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A Look at Instructional Coaching Goals with the COACH Acronym with Katie Maciulewicz, ep. 219

Top view of desk with glasses, paper, pens and paper clips. These words are in the middle "A Look at Instructional Coaching Goals with the COACH Acronym with Katie Maciulewicz".

This episode is sponsored by Kind Cotton

Today, we’re talking to Katie Maciulewicz from EDU Coach Network about setting goals with the COACH acronym.

If you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, you know that I have a love-hate relationship with goals.

I personally like goals and think they’re important!

But I also know that sometimes we set goals and then they go nowhere! Or they’re not realistic! Or they’re more wishes than actual actions we can take!

A good goal needs to be practical and attached to a clear plan.

If you tried setting SMART goals before but felt like they were lackluster, you’re going to want to check out this episode. My guest, Katie, has a unique approach to goal setting that I think you’re going to love!

A Look at Instructional Coaching Goals with the COACH Acronym

Recently I saw Katie share her COACH acronym for goal setting, and I knew I had to bring it to you all! In this episode, she walks us through the process of setting coaching goals and provides tips for achieving them.

Katie explains what each letter in COACH stands for and provides real-life examples to illustrate each step. Here’s a quick overview of the acronym, along with some examples to help you understand each one.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more!

Clear: Define your goal. What is the basic goal? What are we hoping to do or change in the classroom that’s tied to a bigger school goal?

Example: Working on differentiation or trying to use more formative assessment.

Obtainable: How will the goal be achieved? How are you going to obtain it? How will you know you’ve done it?

Example: Increasing the number of teachers using differentiation strategies by 10% or providing PD on formative assessment to all faculty.

Action-Oriented: Describe the specific actions taken. What are you doing? What are the actions being taken?

Example: One-to-one coaching cycles or designing and delivering a workshop series on formative assessment strategies.

Connected: Align the goal with bigger school or district initiatives to make a greater impact. How are we connecting all these things to a larger goal?

Example: Aligning the goal with the school or district focus on higher-order thinking skills.

High-Impact: Measure the impact of goals. How does all of this work impact student or teacher growth?

Example: The impact is making learning materials more accessible for students with diverse abilities and needs.

Katie says it’s the last two letters that really get to the heart of what coaches do. We should set our sights on those letters because they help us to be more thoughtful and look at the bigger picture when setting coaching goals.

How to Accomplish Your Coaching Goals

When setting instructional coaching goals, we want to make sure that we’re going to stick with them. During the episode, Katie and I talk about ways to ensure you accomplish your goals. Here are a few suggestions.

  1. Set an action plan and schedule time in your calendar to work on your goals.
  2. Tell someone! Share your goals with your administration or a colleague so you have accountability.
  3. Find an accountability partner who can check in on you. They can provide support and help you brainstorm new ideas.

Instructional Coaching Goals with the COACH Acronym

Loving your work starts with knowing your purpose. If you don’t have a clear purpose, you may feel frustrated with the coaching work you’re doing, and you won’t feel like you’re making an impact. That’s why we’re tackling goal setting as part of the Loving Your Coaching Work mini-series. Setting the right goals and achieving them can make your work feel more impactful!

I really like the COACH acronym, and I think you’ll find this new approach helpful when setting your goals, even if you need to use a different format at your school.

Listen now using the player below or wherever you get your podcast and start setting coaching goals that make a big impact on campus!

Topics and Questions Discussed in Episode 219 – A Look at Instructional Coaching Goals with the COACH Acronym with Katie Maciulewicz

  • The problems with a lot of coaching goals
  • Setting instructional coaching goals with the COACH acronym
  • What the COACH acronym stands for with real-life examples for each part
  • Deciding on the actions to take when implementing your goals
  • How to ensure the coaching goals you set actually get accomplished

This episode is sponsored by Kind Cotton. Kind Cotton donates books to kids with the proceeds from every purchase.

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Podcast produced by Fernie Ceniceros

A Look at Instructional Coaching Goals with the COACH Acronym with Katie Maciulewicz, ep. 219, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran 00:01
Hey, Coach, I can’t wait to share this amazing business with you. Kind Cotton is a small clothing company started by a former kindergarten teacher and her husband to help increase children’s access to books. For every item purchased, they donate a book to a child. To date, they have donated over 174,000 books. All of their items are unique, and you’ll find so many T shirts, hoodies and fun, meaningful accessories too. They make great gifts. I purchased the inclusive books tote bag as a Christmas present, and my friend loved it. Head to kind cotton.com and check out their website full of beautiful, kind messages for yourself or for a friend.

