How to Collect Data for a 30/60/90 Day Coaching Plan, ep. 202

How to Collect Data for a 30/60/90 Day Coaching Plan, ep. 202, 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 so 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 Miss 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 administrators, build relationships with teachers, understand your school’s needs and so much more, join instructional coaching startup today and get your game plan 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 buzzing with Miss b.com/startup and join instructional coaching startup today.

Chrissy Beltran  01:22

What’s your instructional coaching personality type? Have you ever wondered what superpowers make you a really strong coach, and what areas you could strengthen a little with a little direction? Well, now you can find out. I created the What’s your instructional coaching personality type quiz to help you answer this very question. Just head to buzzing with Miss b.com/quiz, with a capital Q to take the two minute quiz and get your coaching personality type sent right to your inbox. Even better, you’ll get a playlist of podcast episodes that are handpicked just for you to help you hone your superpowers and strengthen your areas of growth. I’m so excited to share this quiz with you, so don’t wait. Go to buzzing with Miss b.com/quiz, with a capital Q, and learn so much about your coaching self.

Chrissy Beltran  02:09

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  02:35

Hey coach, and welcome to episode 202. Of instructional coaching with MS b Today, we are talking about how to collect data for a 30/60/90 day coaching plan. Now I want to tell you about a few things that I have available that can help you do this. One of them is the resource to Action Plan toolkit. And you can grab the action plan toolkit on my site, at buzzing with Miss b.com, or at teachers pay teachers, if you search for buzzing with Miss B, the action plan toolkit will walk you through all of the things that you need to do, all of these steps, and it gives you the tools and the forms. And it’s a really great resource. I’m really excited about it, and I’m super happy to share it with you, because I feel like this is what I needed as a coach to help me focus my work so I wasn’t all over the place. So that’s the resource that you can grab.

Chrissy Beltran  03:19

There’s also a free action plan challenge that you can get, and that is on if you scroll down to the bottom of this post, like if you’re reading the show notes, you can get it on this page, or you can go to buzzing with Miss b.com/action, plan, and then it will give you the challenge. So you can grab that free challenge. It’s like a four day challenge that will teach you what to do each step that we’re going to go through, and it’ll give you a little simple guide that you can follow to actually do this in your coaching work. So check that out at buzzing with this b.com/action plan.

Chrissy Beltran  03:51

And so let’s dig into the episode today. So whenever I was first interviewed, I was asked about my 3060, 90 day action plan, and that is not a question I had prepared for. I did not know to expect that. And I don’t know how many people actually get that question. I thought it was not a terrible question. And so I remember talking about how well I would have to get an idea for what was going on. So I probably visit classrooms and get kind of a picture of instruction. And then from there, I could reach out to support certain teachers. And, I mean, I kind of just, you know, made up an answer which was fine, right? It was a perfectly fine answer. And then they said, What about 60 and 90 days? I said, Well, I’d probably evaluate at the end of each of those time chunks, and then I would do it again, like I would reevaluate, and then make it, you know, take the same structure and apply that with my next round of coaching, right? So that was my answer. And then over time I have, I’ve gotten, I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about this, because it’s like that interview was literally, like, 12 years ago, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. And. And what I would say now is a lot more thorough and more thoughtful, and it would encompass more pieces of my job description. When I went into being a coach, I did not know what to expect as my coaching job. And I can remember asking, Well, what will my day look like? And I was given a, you know, an answer that was lovely. It was like, well, whatever you want, and that wasn’t entirely true, because so much of my time was taken up with responsibilities that were not things that I would just have chosen to do. And also I did have responsibility at different levels of the school. So as we’re thinking about your 90 day action plan, I want you to think about how you serve the school at different levels right now, I, as a coach, serve with whole school. PD, I serve with PLCs for different teams, and I serve individual coaches or individual teachers through individual coaching cycles or different kinds of coaching work. So because we serve at those different levels, many of us, we have to have a plan that’s going to address all those three levels, right? And it’s a lot like your classroom. In your classroom, you’ve got three different levels as well that you do. You have your whole group, you have small group, and then you have individual kids. And that framing your work as a coach like that can really change the way that you approach it. If you are feeling like you are very muddy in where you spend your time and you’re not sure if you’re spending your time in the right way. Weeks pass and you’re kind of not sure what you’ve accomplished like it feels like a drop in the bucket, which, I mean, to a degree, it’s always going to feel like that, because education is slow to change, and classrooms, you know, on the whole, across the school, can be slow to accept different things. But

