Week 3: Why Instructional Coaches Should Invest in Content and Curricular Knowledge – 3 Tasks, ep. 198

Week 3: Why Instructional Coaches Should Invest in Content and Curricular Knowledge – 3 Tasks, ep. 198, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

When I work with new coaches, the two words they use to describe themselves most often are excited and nervous. Even to an experienced coach, the New Year can bring butterflies and back to school nightmares. Figuring out what to do to set yourself up for a successful year can feel like putting together a puzzle when you don’t know what the picture looks like. Instead, let’s start the year with a roadmap that tells you exactly what to do each day. For the sole very important first 20 days of school. The things you do the first month of school will make or break your coaching year. Let’s do the right things together. Head to buzzing with ms b.com/startup to join instructional coaching startup. This course teaches you what to do each day for the first 20 days of school. With a short video and all of the resources you’ll need to set coaching goals. Define your role, communicate with administrator, build relationships with teachers understand your school’s needs and so much more. Join instructional coaching startup today and get your GamePlan for instructional coaching. I even have a private Facebook group for startup coaches where we work through the course one day at a time together, you can share artifacts, you can ask questions and get so much information about your coaching role by supporting each other inside of that Facebook group. So head to buzzy with Miss b.com slash startup and join instructional coaching startup today.

Chrissy Beltran  01:23

Hey, Coach, Are you new to coaching starting out as a coach can be incredibly overwhelming, especially when you aren’t given much direction from your administration. That’s why I created the new coaches playbook. It includes a roadmap to help you start building your coaching Foundation, and a guide to seven podcast episodes in order that will give you the steps and ideas you need to build relationships. Define your role, communicate with your admin and make a plan to start coaching. Grab it today for free at buzzing witness v.com/new coach and save yourself so much time and stress.

Chrissy Beltran  01:58

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach and every coach does too. 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  02:24

Welcome to Episode 198, of instructional coaching with miss b This is week three of our four week series about the first 20 days of instructional coaching. And so today we’re digging into why instructional coaches should invest in content and curricular knowledge at the beginning of the year, we’re going to look at three tasks that you can undertake to really get a stronger handle on content and curricular knowledge. Now these three tasks are from my course that I teach instructional coaching startup, which is everything you need to know about the first 20 days of school doing the right tasks at the right time. And you can actually grab all of that right now. Because the course is open instructional coaching startup, you can go to buzzing with MS b.com slash startup. And you will learn everything you need to do the first 20 days of school and you’ll get all the tools you need to do it, it’s such a good course, I’ve gotten so much good feedback about it. And it really is going to help you set yourself up for successful year. If you want to kind of get your feet wet a little bit and start thinking about your coaching role. I actually have a really cool challenge for you. If you head to the Facebook group, you can join the live challenge there at buzzing with the Facebook group is instructional coaching with Miss B. So you go to Facebook, and then you type in in the little search bar instructional coaching with Ms. B. And you can join Facebook for our live challenge that is going to start I think next week, what week is this? Yes, our life challenge is starting next week. So join the group today. So you will know whenever you’re ready to get started. And we’re going to design your coaching role, develop a three by three vision, all sorts of great stuff in that live challenge. So definitely join me for that.