Chrissy Beltran 00:41
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 01:07
Hey coach, and welcome to episode 219, of Instructional Coaching with miss b. Today, we are talking about setting instructional coaching goals with the coach acronym, with my guest, Katie Maciulewicz. I don’t know if you’ve been listening for a while, but if you have, you might know that I have sort of a love hate relationship with goals. I personally like goals. I think they’re important, but I also know that sometimes we write goals and then they actually go nowhere, and then next new year, there we are going, Oh, I never did. I guess I didn’t travel as much as I thought I was going to. Or sometimes they’re just unrealistic goals. They’re just kind of based on what we would like to happen. But there’s they’re not really very practical. Or maybe the problem with our goals are they’re more like wishes, things we would like to happen, but not like actual actions we could take. And I believe that goals that are not attached to actions, that’s what a wish is, guys. We just want something to happen. So to me, a good goal is going to be practical and attached to an actual plan. If you need help writing goals, I want you to check out buzzing with Miss b.com/jump start, because that is where you can grab my free little mini startup course for instructional coaches that will help you write your goals and think about some steps you can take, what values you want to demonstrate as a coach, all the good stuff you need to have set in place before you start your coaching work. Or you can go back and revisit that at any time if you’re feeling a little like you’re floating around. So check that out for sure, buzzing with miss b dot Com slash start, excuse me, slash jump start. And today we’re going to talk to Katie about using the coach acronym to write coaching goals. It’s really cute. I think you’ll like it. It might be a different way to approach things. If you’ve tried SMART goals and you felt like they were a little lackluster, maybe this is the one for you. I’m really excited to hear what Katie has to say. And so this is the next episode in our loving your coaching work series, and there’s a reason that I put this episode in the loving your coaching work series. That is because I don’t think you can love your work if you don’t know what your purpose is. And so if you don’t have a really clear purpose set in stone, I think that you might be really frustrated with the work that you’re doing, and you may not feel like it’s impacting anything. So that’s why we’re tackling this as part of our love your coaching work series. So let’s go ahead and welcome Katie to the podcast and get started talking about goals. All right, Katie, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here as a quick way to introduce yourself. I would love to hear about a few things. How do you Who do you help? And how do you spend your time and energy at work? Sure,

Katie Maciulewicz 03:40
so I am an instructional slash Instructional Technology coach at a Career Tech High School. So I’m in a very unique educational atmosphere environment. It’s only 11th and 12th graders, and we have all the academic classes as well as all of these career tech classes. So I work with the culinary instructor and Cosmetology and welding and, you know, health, they call it Health Academy, so like, s, t, n, a, that kind of stuff. So there’s a wide, wide variety of options for students, which means we have a lot of different content areas and a lot of unique needs, for sure, like the equine instructor needs something very different from the electrician.

Chrissy Beltran 04:28
I love that, though that must be so much fun. It really

Katie Maciulewicz 04:31
is. You know, in education, every day is a different thing, but it’s really, really true at a school like that I can imagine.

Chrissy Beltran 04:39
So what hubbe, do you do that you love? Because I am on a mission this year to share hobbies with coaches, because I think we don’t like time for ourselves. So what’s a hobby you

Katie Maciulewicz 04:46
love to do? Yeah, so I’ve, I have old lady hobbies. Yeah? I mean, I love reading. I’ve always been an avid reader, but I also have always crocheted. I’m in the middle of a cross stitch project right now. All that I really need to finish. But I, you know, during the summer I garden, and I also can what I have in my garden when, when there’s too much of something, which is often the case. So I love those kind of, I don’t know, they’re kind of meditative hobbies, in a way, which I think is great for, for coaches, a little bit of self care, a little bit of a mental break.

Chrissy Beltran 05:22
I love that I’m across it to myself and a gardener. Well, not like a Food Garden, a flower garden.

Katie Maciulewicz 05:28
So I like, I like to grow my own food. That’s nice.

Chrissy Beltran 05:30
So what is the problem? We’re going to jump into the topic of coaching goals. What is the problem with a lot of the goals that coaches set for themselves?

