Coaching Observations: What Do You Look For?, ep. 178

Coaching Observations: What Do You Look For?, ep. 178, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

Trying to get coaching cycle started and feeling like you just can’t make it work. I’ve got the email course for you. Realistic coaching cycles is a mini course sent right to your inbox. It’s five days of short videos that will teach you exactly what you need to do to start coaching cycles. document your work with a teacher and help them implement the learning you’ve done together. Get it for free at buzzing with MS b.com slash cycles and start your coaching cycles today.

Chrissy Beltran  00:28

Hey, Coach, I know you’re out there hustling to get into classrooms and provide feedback that actually improves 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. Did you coach 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 includes the reports and did the 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 digit coach.com And tell them miss be sent you to try it out for free and provide actionable feedback to your teachers.

Chrissy Beltran  01:23

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss V, where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach and every coach does do. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked. Now I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode.

Chrissy Beltran  01:50

Hey, coach, and welcome to episode 178 of instructional coaching with Miss B. Today we’re talking about coaching observations. Now you’re in the door. But what do you look for? This is part of our coaching cycles make them happen theme for this month, it’s so important that we spend time working with teachers in classrooms. And so I’m really excited to share this episode with you. This is the last one in our little series. So definitely go back and check out the last four episodes. If you are trying to make coaching cycles happen and you cannot seem to make it work. In episode 174. I introduced mini coaching cycles and talks a little bit about how you can structure these cycles in a way that helps you actually get them done. We look at what kinds of pre conference conversations you need to have how you need to work through those pre conferences into the classroom work, and how you can have a post conference that actually create change.

Chrissy Beltran  02:43

Today we’re digging into one type of that classroom work. And we’re going to talk about what it can look like, we’re gonna look at observations. And just you know, between you and me, I was not allowed to use the term observation as a coach at a school whenever I actually worked at a school full time, I was only allowed to say like classroom visits or something along those lines, because observation was considered a an evaluative administrative term. So I had to avoid that because then it looked like I was part of their formal evaluation, which I obviously was not.

Chrissy Beltran  03:16

So why would you be observing a teacher as a coach, you might do observations as a part of coaching cycles. And you may also do observations where you pop in and visit to see how things are going. So I spoke to Alyssa Crabtree about this in Episode 177, to give you context, for the curriculum. And so that is why you may go visit you want to know what’s going on so that you can actually support teachers through curriculum and data and planning and all those other kinds of coaching supports that we provide. If you don’t know what’s going on in classrooms, it’s really hard to be supportive. You might also be doing a classroom sweep where you sweep across your school to help you do a needs assessment and make a plan for PLC topics and professional development that will really address your teachers needs and areas of growth and strength. And I actually teach you how to do this in Episode 39, which is called Three ways to conduct a needs assessment. So check that out if you’re curious about creating your action plan.

Chrissy Beltran  04:11

Either way, whatever reason you’re visiting classrooms for and you need to come in with some kind of purpose and focus. Now I actually have a free mini Crash Course that goes straight to your inbox right now if you could have buzzing with Miss b.com slash cycles, you can grab that free Crash Course and it’s like a five day course straight to your inbox that teaches you how to do a little coaching cycle that’s actually realistic, and it’ll work for you. It worked for me. And so it’s going to guide you through these things and talk a little bit about what you can look at during observations. But we’re gonna get into like even more information today. So if you want a whole overview of the coaching cycle, definitely check out that crash course. When you go to observe a teacher you’re focused on one specific thing, because like we talked about in previous episodes that episode with Alyssa Crabtree

Chrissy Beltran  05:00

We’re trying to do too much and our conversation afterwards or do too much during our classroom visit, we are probably not being super effective because it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming to us, it’s too much information for us to look at and to write down, it’s too much to think about. And whenever we go to share with a teacher, we aren’t really targeting anything that’s going to help them grow. So that thing that you’re focusing on during your observation should be a goal you and the teacher discussed in your pre conference. And it’s likely related to the reason you’re working with this teacher in the first place. So like I explained in Episode 178, and I further discussed in the free crash course that you can grab it buzzing with www.buzzingwithmsb.com/cycles. These goals are usually ideally student centered. And so of course, you’ll have to decide what teacher actions will happen in order to support the goals. I mean, obviously, if your goal is for students to use specific academic vocabulary, you’ll have to plan a lesson where the teacher creates the opportunities and scaffolding for academic vocabulary use. But your ultimate goal is for the kids to do something specific that they were not doing before. However, what if you’re unsure of what to focus on? Or if you’re visiting all the classrooms in a grade level, trying to figure out what their next support should be as part of your action plan? And you’re not sure where to start? What kinds of things do you collect? And what do you write down.