Chrissy Beltran  06:39

if you are feeling like you are not spending your time in the right places because you’re not sure what to focus on. You do need an action plan. So if you’re spinning your wheels, if you’re trying to support every teacher in the same way, and it’s not working, let’s talk about this process for collecting data for your action plan, and over the next few weeks, I’m going to teach you how to actually roll out your action plan. So we need to basically conduct a needs assessment for three different levels of support. Okay, so we’re looking at our Tier one is our whole school, PD. Everybody gets PD, right now, you may differentiate within that, but there are going to be some things that pretty much everybody on your campus is going to get in terms of your school initiatives, right? That’s your tier one. Tier Two is going to be your differentiated PLCs, because different PLCs are going to focus on slightly different things, or maybe completely different things. Even if you have a similar structure for your PLCs, what you’re working on and accomplishing, hopefully, is going to be tailor made for that team, or for a few teams that have similar needs. And then your tier three is your individual coaching, like coaching you’re doing with one on one, with your teachers. So now that is a whole other thing, okay, and we’ll talk a little bit about that today in terms of data collection. But if you are unsure about how to meet a wide range of teacher needs. I want you to look at, I’ll look up the episode number, but look at the episode that I have about tiering teachers for instructional support, because that is going to help you really make sure that you get to teachers in a way that is actually supportive of them. That’s going to be episode 60. How do you do it all tiering teachers for instructional support. So if you can check that one out, I think it’ll really be helpful to you, if you’re feeling like you don’t know how to support a wide variety of needs from your individual teachers. But back to what we’re talking about today. We’re looking at how to collect data. So in terms of data collection, we’re going to look at four different components that are going to help you paint a big picture, a big picture of your of your school, not a big picture. It really sounded like I said, a big picture. Do not try to paint a pig picture. It’s not going to be helpful. So four steps to getting a really clear picture of your school. Okay, we’re going to first look at data, we’re going to get some direction from admin, we’re going to get teacher surveys and feedback, and we’re going to get do some classroom sweeps. Okay, so I’m going to teach you a little bit about each one of those today. I do recommend starting with data first. And in the past, I have said, well, you could start with any of them first, and you can, you absolutely can. But I do feel like the more that I’ve done this process, looking at data first gives you some hard numbers, but it doesn’t give you the why, right? So we see the what. We see what’s going on in terms of the way kids are demonstrating their understanding in whatever assessments you’re looking at, right? Or whatever context you’re looking at, like maybe you’re looking at behavior data or attendance. So we’re seeing how kids are showing what they’re doing right? Data is not the whole picture. Data is just the what. So now we’re going to go uncover the why. Okay, by doing the other pieces, after we look at data, we’re going to uncover the reasons for things and figure out what’s happening. With the data. The data can give us like an outline to a picture, but to really, truly fill it in with color, we have to know what’s going on in classrooms. We have to talk to people. We have to figure out the real, true story behind the data. But the data helps us start somewhere, because those numbers, we say, data doesn’t lie, right? Okay, it doesn’t lie, but it can misrepresent some things if we think we’re taking it at face value. So we need to have a big picture here, a big picture, if you will. So we’re going to start by looking at data. Okay, and the kinds of data that you look at, it depends on what you’re trying to do. So I know that some coaches have been really focused on behavior, because that is an issue that is impairing everyone’s ability to do their job across the board at their school. If this is your school and you are struggling to get anything accomplished because kids are just all over the place, there’s no structure, then I recommend doing some really good analysis of your behavior data. Behavior data can be lots of different things, including attendance, because attendance having, if you have lots of issues with attendance, that can be tied to whether kids want to be at school, not always, because there are a lot of other