Checking Your Progress on Your 30/60/90 Day Action Plan for Instructional Coaching, ep. 204

Episode 204 – Checking your progress on your 30/60/90 day action plan for instructional coaching

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  01:23

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 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 204, of instructional coaching with Miss B. Today, we are talking about checking your progress and working towards your goals on your 3060, 90 day action plan for instructional coaching. This is part of a theme your 90 day action plan, because this is something that has been really requested from coaches. They’re like, how do I make a plan? How do I follow through? What does this look like? And so I actually created the action plan toolkit to help you do this. You can get it at buzzing with Miss b.com search for Action Plan toolkit. You can also get it at Teachers Pay teachers.com if you go to my store, Chrissy Beltran and I also have a free little challenge that will help you set up your action plan at buzzing with Miss b.com/action plan. So it gives you a little guide on how to set your goals, how to collect your data, all of that stuff so you can grab that. It’s got a little video for each day teaching you what to do that day to get started. And I think you’re going to love it. So today we’re talking specifically about working towards these goals that we set. In Episode 202, we talked about how to gather data to get a picture of what’s happening at your school in episode 203, we talk about how to use that data to set some goals for three different tiers of support, of coaching supports. We’re looking at tier one, two and three. Now, different coaches have different job descriptions, and not everybody is expected to do that kind of support at the whole school and PLC team level, but I was, and many coaches I know are, so that is why I have created that three tier system, because if not, it’s a lot to juggle, and it can feel very overwhelming. Today, we’re going to actually work towards our 3060, 90 day plan to build in our check ins. I talked a little bit about check ins in the last episode, but we’re going to talk about what those check ins can look like, and how to keep working towards these goals in between the check ins. Okay, so sometimes what happens is we set great goals, especially at the beginning of the year. And if you’re listening to this in real time, you know, we’re still in August. We’re towards the beginning of school. Some of you just started. Some of you started about a month ago, and some of you have yet to start, because you’re starting like after Labor Day. And what happens is we set these lofty, beautiful goals. They are great. They’re grounded in data. They are designed to support people where they are. And then the year gets started, and we run, we run from leadership meetings to PLC meetings. We run from, you know. The copy machine to the parent volunteer room to beg them to laminate something for us if you have that we run from coverage at lunch to covering a class that was missing to after school duty we are running and our goals can sometimes not become the most important thing that we’re working on, because they are not so urgent. Sometimes the urgent stuff takes over the important stuff. And I’m going to encourage you to prioritize your goals by doing something that’s really simple. It’s just going to help you focus and keep them front and center. So on your calendar, if you’re like me, your calendar is your lifeline. I love a paper calendar. I want to see the two weeks or the whole week. I want to see it out in front of my face. I want to see with, you know, in my own handwriting, because it helps me remember what I wrote. I want to see my dates coming up. I want to be able to easily look forward and back without changing screens. I just, I use technology for so many things, but calendars not they’re just not it for me, I like a paper calendar, and so I used to carry that calendar around everywhere. And I would joke that if I lost my calendar, I would have to quit, because I wouldn’t know what I was doing. And I still feel that way. When I come back after a break, I’m like, I have to I don’t know what’s going on. I need to look at my calendar. I don’t know what I was supposed to be doing today, because I made a plan for myself to tell myself what to do this day, because I know on the day I’m not going to know what to do. I set my day up in advance so that downtime I have is already scheduled, because I know what is important about that downtime. What can I use it for? The reason I know what to do with my downtime is because I have goals. So I do the big three. And I talked about setting up three goals, tier one, two and three goals back in episode 203. And those goals can become your big three things that you’re focused on, right? So on the top of each calendar page or on the screen somewhere, add in a few little rows, I want you to record your big three. I want you to record those big three goals because that’s going to help you focus your actions each month and each week. So use that blank space or a priorities checklist or something on your planner planning calendar to record the three things that you’re going to do this month, because we talked about in the last episode, how our goals have to be tied to actions. Those actions need to show up in calendar time. If you don’t write them down where you’re going to do them, when you’re going to do them, build them into your schedule, they will not happen. So for each tier you have that action you’re focusing on, I want you to write the action you’re focusing on for each tier at the top of your calendar, and when you plan each week, make sure you’re coming back to those actions each week. And if you miss your week, you might lose your inertia, right? So we have to make a point of getting back on it. If we’re losing track of it, we have to make a point of coming back to it before you start working towards your goals using your action plan. You’re going to want to identify what your check ins are going to look like at each point and when they will happen. In the last episode, I talked a little bit about choosing when they will happen. We talked about doing either monthly or looking at 3060, 90 days. You could also do something like, if you do like a six week grading period, you could do six weeks. That can be helpful. But if you’re doing a true 3060, 90 day plan, you’re probably looking at them, 3060, 90 days, right? So here’s what I recommend for a 30 day check in. For your first check in, you want to look back at your goals, and you want to consider any new data you have and how that might paint a picture of how your goal is going. And remember, this is preliminary, because this is your 30 day goal. You’re just getting started here, right? You may not have had time to see change, because change takes time.