Chrissy Beltran  06:20

So let’s talk about some categories for observing and what each one looks like. If you’re looking for really specific guidance, you can check out my classroom observation forms, that you can find the link in my show notes, or if you go to buzzy with Miss b.com. And check out the shop, you can see my classroom observation forms there. They include a specific focus for each form. And we’ll talk through some of the forms and focuses today that I think are super important. And they also include a place to record a specific kind of data that is targeted on that goal. So they include discussion questions to help you reflect with the teacher and guide your conversation into some meaningful next steps. And I think they’re a valuable tool, especially if you’re unsure about how to make observations really valuable, and what kind of data to collect.

Chrissy Beltran  07:01

So the three main categories of things that you could look for in classrooms would be classroom engagement, sorry, classroom management, student engagement, and instruction. And some people might actually combine management and engagement, but I personally think it helps to pull them out separately, because management is are you doing what I asked you to do? Engagement is are you using your brains? Are you really thinking about the content and learning? So let’s focus first on classroom management, there are a few different things that you can look at under that umbrella. One of them is time management. So you can record things like how much time is spent on managing materials and behavior, how much time is spent on direct instruction versus students speaking, reading, writing and working? How much you know, what is the ratio that supported a student’s success with the content, like we want to talk about these things with our teacher, after we’ve recorded our data we can decide is this sort of good ratio of, you know, time spent on management versus time spent instructing? Or do we need to make some adjustments, so we can spend more time instructing in order to support student success, you can also talk about where you can find some time for students to interact with the content if they feel that they are not maximizing that instructional time. And then kids need more time to work with ideas. So if you’re working on time management, those are a few different things that you can include in your notes, as you’re recording your notes.

Chrissy Beltran  08:26

And in your conversation with the teacher afterward, to ensure that you’re actually going to help the teacher grow in the area of time management, you could also be recording notes that are like timestamps, and so you could have a column on the left that has the time, like the actual minute, and then what happened during that minute, so that you can help the teacher go back through those notes afterwards. And notice where the time is going. Another kind of classroom management observation you could do is the ABC behavior chart. So I actually talked about this, in Episode 123. With my guests from navigating behavior change, we look at the antecedent behavior and consequence chart. So you can actually keep a record of those three events, and then talk about them afterwards. And I’ll give you some questions that you can use in just a minute. So the antecedent is what spurred the behavior. It’s kind of like a trigger. So we have a behavior that maybe students are demonstrating, maybe they’re shouting out, maybe they are,

Chrissy Beltran  09:27

you know, avoiding doing the task. And then we have the antecedent, which is what kind of spurred that behavior, what was the moment that caused that behavior to surface, and then the consequences the outcome of the behavior, it’s not necessarily the consequence you assign. It’s what comes afterwards that either reinforces or, you know, show students that that’s not what we want. And so, we have to record antecedents, behaviors and consequences if we’re not sure what’s going wrong here, but something is not working, and we need to figure out where exactly the teacher can change their behavior.

Chrissy Beltran  10:00

In order to result in different student behavior, so after you record those three things in your lesson, and again, you can go back to Episode 123. To learn all about how to do it, you can talk about a few different things to help the teacher observe patterns, you can say, what patterns do you see right away? Which behaviors do you see most frequently? Because you may notice certain things popping up over and over? What is the antecedent to these behaviors? What is the consequence or results to these behaviors? And could the result be reinforcing that behavior? What could the child’s motivation for these behaviors be? So if we consider the antecedent is a student trying to gain or receive something? Or if we’re trying to avoid something? And how could we plan a consequence and response that wouldn’t be productive and help deter the behavior as well as help us avoid reacting in the moment because if you have a plan response, you’re more likely to react properly, instead of just losing your mind whenever behavior goes kind of off the wall. So those are some things that you can look for. And then those are the guiding questions you can use to talk about this afterwards with a teacher.