Katie Maciulewicz 05:40
Yeah. So I think, you know, if we think the traditional like smart goal, it’s a great framework for setting a goal, but they’re also very much just personal goals, which there’s nothing wrong with a personal growth goal or a personal goal. But as coaches, the work that we do is tied to other people and in also to a larger context of an entire department, an entire school, in some cases, an entire district. So you know, coaching goals need to align with some of those larger groups or larger the goals outside of the individual coach, and that’s where a lot of times we kind of fall short. Okay,

Chrissy Beltran 06:24
so I saw that you shared about this coach acronym, right, that you use for goal setting, and I would love it if you could walk us through, you know, each letter and maybe give us some examples of each step along the way, you know, talk a little bit about how you how you decided to set, you know, certain goals for each letter thing, or certain how you decide to use each letter towards, you know, an overall picture of what it is you’re trying to accomplish.

Katie Maciulewicz 06:48
Yeah. So the idea with the coach goals was, I was actually thinking like, smart is five letters, which is also five letters. How could we kind of reframe SMART goal to be a coach goal? And that still is very similar in a lot of ways to that SMART acronym, right? But Coach stands for clear, obtainable, action oriented, connected and high impact. And it’s those last two I think that really get into the heart of what coaches do and where we should kind of set our sites with our goal setting so clear is really just kind of like, what is kind of the basic goal? What are we really hoping to do to change so that could be, you know, we’re working on differentiation. We’re trying to use more formative assessment to inform instruction, using technology to enhance student engage, engagement. You know, developing and implementing social emotional learning strategies and classrooms, those, those things that are the like, what are we actually changing in the classroom that can then be tied to a bigger school wide goal? So obtainable is kind of like, how are you going to obtain it? It’s a little like the measurable, um, so you know you’re you’re hoping to do something with differentiation, change something about differentiation with a group of teachers within the building within the district. But what are you actually going to do as far as, how are you going to know that you’ve done it? So, you know, increasing the number of teachers using differentiation strategies by 10% providing professional development on formative assessment for 100% of the faculty. You know, it’s kind of that step of the How are you going to know that you did it to a certain extent. So that’s clear and obtainable. So A is action oriented, which is also the the What are you doing? Part of it, it’s, it’s, what is the action being taken? So that could be your one on one coaching cycles or coaching meetings, you know. And if you want to be very specific with yourself, you can put in numbers like, I want to conduct one on one coaching cycles with 10 teachers in order to increase differentiation, right? We’re tying them all together. You want to design and deliver a workshop series on formative assessment strategies. You’re going to facilitate PLC meetings that are focused on reading comprehension strategies or problem based learning, or, you know, whatever that bigger goal is. So those three really do kind of tie into the SMART goal kind of structure as well. It’s just a slightly different way of saying it. But where, again, where we really get into the bigger work of coaches and of coaching is with the C and the H in the acronym. So C is connected. So how are we connecting all of these things to a bigger goal, to the school initiative, to, you know, whatever is happening within. In that specific department? Did they have a goal that they want to work on something like that? So, you know, when we’re talking about differentiation, maybe the district has an equity initiative of trying to, you know, make to to reach all students, to make learning accessible for all students. You could tie that in. You could align it with the school or district focus on higher order thinking skills. You could say it’s the personalized learning goal. You know, the the schools that I’m in, the Career Tech, there’s a lot of focus on problem based learning and personalized learning. So anything that I do, I try to tie to that, because the risk of, you know, not tying it to a larger goal is that sometimes you just have these one off small, like, kind of quick fix or, like, on the spot help, and it doesn’t have, you know, a longer impact or a connection to what we’re really trying To get at and what we’re really trying to change with our work, or

Chrissy Beltran 11:04
I’d say, also the power of having something that the district believes is important, right to what you believe is important, suddenly that can become more important to people at your school. So like, if you’re just trying to do something that you just unilaterally decided that it may not come with that weight that a district initiative would come with, right?