Chrissy Beltran  08:47

So just take it with a grain of salt, but start to look for things. Notice. I want you to visit any classrooms that you have been working in and keep this at the forefront. Just observe and notice what are we doing here towards these goals. What am I seeing? Am I seeing them in action? And I would like you to meet your with your administrator to get their input, because you’re going to want to have some people have a weekly meeting with admin. I found that’s not always easy to do. Bi weekly might be easier. Once a month, might work for some so you’re going to want to meet with your admin to get your their input and let them know you’re coming for this purpose, because if you spring it on them, they’re not going to be ready to talk to you. So visit, ask what they have seen in those three areas, your tier one, two and three goals, and break it up and talk about each one individually. You can ask them, What have you seen in response to this goal we’ve been working towards. That can help me think about next steps. Do you think any adjustments are needed? And then you consider those three things, your admin conversation, your class visits and any kind of new data that you have since you started out with your action plan, consider those three points and use them to evaluate your progress and make any adjustments that you need. For a 60 day check in, you’re going to want to look at data. You’re going to want to communicate with your administration, and I recommend including a teacher survey, because teachers will have had almost two months to implement the work you’ve done together to a certain degree, and if you let it go too long without checking in with them, they’re not going to think it’s a big deal to not do it. Sometimes they’re gonna forget, because this is what happens with new stuff. You have so many things that you do in a classroom, and then whenever something is new, you are finding a place to put it. Hopefully, you’re looking at your schedule, and this is something you can facilitate in conversations with teachers. You’re looking at your schedule and you’re saying, What is something I am not going to do, because I am now going to do this right? But sometimes teachers don’t do that. They squeeze it in somewhere, and then it just doesn’t always happen. When it doesn’t happen, it’s our responsibility to bring it to the forefront again. So if you’re talking about your tier one goal is some sort of whole school goal, like in last episode, we used the example of academic language if you have given PD to your whole school about different activities that they could use. You want to make sure that teachers are using them, so send out a survey asking about those activities, or if they’ve used any others, and how they’ve gone, how they think that this is impacting student academic language and what kinds of support teachers need next to continue to implement this, you want to get their feedback on the process, but you also use this as an opportunity to bring it to the front of their minds. And I actually have surveys included in my action plan toolkit that you can get on TPT, and I also just have teacher feedback surveys that you can get on TPT, or buzzingwithmosp.com the teacher feedback surveys are really helpful because some of them are just editable. They have editable components. Some of them are set in stone and printable, and some of them are Google forms that you can edit and change up the questions, but the majority of it is already ready to go for you at 90 days, you’re going to want to combine your admin dialog data review, and then you can actually plan another classroom sweep and visit all of your classrooms. You could check in and see specifically how things are going in response to the learning that you provided at tier one and two, and consider the work you’ve done with individual teachers for tier three as you’re visiting all these classrooms. And then here’s some questions you might ask yourself. And then in a minute, I’m going to tell you a really cool thing that I did whenever I did these classroom suites. So the questions you might ask yourself are, what evidence could I see that will help me identify how we’re moving towards our goals? What evidence do I see of the learning we’ve done together in tiers one and two? What evidence should I see that I do not how have teachers made this their own and adapted it to their style and classroom. What gaps can I identify in the learning that I’ve provided that I can adjust for moving forward? What individual teachers have been impacted in the past 60 days? Excuse me, I should say 90 days. How do I know that they’ve been impacted? Can I see the results of our work together? Is this impacting student learning positively, and how do I know that it’s impacting student learning positively? You can combine all of that information to get an understanding of where you are at 90 days. That’s your snapshot. And then you can decide, have we met our goal? Do we need to adjust our focus, or is this a year long goal that we’re going to continue working towards in the next semester? You can build a new 3060, 90 day action plan for the next semester, or you can take the same goals and just continue adding on to your previous plan, right, making sure that you have opportunities