Chrissy Beltran  11:00

Something else you might look at is behavior interruptions. So sometimes we just have a class where the kids are constantly interrupting and pulling the attention away from the learning into some other direction. And so one way that you can start helping the teacher notice what’s going on is by recording different kinds of interruption eruptions and tallying them to see okay, well, what is happening here? And so then what can we do about that? So a few different kinds of behavior interruptions that you could record information for could be that they need materials. It could be inappropriate comments, or interjections, like whenever kids just shout things. It could be site, a site conversations, are kids just having little conversations instead of you know, actually doing the work or communicating about what they’re supposed to be our kids arguing with the teacher or with other kids, are they using technology as an instructor, and also are there outside personnel or announcements that are frequently interrupting the lesson and making it difficult for you to get momentum, you can record tallies, you can record notes about what each of those look like. And then you can have a conversation about how you can minimize those interruptions and maximize learning time.

Chrissy Beltran  12:06

So those are just three examples of what you can look for, if you’re hunting for classroom management in your observation. The next category we’re going to talk about is engagement. So one of the things that we’re going to look at is student participation. One easy way to do this is to have a seating chart. So you go to the classroom, you record like a little mark your your little seating chart, you make little map, and then you just tally. And then afterwards, you’re going to notice who contributed the most. And who contributed the least, is there a pattern of students who do or don’t participate? What ideas can we come up with to involve other students, because that’s the point, we take the data, we have the dialogue in order to create change in the classrooms. Another thing you can look for is something that I mentioned a little earlier, it’s compliance versus engagement. So instead of just looking for are the students following directions, you know, you may notice that you have a classroom of students who maybe they’re doing what they’re asked, but they’re not really thinking they’re not doing the mental work that they need to do in order to actually learn the content. So in that case, we’re looking at like student behaviors versus evidence of learning, are kids speaking about the content are they writing, so if you have a teacher who’s not really actually planning opportunities for students to produce evidence of that learning, that could be a good focus.

Chrissy Beltran  13:25

A third possibility for looking at student engagement, is looking at student movement. And so you can actually discuss and record what students are doing with their bodies during their lesson. So you may have kids who are seated at certain points in the lesson, maybe they’re standing, maybe they’re moving around the classroom by walking, maybe they’re dancing or moving their body somehow, maybe they’re moving their arms and large gestures are clapping, there could be other ways that we encourage students to move. But if there’s no movement in the lesson at all, then you may notice that kids are not as participant, they’re not as as, as engaged. And they’re not as likely to give you a positive learning response, because they’re just not present. They may be going through the motions, but they’re not like actually moving their bodies and getting engaged. So that’s one thing that you can look at, if you’re noticing that maybe there’s a lot of what I know teach one teachers to call bottom time, lots of time spent sitting on bottom. The third category that you can look at is instruction. So we’re going to look at a few different ways to observe or instruction and ways you can record your notes as well. The first one is less than alignment, does the objective or target match the standard match the material, match the questions and match the assessment? And so whenever we look at a lesson, we can record exactly what the learning target is what the standard is, and then you can kind of go back through your notes and mark the alignment or the lack of alignment if the standard says that students are supposed to evaluate or apply and then look

Chrissy Beltran  15:00

Kids are actually dis identifying, there’s a lack of alignment. Now, they may need to start with identifying right in order to work up to evaluating and applying because you often can’t do the higher order stuff if you haven’t gotten the lower order stuff mastered. But if we never get there, we have an issue. And if the teacher thinks that, oh, I taught that standard, by having taught that lesson at an identification level, then we probably need to have conversation about planning and alignment with the standard. We also want to make sure our student tasks match what we’re asking kids to learn. So again, if we have the standards about distinguishing, and kids are sorting great, we’re having to distinguish between different characteristics, and you know, items that have those characteristics. But if the standard says apply, and kids are sorting, that may or may not be in alignment, we have to really be thoughtful about that. The second thing that I’m going to encourage you to look at during instruction is academic language. What language are students encouraged to use? And how are they encouraged to use it? And how often are they encouraged to use it and in what ways and so one thing that you can do here is record what students say. And then opportunity students have to write because we’re talking about expressive vocabulary here are students learning the words and then internalizing them and able to use them. So if we record the things that they say and record, look at student work samples, and identify opportunities that they’ve had to use the words and writing, then we can see which kids are using the language, which are not and what we can do to scaffold that opportunity.