Chrissy Beltran  03:56

So we’re going to talk today about learning the third week of school. Or the second is you were able to start the week before school, which I highly recommend, if you can, is all about learning. We’re talking about teacher learning, Coach learning, kid learning, basically, everybody needs to be figuring out what kind of learning needs to be happening and when and where. So when coaches are starting at the beginning of the school year, they’re not always thinking about the learning. And that sounds kind of crazy, right? But a lot of the job is about logistics and materials and school systems and getting everything sort of established. But when we spend too much time on those tasks, we sometimes don’t invest in the classrooms where the actual learning is happening. So in order to get ourselves ready to work alongside teachers and coaching cycles, and really make an impact on those classrooms, we need to have a strong handle on what learning looks like in your grades in your subject areas and at your school. This episode is going to teach you three tasks from the course, the startup course that I teach for coaches about how to set yourself up for success. Here’s so we’re gonna dig into these three tasks. And then you can learn about all the other essential tasks for content and curriculum in the course, that’s just one week out of the four weeks. Now, coaches do participate in curriculum at varying degrees in different places. So I was heavily involved in writing lessons, evaluating our curriculum planning, collaboratively. Building assessments are very curriculum, heavy tasks, you may be involved to that degree, or you might be involved to a lesser degree, depending on what your roles and your responsibilities are. And so this is actually a really good question to ask your administrator about, because if you’re unsure, you really won’t know what it is that you’re there to do, right? So the thing is, though, even if you’re not responsible for making sure that the curriculum is used, or that units are taught, it’s still important for you to know what is going on when you walk into a classroom. So I want you to kind of envision this, you walk into a third grade classroom, there’s a lesson on perimeter. The kids are using little cubes to measure around the outside of shapes. Do you know if it’s being taught at a high level or not? If you have no idea what the standard and the assessment are? Without that context, how would you know? Picture this, you’re in a high school government class, and it’s a test for the time, there is a learning target on the wall that says something about different types of governments, and a video being shown about King Henry the eights. Kids are recording details on a graphic organizer? Do you know what’s going on? Do you know what is intended to be going on? Do you know if this is part of their test review really because it’s relevant to what’s being tested, or if it’s busy work, or what you have no frame of reference for what the end goal is for this class. If you haven’t done some work to dig into the curriculum and the expectations. Here’s my last scenario, you’re in a kinder classroom. The kids are rotating through literacy centers working on writing words that follow specific phonics patterns with different materials and retelling stories with puppets and listening to audiobooks. Do you know if this is time well spent every single day or not? If you’re unsure of what expectations are for kindergarten, and what’s developmentally appropriate this time, as well as what research says about learning literacy? Will you know what you’re looking at? This is kind of the argument that many people have about administrators, how many administrators don’t seem to know what they’re looking at when they come into your classroom? And they give you feedback? And you’re like, that’s not exactly what was okay.