at tier one, two and three, for teachers to learn what it is that you’re working towards. So here’s the cool thing that I did one time whenever we were working on a plan like this, we had created an action plan around behavior at our school because teachers had said that the majority of the behavior issues were when kids were like in transitionary periods, like walking to lunch, or they had said that a lot of the issues were happening at PE but then my assistant principal went through and did a whole data dig, collected all the information, recorded the location of these incidents, and they were not happening at PE mostly they were not happening when kids were In transitionary periods. They were happening in the classrooms, which, in a way, makes a lot of sense, because kids spend more time in the classroom than they do in those other places, right? So after that came about, our school said, Okay, we need to align our behavior management practices. This was a bear. I’m not going to lie. And you know, after I left that school and that principal left that school, did they continue doing it? I couldn’t say. I’m sure that some teachers held on to certain practices that they had learned during our work together in that area. You know some do and continue to use them, and all of them benefited from the experience one way or another, but I don’t know that they continue to do the whole specific program that we put together. So anyway, what happened is. Yeah, we got a group of people together. We made an open invitation, but you could join us to create a program for our school, a management program. And we had a few teachers join us, and then a few of the support staff, myself included. And so we put together this program, and then we trained teachers on it. We trained them during in service. We, you know, referred back to it during PLC meetings, things like that. And what we wanted to know is, after 90 days, what was in place? Are we seeing it? Is it happening? So what we did is we did a classroom sweep of the school, and then we documented percentages that we could see. Okay, these things are in place. These things are still growing. These things are not in place at all. So it told us what to focus on next. The information was not punitive. It was telling us what do we need to bring back? What can we focus on in our next workshops with teachers? And I took little videos of teachers who were doing really cool things within the program. So I was like, okay, oh, I love the way you’ve got your kids lining up. We said we need to have a lineup procedure. Let’s see what that looks like. I’ll take a little video, and I will share that during the next PD, taking those videos of classrooms where the things were going on and being used in a way that the teacher had adapted it to their own needs, but it was working really well. It was so valuable, because teachers who could not envision the thing could suddenly see it. They were like, Ah, this is what it means. This is how we can do this. Now I see how I can make it work. I couldn’t picture before. And so that helped a lot of teacher who were not on board get on board and try out new things from the program, because they could see them in action. So if you’re going to do a classroom sweep aligned with your 90 day check in, I absolutely recommend it that you take little videos and highlights and kind of like a commercial you’re showing people what’s going on in classrooms, because we don’t get to see other classrooms so much whenever you’re already teaching. So I definitely recommend that I loved it. Teachers enjoyed it. I got to kind of showcase a few teachers that maybe it hadn’t always been showcased, and I also got to share some really cool stuff with their colleagues, and they a lot from each other. So I hope this gives you an idea of what you can do to check in on your goals throughout the year and to evaluate your progress towards them. Now remember, things can change, and it’s not bad to learn something new. So if you realize your original goal is no longer best or relevant, you can update it to reflect the work that you will do with your teachers, because that is learning, and we want our teachers to do that too, right? So we need to be models of vulnerability, reflection and change. Next week, we are wrapping up your 30s. We already did that. This week, we wrapped up your episode, your last episode, with the 3060, 90 day action plan. Next week, we are starting a new series. It’s a fun one about relationships, resistance and rookies. Episode 205, is going to be about providing feedback to Enneagram personality types. And so I’m excited, because I asked Hillary McCaskey of Enneagram and coaching to introduce to us how the how we can provide feedback and what are some mistakes we might be making when providing feedback to different personality types in the Enneagram. I’ve gotten some requests for this. I know a lot of coaches use the Enneagram with their teachers, and so I hope this information helps you think about how we address people and what kinds of responses we give them that will actually be received. Well, don’t forget to grab that free action plan guide that’s buzzing with Miss b.com/action plan. And till next week, Happy cooking. 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!