Chrissy Beltran  16:26

My third way of looking at instruction is really fun, called pick three. If you pick three students, and just track everything that they do, it can be pretty telling. So you can record one student on one page, you can have a page for each student, or a vertical column, or just like a box. And basically you’re saying, Okay, at this time, this student did this, the student did this, and the student did this. And at the end of the lesson, it can be interesting to see well, which students are spending more time talking, thinking, doing the writing, which students are spending more time doing other stuff. And so if our lessons are structured in such a way that everyone can participate at a level that’s appropriate for them, we may see more evidence of kids participating throughout the lesson at appropriate ways. But if they’re not, then we may need to go through and scaffold what can we do to encourage certain kids to be able to have the same opportunities as other kids. The last one I’m going to share about is teacher feedback. We can record what the teacher what feedback, the teacher gifts.

Chrissy Beltran  17:25

And here’s an example. I remember once I was coaching at a school, and there was a teacher who asked a question, it was one of those questions that really it’s kind of a waste of time at the beginning of a lesson where you say, who knows what a polygon is? And the kids are the ones who already remembered from last year what a polygon was, yeah, they already know it. And the kids who don’t know it, still don’t know it. And then you ask one kid, and the kid says it’s a shape with signs. And you say, great, and still the only person who knows it is that kid, right? So it’s one of those questions. However, the teacher said, who knows what a polygon is? And a kid said, it’s a man, they gave a wrong answer. And the teacher said, almost, and then they move to the next kid to get there also incorrect answer. So that kid walked away with that understanding that almost was pretty close, and probably good enough. And they may have thought that they still have the correct idea of what a polygon was, when they did not. And so I remember recording this. And then having a dialogue about, you know, whenever we give feedback, we are teaching kids how to think about what they’re doing. So if we’re saying almost, then we’re telling the kid pretty close. Yeah, you’re fine. And that’s what they’re internalizing, many times. So we want to make sure that our feedback is accurate, and that it provides information to students.

Chrissy Beltran  18:52

Now, that example was imperfect, because it was a throwaway question, and really just a waste of time. But, you know, in general, we need to make sure that our kids know, if they’ve done something that meets the mark or not, we’re the only ones who could tell them that most of the time. So if you are going into classrooms, and you’re observing and you’re trying to figure out what to look for, I recommend, you know, once again, looking at either classroom management, student engagement or instruction, and you can break it down further into one of those specific examples that I gave, we talked about,

Chrissy Beltran  19:23

like 10 different ways of looking at classrooms today. Whenever you are getting started, if you’re unsure where to start, make sure you grab all of these forms and more forms in this in the classroom observation forms. Whatever focus you use, you want to make sure that you’re recording actual evidence and facts that happened during the lesson. So this will give you something to talk about during the post conference, and that will really support your discussion and your reflection. And I actually teach more about this in my real estate coaching cycles, crash Crash Course, buzzing with Miss b.com slash cycles. So what do you do during an observation? When you arrive on a call?

Chrissy Beltran  20:00

Classroom, you’re gonna want to wear a pleasant face and wave if the teacher looks in your direction, okay? Some people I know are like, well, I don’t want to give any feedback and make them safe that they’re performing for me. No, it’s okay to wave. It’s normal. It’s human look like a person. We don’t want to be all creepy, creeping into the back, and just kind of like, you know, hooking there. But let’s try to be unobtrusive. But you know, pleasant. And if a teacher asks you to participate in the lesson, I personally think it’s fine.

Chrissy Beltran  20:28

I don’t like it when they start to tell me everything they’re doing, because I can usually tell what you’re doing. But if they say, Oh, would you like, Would you like one of the handout? Sure. You know, would you like to sit with his team, great. If you choose to confer with students do so in a way that’s quiet and it doesn’t interrupt direct instruction, you can ask the kids questions about what they’re working on and what they’re learning. And sometimes I’ll talk to kids, sometimes they won’t, depending on the lesson, and whether I think that will be a distraction. You record your observations, and you’d be discreet, and you can choose how long the stay depending on what is going on, usually five to 10 minutes will give you a good picture of what’s happening at that time.