Chrissy Beltran  07:29

Like, you know, I was, I can remember, once I was doing a reading across the curriculum lesson we were writing in science. And I got some weird feedback that I was like, What lesson were you watching, but it’s because they really didn’t know what was going on, they didn’t know what they were looking at, is you have no frame of reference for what’s happening in the classroom. If you don’t understand standards, if you don’t understand the assessment, if you don’t understand what curriculum teachers are using and why they’re using it, you might not be super sure of whether things are moving in a good direction at a good pace. And whether the teacher is planning lessons that actually develop the skills that kids need. You don’t always get to make that call, because the teacher obviously isn’t the you know, the steering position. But if you want to be a good partner, isn’t it valuable to have some knowledge that can help the teacher understand the big picture. So I’m going to share three things that I recommend that you do that can really be helpful to you in getting a handle on content, curriculum, expectations for your grade, all of that. So the first one is unpacking standards. And I know, when anybody says unpack the standards at a PLC meeting, everybody’s like, Oh, right, because it just feels like the most awful thing to ask anybody to do. But the truth is, without a clear understanding of what teachers are expected to teach, at what level in what context for what purpose, then what on earth are we doing here? Right? If you’ve taught the grade levels that you’re coaching, you’re probably ahead of the game in this area. So like myself as a coach, I moved into coaching case five, after having taught third and fourth grade, and I taught all subjects, and I was just coaching literacy. I still miss math and science guys, I still miss all that time I spent outside in social studies. But I had some really strong knowledge. And then I had some areas that I needed to grow in, ie primary grades, and I was very nervous about coaching those primary grades. So when I started, I had a partner who would do the heavy lifting in primary. And that unfortunately meant that I had a really good reason not to visit those classrooms as much not to learn as much about that instruction. Then the way that I was doing with upper elementary, putting that off was actually to my own detriment. So I spent more time working overtime in these classrooms. Like it took me a little while to be more comfortable. And then after a year or two, I really was like, Okay, this is going to be my thing. I’m gonna get more comfortable with this. I spent time working in those those classrooms with teachers and digging into the curriculum in those grades. And I learned so much from that experience. So don’t be afraid to work with the grades are content areas that you’re unfamiliar with. Instead, let’s look at it as a tremendous learning opportunity. So here’s what you do to get started with this amazing learning opportunity. So during this week, you’re going to take some time to dig into standards and get a better understanding of what is being asked in the areas that you’re unfamiliar with. So if I were you, you know, I would if you have little access in the past to first grade, or if you are really, really unfamiliar with like high school chemistry, and you have no idea what’s going on there, look at the standards, and then unpack just a couple of them, just to kind of give you a frame of reference reference, see what resources you have things like that. So I’ll share a process and a video guide and examples of unpacking a standard in the startup course. But I’m going to walk you through some of the elements you’ll want to consider as you’re digging into your own standards. And also, you know, getting familiar with this process is a really great way to support your teachers. And you can use the handouts and stuff from this course with your teachers, that’s totally fine. Because we have to get good at this so that we can help teachers become better at it too. So unpacking the standards, these are some of the things that you’re going to look into while you’re trying to get a better handle on what these standards look like. So you’ve got your standard write, and I recommend analyzing the standard from the year before and the standard from the next year because you want to see the progression. What is the difference? You know, in Texas A few years ago, whenever they updated our standards, they did this really cool thing where there are most of the standards are very similar from grade to grade. And what really changes most of the time is text complexity, which makes a lot of sense, right? Now they do have some differences. So for example, if figurative language is the standards of figurative language, you know, then there are some the grades that will introduce maybe similes or some grades that will introduce you know, alliteration, and then as you go farther down the line, they introduced different kinds of things. So it’s not that it never changes, but the main part of the standard is pretty much the same. And there were very minor changes from grade to grade, except for text complexity. That’s just an reading specifically. So from there, once you have that standard, and you kind of notice, what are the differences between the previous year in the next year, you can also dig into the nouns? What are the concepts that the student needs to know? And the verbs? What skills will the students need to demonstrate? So for example, if your standard is describe the effect of figurative language on the reader, right? Well, we’re looking at figurative language. And that’s the concept and then we need to know the effects of figurative language as well, right? Not just what it is, we’re not just identifying we’re describing effects. And then we also need to know whatever kinds of figurative language are going to be taught at that grade. For our verb, we’re going to describe effects we’re not identifying, which is often where people get stuck, right? We’re describing effects of figurative language. So you have to think about, okay, if the reader reads this simile, what happened? What did they think what does a picture then you want to look at the context, in what context is the student need to apply the standard. So in our case, maybe there’s like an umbrella standard of like our knowledge and skill statement that actually says that this is in fiction and drama, or this is in you know, a specific kind of text. And then you can actually list out some possible learning targets. So look at that describe the effects of figurative language on the reader. And you might have to start with identification. Because if you’re up in fourth grade, and kids have had, maybe they’ve had this every year, but you need to come back to it. You don’t want to just jump right in, you’re gonna want to make sure that kids can identify different kinds of examples of locate examples of figurative language, and then they can talk about what effect does it have on the reader, the kids can visualize figurative language and what it looks like. So I think that it’s really helpful to brainstorm some possible learning targets to think about what might the progression of instruction look like for this, I also recommend that you pull out your test, whatever the test is, okay? And if you have a grade level test, if you have an end of unit test, whatever you’ve got, and that you pull out question stems that involve that standard. So if you look at your tests, you say, oh, okay, this this question says, what effect does line 17 have on the reader in this poem? Okay. Now, we know that that is one way that that can be worded. So that may be a kind of question you want to expose your kids to. And you can look at your answer choices and see well, how do they word the answer choices? What kinds of vocabulary can I pull out from that? What kinds of question stems and, and the test can give you a frame of reference for what your kids are being asked to do. Because even though I’m not a huge fan of the test, the one thing that it does do, is it tells us what is important to the people who wrote it.

