaving the field, they’re leaving, some of our really great teachers are leaving because they’re done. What can we do to support those people to help them continue to grow, but to base it in the reality that they are dealing with right now? Okay, those are my tips for coaching with fewer meetings. I know this was a short one. But I really wanted to make sure that we talked a little bit about how you can reach your teachers, because I’m seeing it from teachers, I don’t have any time for meetings, I am not talking to anybody in a meeting, right? If you’re having trouble getting your teachers engaged in coaching cycles, and you want to try out some of these tips, but you’re unsure even to how to get how to get the door open in the first place. I have a really great free download for you. It’s five ways to get your teachers excited about coaching cycles. And I actually included some of the tools that you can use, you just print them out and go. And they will help you support teachers in the areas that they need to be supported. And they’ll help you get the doors open. So definitely check that download out, it sent BuzzingwithMsB.com/Episode 165. If you scroll down, there’s a place for you to enter your email address. And you get the freebie and it’s a good one. Like I really wanted to make an effort here to make sure that you had a tool that would help you get those doors open. So this is going to teach you how to do that. So that you can get started in actually working with your teachers. And you can try out some of these ways. Now I even recommend telling teachers Hey, I know that you’re like tell me what it is that you’re concerned about with a coaching cycle. Why is it that you’re hesitant to start one? And if the answer is I don’t think I have the time. Say what if we found a way to do this with fewer meetings, introduce the tools and help them choose which one would be most relevant or useful for them say let’s try it out. And if we don’t like it, we’ll try something different. None of this is set in stone we have to be responsive to what our teachers need. And so asking them to be part of that conversation is a great way to get it started. So head to BuzzingwithMsB.com/Episode 165 to grab that free download and get your teachers excited and interested in coaching cycles with the tools to help.

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We are also launching my course the confident literacy coach, it is open it is available for you to grab if you are struggling with coaching cycles and you cannot figure out how to initiate them how to get teachers interested how to actually make an impact and what what they look like at each step of the way. If the post conference stresses you out like it did me if the pre conference stresses you out like it did me if modeling and coaching stress you out like it did me this course is for you because it teaches you exactly how to do all of the things Okay, so that course is that confidentliteracycoach.com You can have there see all the great stuff that is included but it is absolutely going to answer a lot of the questions that you have around coaching cycles and it is open right

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Now, grab it, grab it, grab it. Next week, we are going to have a little conversation with Sherry St. Claire, about goal focused coaching cycles. We’re going to talk about how we worked through goals during the coaching cycle to help teachers actually achieve something, know what they accomplished and to make sure that we’re providing the right kinds of support. That is coming out next week. Until then, happy coaching

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Thank you for listening to buzzing with Miss B the coaching podcast. Want more coaching ideas? Check me out at BuzzingwithMsB.com and on Instagram at buzzing with Miss B. If you love the show, share it with a coach who would love it too. Or leave me a review on iTunes. It’s free and it helps others find this show. Happy coaching!