Katie Maciulewicz 11:23
And so the H is high impact. So how are we How was all of this work impacting student growth or teacher growth? So we’re we’re talking about increasing differentiation. We’re going to conduct one on one coaching cycles with 10 teachers. It’s aligned to the district’s equity initiative. What’s the impact? It’s improved student learning and accessibility of materials for students of various abilities or various needs, right? So we have to consider that what we’re doing, you know, especially when it comes to technology, we don’t just want to do like technology for technology’s sake, it needs to be tied to some specific goal. It needs to have some sort of impact on the students in in the long term and increased engagement, motivation, achievement, and sometimes what we want to do is not so much impacting the student achievement as much as the teacher learning, teacher growth, which, of course, impacts student achievement, but, but maybe we’re really trying to work with a teacher on something specific. So that is also, you know, that’s the impact, the high impact, of that teacher, or the, sorry, the coaching goals acronym. So, you know, are we trying to improve teacher collaboration with our PLC that we’re leading. Are we trying to just support professional growth and knowledge sharing with, you know, a workshop series with coaching cycles? Maybe we are working with two teachers together instead of one on one, you know? So that’s, that’s really, it’s the the connection and the considering the impact. I think that are the most important, like new elements, I guess, of what this coach goal setting acronym does.

Chrissy Beltran 13:13
Yeah, I like that because, like you said, SMART goals can be very they can be very compartmentalized, just, you know what it is that you’re trying to work on. But as I like the way this broadens it out and helps you think about the school as kind of like, like an ecosystem, and, yeah, you know how it’s placed in the district, or, if you’re a district coach, you know, like, what is the big idea that you’re trying to accomplish? Every district has initiatives, every district has goals that they’re trying to do. So I do like the way that this is tied to that. I think it helps you be a little more thoughtful, maybe as you’re going into your goal setting. Yeah, for sure. So did you? Just out of curiosity, are the goals that you’re working on this year? Are they at differentiation? Because that was your example, so I was wondering if that was where you’re heading, and it would make sense with the nature of the work you’re doing, to have a goal that would be very supportive of, like, lots of different content areas, yes.

Katie Maciulewicz 14:03
So the school that I am at, again, because of all the different content areas, there’s a lot of personalized learning, problem based learning, kind of, it’s not really initiatives, it’s kind of exploration at the moment. But there’s also a large population of English language learners. So that’s been, and that’s been a growing population in the last couple of years. So that’s also a part of the work that we’ve been doing, is, how do we make sure that all of the materials are accessible to all of our students?

Chrissy Beltran 14:33
Yeah, I like that. So in terms of you mentioned that the, I think the A was the actions, right? Can you give me a rundown of each of each letter again, and just what the what it stands for. Okay,

Katie Maciulewicz 14:43
yeah. So it’s clear, obtainable, action oriented, connected and high impact. Okay,

Chrissy Beltran 14:49
so the A that was action oriented, you talk about like, this is what you’re going to do. These are, this is like your steps. So how do you decide what those steps are going to look like?

Katie Maciulewicz 14:59
Yeah. So I think that we’re. Really depends, again, on kind of what your goal is and how, excuse me, how, how teachers work together. Your it depends on kind of your time and how your day is broken down or how your week is broken down. I have the benefit of being in one building, which is great, but I also work with teachers who serve one or sorry, coaches, one coach who is the only coach for an entire fairly large suburban district. So that, of course, is going to change what you are capable of doing and how much time you have to work individually versus in groups. Or, you know, in some cases, maybe it’s through like, your passive PD, like, if you send out, you know, a newsletter or something like that. So I think the actions really depend on your time and your capability. In that way, being the only coach in one school building. You know, I can definitely work one on one with teachers pretty easily, and I have that that luxury of time, which is awesome, and they’re kind of meeting doubt after school. So, you know, holding after school, like workshops or PD meetings doesn’t really work well in my building, because it’s just hard to find the time and the space.

Chrissy Beltran 16:20
Yeah, yeah. So you have to be thoughtful about your school. You have to know your people, yes, and how you can best meet those needs. And like, I love that you mentioned, you know, passive opportunities to learn, sending things out to teachers doing, like, a proactive PD calendar, where every month you send something out around that goal that you’re working towards, yeah, and then having other opportunities to weave it into your coaching cycles and individual coaching work, that’s great, absolutely. So then, how can people ensure that these goals that they’re setting, that they actually get accomplished? Because I feel like a lot of times we set goals at the beginning of the year and then at the end of the year we go, Oh, it didn’t get there. Didn’t quite make it, you know, but, and maybe we haven’t done a whole lot of thought about them throughout the year, because we get other things, yeah.