Chrissy Beltran  14:48

And that also doesn’t sound that important, right? But what I mean is, if they’re writing questions in a certain way about something, then they’re basically saying this is what we mean when we say this standard. We’re saying for you to do this, but what we really want kids to be able to do is the way that we’re asking this question. So to me, that’s really helpful. So that’s what I would do. First is unpack some standards, I would also learn about assessments. Now, depending on what grade band you’re coaching, or what content areas you’re coaching, maybe you have a lot of state tests, maybe not so much, maybe you do, you have some benchmark assessments, you can learn a learn about, maybe you have an end of the year mastering skills list that you have maybe like in Kinder first grade things that were expected, expecting kids to master, by the end of the year, maybe you have, instead of like a state assessment, maybe it’s like a an AP test. And this is an AP class, and you’re gonna go and examine that. You want to know which of your grades are testing, how they’re testing how kids are going to be held accountable for that learning, because part of your job is to help teachers help kids be prepared to be accountable for that learning. Okay, successfully. So you want to begin to your assessments and really just look through them and get make some notes about what you’re observing. What does this test look like? What does it involve? And then you can connect it to the standards you’ve unpacked, like I just mentioned, where you can examine that test, look at the standard, see which ones are more heavily assess which ones are less. So that tells us something too, right? It tells us what’s important to the people who are making the tests, which are the people who were, I don’t know why they’re chosen to tell us what’s important about teaching, but they haven’t. So you tells us okay, they’re they’re really focusing on this, this and this, that tells me that maybe we need to spend a little more time on that maybe that’s something kids are supposed to master at high levels. You can connect it to your standard, and also this most basic thing, but it’s really helpful. Set your testing calendar, put it on a calendar, whatever your calendar is, if you have your little paper calendar, which I love. And I will always love my little paper calendars, put it on your calendar, and then you can connect it with your units, because it’s helpful to know, okay, the calendar that we’ve been given kids are not actually done learning all this stuff until after the assessment. So maybe we need to adjust that. Or we actually have some extra time we can plan in some sort of a review, just knowing that that’s coming. It’s helpful to you as a coach, as you’re supporting your teachers in thinking about what are essentials? What’s most important to focus on? How do we need to present this information to kids in such a way that they will learn the information, they will learn the content, they will learn the thought processes, and they will be able to demonstrate it in whatever way we’re asking them to demonstrate it. I just think it’s really unfair whenever all year if you were to teach a kid how to draw with a marker, and then at the end of the year, you gave them a test and it was a paintbrush. I don’t think that’s fair. Do I love the test? Nope. Do I think there are better ways? Absolutely. Does anybody care what my opinion is? makes decisions? Apparently not. But I do think that if we’re holding kids accountable for this, even if it’s not our choice, we have to prepare them for that it’s only fair, it’s only right to prepare kids for what they’re going to see. And the little ones, they need to see things that look like what they’re going to be held accountable for. They just need to, and a lot of big ones too. My last task for you is to dig into curriculum alignment and see what you’ve got, and what gaps you have and what resources teachers are using. So these are some questions that you can ask yourself, what resources do teachers have? So what is actually available to all your teachers? What resources do teachers actually use? That is a different answer, right? You’ve got maybe a main curriculum, maybe when I first started teaching, I did not even have a textbook. It was a very, I don’t want to say it was a hippie dippie school. That’s what it kind of was. And it was run by a principal who was very much a believer in constructivism and authentic engagement and things like that. And while I do think that there’s a place for those things, I also think that we need direct instruction, we need access to texts that are great, appropriate, and you know, like a logical sequence of instruction and all these things. So the the principal actually took the textbooks and stuff them in a locker room. So I didn’t have a textbook to teach anything. So I was literally having to create almost all my lessons from scratch. We did have one math curriculum didn’t cover all of our standards. We had a science curriculum covered like two things, and it took you like, I don’t know, a month to teach each thing. And then you still have like 45 centers left over to teach, right. And then we had literally nothing for reading and writing except for lots of training, which is the reason that I can create resources now because I’ve been doing it since day one. However, if you’re a coach and