How Your Coaching Job Description Will Set You Up for Success…Or Not, ep. 201

How Your Coaching Job Description Will Set You Up for Success…Or Not, ep. 201, 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 road map 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 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 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 Ms b.com/startup and join instructional coaching startup today.

Chrissy Beltran  01:23

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 Ms 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 hand picked 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 Ms b.com/quiz, with a capital Q, and learn so much about your coaching self.

Chrissy Beltran  02:09

Welcome to Instructional Coaching with Ms 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  02:36

Coach, and welcome to episode 201. How your coaching job description will set you up for success or not. So this is the first episode in our series called your 90 day action plan. And I actually have a resource that will guide you through creating your action plan. It’s the action plan toolkit. You can get that at buzzing with msp.com.com, just search for Action Plan toolkit. Or you can get it on teacher, pay teachers, and you can search for my store, Christie Beltran, buzzing with MS B and grab the action plan toolkit there. I actually have this resource that I created very purposely for you to help you figure out what your plan is going to be for the beginning of the school year, and if you are starting this later in the school year, that’s okay. If you have, don’t have a plan, you don’t know where you’re headed. This will help you do that. You can also still grab instructional coaching startup for the month of August. It’s going to be open through the end of August, and then I’m going to close it up. And so instructional coaching startup is the course that will walk you through the first 20 days of instructional coaching. And you can join the Facebook group. Once you join instructional coaching startup, the instructional coaching startup Facebook group, we’re going to go through that course one day at a time. So you get to see pictures of what other people have shared. You get to hear about the conversation that we have had as we are figuring out kind of what people’s roles look like, how they’re going to share that information with teachers, all of that stuff. And so it’s a really great place to be if you are unsure about how to establish yourself as a coach. This year, instructional coaching startup is the answer go to buzzing with ms b.com, slash startup.

Chrissy Beltran  04:10

So we are looking at your 90 day action plan. The first thing we need to figure out before you can create your action plan is you need to know what you’re doing there, what is your job. And the issue that we have is that sometimes coaches don’t have a job description. You may have a job description. It’s probably the one that says other duties as assigned on the bottom right. And this could be a job description directly from your school. It could be from your district or you, like I said, may not have one at all. When I first started as an instructional coach, my title was not instructional coach, it was school wide project coordinator, and that title was a little bit outdated. It wasn’t really being used anymore, so people would just call you the literacy. Coach. And even though that wasn’t, you know, the name of of what was on our contract, our contracts were school wide project coordinators, and we had some detailed responsibilities in that job description. A lot of it was about parent involvement and about, you know, hosting events for the school and coordinating literacy projects and and also supporting individual teachers. It didn’t start with supporting individual teachers. That was one of the things that was equally weighed with all of the other roles. Over time, my district did a complete overhaul, and they were like, Okay, we want to really redefine how coaches work. Some schools had math and science coaches. Some did not. And so we want to realign everybody. Everybody’s going to have a literacy coach. Everybody’s going to have a math and science coach. I also did social studies, those literacy and social studies, and then on the other side, math and science, everybody’s going to have these people and a technology coordinator. And we are going to realign all the responsibilities to make sure we know what they’re there to do. And with that redefined role, it came lots of responsibility. Came with lots of responsibility and lots of training, because they were like, Okay, we need to make sure everybody has a similar knowledge base. So changing roles, if you don’t have a currently, you know, clearly defined role, it comes with a lot of work, potentially, but it can also get you the things that you need. So we’re going to talk a little bit about why you need a job description, and there are lots of points. One of the ones I just made, it’s hard for you to justify training and resources if those things are not included in your job description. So let’s say that you wanted to join instructional coaching startup, but having a clearly defined role, building relationships with teachers, those things are not really included in your job description. So people are like, Well, what do you need that for? Why don’t you just go work in classrooms? This will help me work in classrooms. Well, it will help me prepare to do those things. But without having that on paper, it may be really hard to justify why you want to do something like that if you if you don’t have any clue about what your job really is, I mean, obviously you have a clue. But if you are not in alignment with what’s on paper and what your administrator thinks and what your teachers think, then how do you know if you’re doing your job? Are you being evaluated on what? How will your administrator know if your job is looking the way that it needs to look. It can be really difficult when your boss has an assignment and it has to go to somebody, and if your job is kind of a catch all support, support person role, everything’s going to land on your desk. So how does your boss decide what lands on your desk and what doesn’t they look at that job description, they look at your role, right? You also want to know how to track your impact. How do you track your impact if you don’t have a specific job description? How do teachers know what you’re there to do? Not having a clearly defined role can mean your position as muddy, and muddy equals untrustworthy for many teachers, and they may consider you administration, which is like the kids of death. It’s like the death sentence for coaches. You might love and trust your principal and feel like no documentation is needed, and maybe you’re fine right now, but when you get a new administrator, what will happen to your role? So there are lots of reasons that it’s very important for instructional coaches to have job descriptions that accurately state what their role is. Now let’s talk about what needs to go in the job description. Okay, these are some points for you to think about. One you don’t want to include anything evaluative. For teachers, if you have anything about, you know, coaching, providing feedback, all good, right? However, if it talks about evaluations, or being a part of evaluation, feedback or documenting something for principals to use towards evaluations, excuse me, you don’t want any of that on your plate. That is not the role of a coach and and having those items in your job description is going to make it really hard for you to be an effective coach. Now some people are, I don’t know how they do it, half time coach, halftime assistant principals. That is tricky. You can do coaching work. You can build up teachers, but it is hard to build that relationship whenever they also know that you’re their evaluator. So it that that is a special circumstance. If you can avoid it. Really try to avoid it. Something you do want to do is explicitly state the responsibilities that will end up on your desk. So because you’re a support staff member,