factors there too, but that’s one of the things that it could be tied to. I know whenever my daughter, who you know generally loves to learn, isn’t super excited to go to school that week. I mean, she goes, I take her, but there are times whenever she’s less excited. And maybe if I didn’t think it was big of a deal, maybe I’d let her stay home, you know, but I know she has a good day when she gets there. Sometimes it’s just a challenge to get her out the door. We’re not early risers around here. We are late risers, for sure, and she struggles with early morning start times. So behavior data can be one place to look if that’s an area in general that you’re trying to figure out what’s going on at your school. Academic data is obviously another huge component. This can include end of your assessments. I mean, we’re towards the beginning of the school year, if you’re listening in real time, if this episode just came out, and so you know, end of your data, it doesn’t tell you what the kids can do now, but it does tell you what they did at the end of a year of instruction last year. So that can give you a piece of the puzzle looking at beginning of your data, if you have some boi assessments, that’s actually something that I teach my coaches to do an instructional coaching. Coaching startup is to make a plan for collecting that beginning of your data. Of your data, so you can check that out. If you’re not already in the group, it’s buzzing with Miss b.com/startup and then you also get access to the Facebook group where we share stuff in there about how our startup course is going this year. So boi data can be helpful looking at, if you look at maybe many schools are moving away from reading levels, or schools are combining reading levels with, like a skills component, which I think is wonderful, because that gives you kind of an overview of, okay, this is what kids can do, specifically with individual skills. So important, plus, this is where they are when they put all those skills together. I think that’s valuable information. I think it’s also helpful to take a look at if you have beginning of year writing samples or end of your writing samples, we used to send up a writing collection every year, and so at the end of the year, we would have multiple pieces in a folder, and that folder would travel with child up to the next grade, but those were supposed to have been scored by the previous teacher. So it can be helpful to take a look at that if you have math assessments from end of year, if you do like a math challenge we used to do in elementary school, a fast facts challenge, and kids would have to practice our facts, and we could see how many kids were mastering those. There are so many different kinds of data that you can collect in the primary grades. If you don’t have information there, it’s time to start collecting information there, because if you do not know what reading skills your kids have, you cannot support them. So that’s just and that’s just the basic reading skills, right? And writing skills are important as well. I mean, if you don’t know you, what are you working on? So we gotta start making sure that we have data collected at all levels. If you’re in secondary, you have a bunch of end of year assessments, right? And they all are going to be different. Is the issue certain grade levels, you’re not going to have a state assessment for a lot of kids, certain grades, you will and but I don’t want you to get stuck there, because if we are only looking at state assessments, then we are missing what’s happening in our classrooms all the time. So I recommend that you figure out some way to get some kind of information from your teachers about how kids are doing, not just on state assessments, but even those subjects that are not tested, even those subjects that are only tested up to a certain grade and then they’re dropped, those are the areas that maybe there’s lots of room for growth, but we don’t even know what it is, because we are not tracking it well enough. Okay, so those are different kinds of data that you can collect from there. You gotta look at it, right? And so if we are looking at data through no lens, we. Be very overwhelmed. So what I want you to do is decide how you’re going to break it down. Are you going to look at it by teacher? Are you going to look at it by student? Are you going to sort kids into different categories to see what percentages were at each level? How are you going to approach this? In order to help you have a frame of reference for what the big picture of the data is saying sometimes we just kind of look over things, we’re like, oh, 87% passing good. But what about our sub populations? What about those kids that traditionally have been neglected? Where are they? How are they doing? Are all of those kids failing?