your teachers don’t have anything, you got to figure out what you’re going to do about that. Because that is not realistic for most people, right? It’s not a good method. There’s going to be no alignment, there’s going to be no What do you do when kids don’t get it? I don’t know we got nothing right? You we need to make sure teachers have the resources that they have. And we can serve as a liaison to administration. If we You know, so what resources, resources do teachers have? And what resources do they actually use? You want to know, Do teachers plan together using that curriculum, or resources aligned across teams or grades or departments? So when they do plan together that everybody actually has access, or some people like, I don’t even know what you’re talking about interviews that are the resources that teachers have and use actually aligned with the standards. Here’s the big question, right? Because how many times do we see a teacher following a lesson? 123456 not even noticing? They’re missing half of what they’re asked to teach? Are there gaps in the curriculum, in the resources that don’t meet all of the standards? Or are the things in the curriculum, the teachers are teaching this because it’s there. And they don’t even have to teach that in the grade or it’s not at the right level. One of the things that I see happen a lot in Texas, is new standards come out one year, the next year, new textbooks come out aligned with the standards. The following year, the new tests come out. And the tests do not look like what anybody expected. And so the textbook is creating resources, based on standards with no clue what the assessment will be. So then, whenever we the assessment comes out, and that’s how they show us what they actually care about. It doesn’t match. So you’re looking at this resource that is suddenly obsolete after one year. That’s my opinion, anyway, they are never quite to the rigor that they need to be based on the assessment. There’s always a struggle with that. So there are gaps. And then if there are gaps, how do we fill them in? What are we going to do, we need to do some thinking about that as coaches because each individual teacher is responsible for their own classroom, but we can look across across classrooms and across our school and go, Ah, this is why everybody’s scores are all over the place. This is why everybody’s doing whatever they want. There’s no aligned curriculum, there’s no support. There’s, it’s not that teachers have to follow the curriculum to the letter, dude, with everybody turn the page at the same time, we don’t want that, obviously. But you want a tool there and a resource, it’s going to be pretty good to cover the majority of things and teach it at high levels that teachers need to teach so that you can figure out what you need to fill in the missing pieces. So those are the three tasks. And you know, this third one, actually, you can dig into some of that on your own. But these are really questions for your teachers that you need to you learn from your teachers and for your admin as well. If you need to learn about what teachers have, and what they need a survey is a really great way to get to know what teachers think, and actually use from the resources they have. So if you need surveys, you can head to my store on my site visit with Miss b.com. And I have those teacher feedback surveys that can tell you a little bit about what resources teachers use. So these are just three of the many tasks that will help you get a handle on what learning looks like at your school. I recommend that you spend some time in the third week of school, understanding this important part of coaching and preparing yourself to be a good coaching partner to teachers with all of this knowledge. Now we’re continuing our four week series next week. The fourth week is going to be about why you need a proactive PD calendar as an instructional coach. And I’m excited to share that with you because everybody I’ve shared it with like what this is brilliant.

Chrissy Beltran  23:16

So next week, that’s what we’re gonna talk about. You’re gonna focus on learning that happens for teachers and in classrooms. And again, you can get all the step by step instructions and every single document and form you’ll need in instructional coaching startup at buzzing with buzzfeed.com/startup. I also want to tell you about a really fun thing that I’m going to do because as you can tell, this was episode 198. Next week is going to be 199. The week after that is episode 200. And I’m going to do something fun because who doesn’t like fun stuff. So episode 200 is going to have a game bingo with miss B. And so to play bingo with Miss B, go to my group, Facebook group instructional coaching with Miss b. And you can download the bingo board. You can also get it at buzzing with miss b.com slash bingo. And you download your bingo board. It’s not complicated. I’m not going to make you do a lot of tasks. This is like fun questions about yourself. And then you’re just gonna see how many matches we have. And people with the most matches. They’re gonna win some prizes. So easy peasy. It will take just a few minutes to fill out because I really want you to play and grab that today but to have the b.com slash bingo or inside the Facebook group, until next week, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  24:32

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