Chrissy Beltran  09:32

everything can end up on your desk, right? Random documentation that needs to be entered for the state. Well, there you are, clicking away, right? It’s something literally anybody could do, but they might ask you to do it, so we need somebody to run all the GT testing and complete all the documentation and sort the kids and plan make sure they’re in the right placement for next year that could end up on your desk. Family literacy nights, like I mentioned before, as a school wide Project Coordinator, I ran family literacy nights, and that’s. Responsibility that I carried over whenever I became just an instructional coach in name as well. All of those things could land on your desk. You know, attendance, data, disaggregating data, bullet boards, literally anything that needs to be done, that needs to be done by somebody without a classroom that doesn’t have kids all the time can’t land on your desk. So if you want to make sure that you are only getting the responsibilities that really pertain to your job, you have got to go through this, and it might seem like torture, but you’ve got to be specific and know what you’re going to be held accountable for. Actually have a checklist for you inside of instructional coaching startup. So if you join startup, grab that roles and responsibilities checklist and use it whenever you’re having that conversation with your administrator that I teach you how to have in week one. It will help you clearly identify exactly what your responsibilities will be in this role. You also could look at your responsibilities and it’s easier to make sense out of them. You can divide it up into annual semester and maybe monthly tasks or responsibilities. So maybe annually, you do have to conduct some sort of audit or needs assessment. Would make sense that be part of your action plan that we’re going to talk about next week. Maybe every semester, you have to collect data on something specific, or you have to submit minutes for something or you have to attend certain meetings that would be part of your responsibilities that you can divide by semester, maybe every month you have to collect something from teachers, you know, review it, analyze it, and then return it. That could be like a monthly task of responsibility. So it can be really helpful to look at those responsibilities that your administrator and you have figured out as part of your job description. Work through them to say, how often does this need to be done, and organize them by frequency. You also need to have somewhere in your job description explicitly what your coaching work looks like with individual teachers. And this is my own personal soapbox. We’ve talked about this before, the idea that you have to figure out what your caseload is, because schools are all different in terms of who you will work with. So will you coach everyone, but only upon request? Are you there as just like this resource, unless someone approaches you for coaching, or unless you can finagle your way inside and get them to agree. Do you coach everyone but on a rotation where you say, Okay, I spend three weeks with these six people, and the next three weeks I spend with these six people. How does it work? Do you coach only teachers identified as struggling? That is another responsibility role that I’ve seen where coaches only work with teachers who are identified as struggling, and that’s usually identified by the principal, or maybe some sort of evaluation system, and then those teachers go on to your roster, and those are your people that you work with. Do you coach only new teachers? If you have a large percent of new teachers, this could actually fall into your lap, where you are only assigned to coaching those new teachers, because there are just so many. The issue, excuse me, we have coaching only teachers identified as struggling, only teachers who request you, only teachers who are new. The issue with only coaching one small sub population of your faculty is that that will establish your role clearly to other teachers, they will perceive it, even if you didn’t tell them, as being the teacher, the coach, who only works with these people. So then people outside of that role have no interest in you. So let’s say that there’s a teacher in fourth grade, and they’ve got a lot of great things going on, but they could really use some support with a new Mac math curriculum this year, they’re having a hard time. They can’t figure out how to integrate the best practices that they know about, manipulatives and and hands on practice with this very scripted curriculum. They’re stuck. But you only work with struggling teachers. That teacher is not going to be interested in your help, usually, because that would mean that they’re struggling teacher, and they don’t want that label. Once you label who you work with and it’s struggling or new teachers, there’s nobody else who’s outside of that category is going to be interested in you, and nobody wants to be in the category of struggling teacher. It also like makes the people who are in the struggling