Chrissy Beltran  21:02

But depending on your focus, you might need to stay longer to observe transitions, how materials are handled response to misbehaviors and things like that. You can use a table and you know, on your document to record when you have visited classrooms. So you can notice patterns. So what I would do is I have the teachers names down the side. And then I had, you know just a column where I would just record the date that I popped into visit. And so if every time I visited a specific classroom, they were having a fun day or a free day, that can be a sign that there isn’t enough instructional time happening in that room. Unless you’re always visiting like the last 15 minutes on a Friday or something, you got to change up your patterns. So it could be the sign that you need to come at a different time during the day or different day of the week. After your first round of visits. If you use a Foursquare overview, that’s one way to do it, where you just record you know, what is being taught, you can record some notes about instruction about classroom management and engagement, you can take a look at what you noticed and choose the one thing that will most significantly impact student learning in that classroom. Because maybe it’s an engagement or management you have to decide. And the map can be your focus for work with a teacher unless they are coming to you with something else. If you’re working on a coaching cycle with a teacher, and they have a different goal, you can get started on their goal and then over time, bring awareness to this focus that you’re seeing through your work together. If the teacher is unsure of where to start, though, the need that you saw can be a suggestion that you make. If you are not working directly with a teacher through coaching cycles, you want to provide them with ways to grow in that area, you can do a few things, you can engage them in a post visit dialogue that helps them think about that area and targets what they can do to grow. This obviously requires more than you telling them. So I recommend using some guiding questions. And I actually have, in many of my resources, I have a debriefing questions that you can use for general conversations. And this can help them kind of be thoughtful and reflective about their practice, and how they can change their instruction to meet their students needs.

Chrissy Beltran  23:03

We can also provide them with PLCs and PD that target this area, especially if this is a common leave that you’ve seen across your campus. And another one of my favorite strategies for classroom work that you could do next steps is give them an opportunity to visit a classroom. If you try to do too many things at once, it’s going to frustrate you and the teacher both of you. So instead just focus on one thing that will impact student learning the most. And over time, as you see an improvement in this area, you can go back through again with a general observation and get another overview, and then figure out next steps. So those are my tips for observing in classrooms, setting yourself up for success, being really focused and being able to have a focused dialogue with a teacher because you took such great data and focused notes. I always share my favorite thing right now my favorite thing is routines for after school. So my daughter is a kindergartener, my other one is two, we have a routine calendar that shows what we do together after school. And that calendar looks like art and crafts Monday, game and puzzle Wednesday. We have adventure Tuesday, which is whenever we go out and do something in the world in the afternoon, outdoor Thursday, which we’ve had to forego the last few weeks because of massive winds and And Friday, it’s movie Friday, or visit grandma Friday. So those have helped me kind of make our week flow.

Chrissy Beltran  24:24

And we didn’t have this weird after school time that I didn’t know what to do with. I hope that is helpful to you. If you have kids, you are home with a lot. Don’t forget to grab the mini coaching cycle Crash Course. It’s right to your inbox, a five day course that teaches you exactly how to get your coaching cycle started at buzzing with MS b.com slash cycles. And next week, we are starting our new theme. So that’s pretty exciting. We’re going to look at coaching for engagement. So we’re kind of taking one of the things that we talked about in this episode that you can look for and zooming in on it. Because one of the main things we look at in classrooms is student engagement. It can be hard

Chrissy Beltran  25:00

are to support teachers in making shifts towards more engaging practices, especially if they’re thinking that what they are doing works, which I put that in quotation marks right. So starting with the next episode, we’re looking at instructional coaching for engagement. I’m super excited to share it with you. We’re starting off with an episode about differentiation as an engagement strategy and it’s gonna be great. Until next week, happy coaching

Chrissy Beltran  25:27

now that you’ve got so much to think about, head over to buzzing with bisbee.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIP, and check out the podcast show notes. Happy coaching!