Chrissy Beltran  15:37

If you are at a school with a diverse population, do you have a lot of kids who are failing, who are identified as English language learners. Are they all failing? Do you have a lot of kids who are identified as subpopulation in terms of ethnicity or gender? Is there a pattern? So we need to look see, oh, there’s Pat Are there patterns there? And zero. And one way you can do that is by breaking your data into subpopulations and noticing how many special ed students are being successful here. And what can we do about that? Right? So that’s the first step. Is look at your data, whatever data you have access to. And side note, if you haven’t been collecting a lot of data, it’s a good time to start. Okay, the second thing I want you to do is go to your admin and get a picture of what’s going on. Okay, what do they see now, the thing is, our administrators should be in classrooms. Absolutely they should be in classrooms. I just talked to a teacher the other day who told me that their admin came into their classroom once all year, and when she asked why, they said, Well, I wasn’t invited. You didn’t invite me. Oh, no, no, no. It is not a teacher’s job to invite administrators. Administrators steer the ship. They need to meet they need to know what those rowers are doing, right? So we need to make sure that our admin are in those classrooms getting a picture of what is happening on their campus. They are responsible for every child in that school. They need to know what’s happening in those rooms where those children are all day long. That’s my soapbox. So admin, need to be in classrooms, period. It makes teachers uncomfortable. It does. A lot of teachers never get over that feeling. But if you create an environment in which I am here to help, I am here to support and help you grow, I am not here to tell you all the things you do wrong all the time. I’m going to point out the things you’re doing well and help you grow the areas you need to grow, teachers will start to be more comfortable with you. But the truth is, even if they are not comfortable yet, you gotta get started. And I believe coaches need to do that too. I believe a school that has a closed door policy is not going to be successful. You’re not going to have everybody doing the same kinds of things with kids, which means kids are going to be starting over every year. You’re not going to have everybody working to the same standards or using the same academic language. We need some alignment here. It doesn’t mean everybody turns a page at the same time, but it does mean that people are working on similar things in a similar way. We have to build what our kids know, and we do that with some alignment. We don’t get alignment. If we don’t get into classrooms, you need to know what’s going on. So I believe that our administrators are our first point of contact, because they should have a picture of what’s going on in classrooms. I know whenever I was a coach at a school, they had a specific number of walkthroughs that they had to do every year, and they actually had to keep track of them, principal and AP. And it’s interesting, because I talk to principals now, and some of them don’t do them hardly at all, and I don’t understand this. How do you know what’s going on? How do you find patterns? So we want our admin to tell us what patterns they are noticing, because that can shed a little light on the data as well. Your admin may say, You know what? I never see writing. I go into all these grade levels. I never see writing happening. They don’t teach writing. I can’t find it. I’ve been in several times a day, and the only thing I saw this is true story. Administrators told me the only thing that I saw kids writing was like, if they liked the book or not, and that was it. So whenever that happens, we have to really look at writing and say, Okay, what’s going on there? Do we have teachers who are uncomfortable teaching writing, which was the case, and maybe they need more support in that area. We have to figure it out based on our data and our admin. They can help. They can start to fill in some of the missing pieces. Okay, after you talk to your administration, you’re going to want to talk to your teachers. And there are a couple of ways you can do this. You can actually go the blanket approach and get a response from everybody by sending out a survey. It can be anonymous, but it is helpful if you have them put their content area or team or grade level on there somewhere, so you have a frame of reference, because if it’s from, you know, let’s say algebra, then it’s gonna their information is probably very different than somebody who is teaching like world history, right? You want to make sure that you are not that you are getting information that has context, and without it, you might not really have much to do with that information. For example, oh, we don’t get enough training in my content area. Well, what does that mean if you don’t even know what content area they teach? Yeah. Teacher surveys are helpful, because everybody can tell you what they think. If you don’t want to do teacher surveys, you can actually go out and seek specific teachers, seek out the ones who seem to be present in the school, who seem to know what’s going on, who other teachers go to for help, because they will have an ear to what teachers are asking, right? And whenever you ask them, ask them what they are hearing from teachers as well, not just what they need, because what those teachers need is going to be different than what other teachers need. So ask, you know, what they would need, and also ask, what do they think their colleagues need? What are they seeing whenever they’re working with their colleagues? The last piece that you’re going to want to get is a classroom sweep. And I’ve taught you how to do this in different episodes, but a classroom sweep is whenever you visit all the classrooms. You can do this by visiting every single classroom in a week. You can do this by, you know, breaking up your day and saying, I’m going to go see all of this grade level. I’m going to see all of eighth grade English. You know, on Monday morning I’m going to see eighth grade math on Monday afternoon. Depends on how you need to do it. You know, your school schedule is going to determine that. But you’re going to want to visit everybody and observe. You’re going to want to observe the walls. You’re going to want to observe what teachers are saying. You’re going to want to notice what students are saying and what students are producing. If you are already at this point, then you may have some ideas of what to look for based on your data, your admin conversations and your teacher conversations as well. So whenever we look at all of those other three components, maybe we say, You know what I feel like? What I’m hearing is kids are not engaged. They’re not interested in doing this, they are not talking to us. That’s what teachers say. That’s what the admin say. They don’t see enough dialog. You don’t see enough student engagement. So whenever I go in, I’m going to look and see if I see examples of student engagement, or if I see some areas to grow that can give you a frame of reference. Okay, so you go through your classroom sweep, and you have notes recorded for the whole thing, right? Then you take those notes and you combine them with your data, your admin and your teacher conversations. And from there, you will actually be able to pull out your goals for your 30/60/90 day plan. This will tell you what you want to work on. Now I recommend that you’re only choosing a few, right? And so we’re going to talk a little bit about how to go about that process next week in episode 203, but between now and then, grab your data, start putting it together, and start thinking about patterns that you are noticing so that you can actually build a really great plan based on the needs your school has, and not just what everybody else seems to be working on, right? So I will talk to you next week. In the meantime, head to buzzing with missy.com/action plan, to get that free challenge. It’ll walk you through all of these things and give you a handy guide. And you can also grab the action plan toolkit at buzzing with Miss b.com or at teacherspay teachers.com and search for Christy Beltran buzzing with misspeak. I will see you next week, and until then, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  23:06

Now that you’ve got so much to think about, head over to buzzing with missbee.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIBee and check out the podcast. Show Notes. Happy coaching!