category that that category feel pretty awful, and then they’re not going to be excited to work with you, either, because nobody wants to work with somebody just because I’m Oh, I’m so bad at this and I needed somebody to come help me. That’s really, really negative role to have assigned to you. And so if you can avoid that, I would recommend that you do. It’s best to start with your friendlies, start with some teachers who are have some really great things going on, and use that to leverage to get into other classrooms. You You want to make sure that your role sets you up for success, not for failure, and a role that is designed around struggling or only new teachers is probably going to set you up for failure. I mean, new teachers, that’s fine. If that is like many times it will be. One person who serves several schools that works with new teachers. But if you’re really trying to make an impact on your school, you want to be open to working with whoever wants to work with you, and whoever you can kind of convince to work with you as well in those natural, organic conversations that we talk about. You know we want to be open and make sure that we are there to grow teachers. Because every teacher deserves a coach. Every teacher does not just the ones who are labeled as struggling and not just our new teachers. Okay, so from there, you want to know, how will you be evaluated? So, okay, these are all of my responsibilities, right? What is that going to look like on my evaluation? And that evaluation, setting up a strong evaluation, can actually help you formulate your action plan, because your evaluation can be tied to the 90 day action plan that you create. And it doesn’t have to be just 90 days. 90 days is what I’ve seen requested the most. And I do remember whenever I was a coach and I was being interviewed, I was asked what is my 3060, 90 day action plan in my interview. And so I do know that those are questions that come up a lot. Now, obviously, 90 days is roughly a semester, right? And so if we think about it that way, it makes a lot of sense to say, Okay, this is my first semester action plan. After that semester, I’m going to reevaluate and make some changes. Now, if you want to know what you’re you’re being evaluated on, hopefully you can tie it to the actions that you’re taking as part of your action plan. These it will hopefully be tied to some of the goal that you have set around your coaching work. And so making sure that all of these things are tied together is a really great way to streamline and have alignment in your work. So you know where to focus. Having a strong coaching role helps you figure out where do I focus my time and energy? Because this is my main thing, right? Having a really clear focus in your goals, which we’re going to talk a little bit about next week, that can help you figure out where you’re going to spend your time and energy. And so if we don’t have a really strong plan and purpose, then it’s hard for us to think about, have we been successful or not, right? Because we don’t know what we set out to accomplish. Hopefully, your evaluation, however you’re you’re evaluated as a coach, which is different everywhere, everywhere it’s wildly different. Hopefully you can kind of tailor that to make it support the work that you’re trying to do in your coaching role. Some coaches like, whenever I first started coaching, I was just evaluated on basic questions that were not really even aligned to my job. And so, you know, we filled in the questions, and then my my principal would come watch me teach a lesson with students and give me feedback on that actually as part of my evaluation. But many coaches that is not the way their evaluation looks anymore, because people have realized that is not an accurate representation of what coaching is. So keeping that in mind, you know, you want to make sure that you know what that’s going to look like, because that job description should be tied to your evaluation, but should also be tied to your action plan that we’re going to build over the next few weeks. Okay, so you know that you need to check back in next week, because we’re going to talk about how to collect information needs assessment for to build a needs assessment so you can set a really great strategic action plan. It’s going to make a huge difference in your coaching work. And we also have that I have a really great action plan freebie. It’s a little email course that will come right into your inbox. People love the email courses, so I keep making them, and it’s just a few days long. It’s going to come to your inbox and help you walk through the process of creating your own action plan. Plus, you can get that action plan Toolkit, which is everything you’re going to want to build your own action plan. You can get that at buzzingwith ms b.com to search for Action Plan toolkit. Next week, we’re continuing our work in our mini series about your 90 day action plan. And until then, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  18:58

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