Katie Maciulewicz 17:01
So I there’s, there’s a lot, right? So yeah, when we’re thinking about the beginning of the year setting new year’s resolutions, I think, I think, like January 17 is national ditch your resolutions day. That’s about how long people typically make it. Um, but when we’re thinking about goals that have this kind of large impact, we really want to make sure that if we’ve set a real goal, that we’re going to stick with it. And so that can be something that is tied into your your kind of, your action plan, like that can be literally written into your goal. Of, are you going to do, you know, weekly check ins on your progress? Are you going to is it something you need to, like, set aside time for in your calendar to, especially if you’re doing, you know, PD sessions with meetings you have to plan, or these passive PDS. I mean, sometimes that can take just as long, right? Because you have to make this pretty little graphic and document and do something in Canva, make it extra cute, hyperlink stuff, yeah, so you can tell what I spend my time on. So, you know, you have to sometimes just set aside that time in your calendar to say like this, you know, one hour on Wednesday, I’m not going to be in classroom. I’m going to be working on this so that I can have it done, to have that impact, to be able to work with teachers on this initiative or this goal. I think it’s also helpful to specifically tell people what your goal is, because if people know that you have this goal and that it’s a very specific goal, then you’ve kind of got some forced accountability, because they may ask you about it later. So yes, you want to you, you know, if you’ve told your administrators that you’re working with the third grade teachers on reading comprehension, and you’re going to be meeting once a week, they’re probably going to ask you, how’s that going? What’d you talk about in your meeting this week? What kinds of things are you working on? Or even I, again, I have the benefit of working kind of with a team of coaches, so it can be helpful just to have another coach know what you’re doing. I call it an accountability buddy, so someone who can just check out on you and make sure you’re following through and that you’re doing what you need, but also for that support. You know, if you get stuck, then you have someone who understands what you’re what you’re doing, what you’re trying to accomplish, and can then help you brainstorm and think through, which I know is not always the case. I know a lot of times coaches are kind of off on their own little islands in a building somewhere or in a district, but if you you know, have someone, another coach that you talk to that can be really, really helpful.

Chrissy Beltran 19:35
Yeah, I agree. I think you have to make a buddy to talk about these things, because they can give you some perspective. It’s easy to get stuck in our own bubble of our schools, and then we it’s hard for us to think differently just because of the nature of the job. You know, it’s so entrenched in the way the school works. So it can be helpful to have a different and outside perspective. And I like that, and I like the idea of the check ins as well. I think that, yeah, just like. Yes, just like whenever you set a coaching cycle, you need to say, okay, when are we going to debrief about this work? At the beginning, at the outset, I think you have to do the same thing for goal setting, and say, What am I going to check in on this? Because if not, it just gets it’s just there’s too much on your plate, and it can be very easy to ignore something for months and and so having like, a special document where you have your check ins planned, and then you record, like any, you know, evidence or any work done towards that goal. I think can be really satisfying, also to people who are goal oriented, because then they feel like, look at this stuff. I did do things, and then you can look back at it a few months later, whenever you absolutely would have forgotten that you had done some of these things towards that end. So I love that having the check in set in advance too. It’s great. Yeah. So anything else that you’d like to add about using the acronym to set goals? No. Okay, all right. So then, how can people keep learning from you if they want to check you out online, you know, anything like that?

Katie Maciulewicz 20:55
Absolutely. So I am the Communications and Content Manager for the edu coach network. So the edu coach network is, it’s a combination of things. So we’re on all of the socials. Pretty much, we’re on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. We’re new to blue sky. There’s nothing there yet, but we have an account. But so that’s edu coach network. On all of those platforms, we also have an online coaching community, professional learning network. So that’s edu coach network.com very consistent with our naming, and that is a free community for coaches. I mean, you have to sign up, but you don’t have to pay. And there are, you know, monthly discussions posted. There are quarterly webinars, there’s a newsletter, we have a blog, and it’s all focused on coaching, K to 12, tech, literacy, math, just general instructional coaching, anything. That’s what we’re really here for. Because, you know, like we just said, coaches are often kind of off on their own islands, and so this way you do have the ability to make some connections with other coaches, to share ideas, to get support. We also there is a paid all access coaching network option as well. And they get monthly round tables and workshops and a little bit, just little bit bonus material. In a way, we also offer a coaches camp, kind of a boot camp for coaches training to help you kind of think through how to clarify your role, how to build relationships with teachers and administrators and what is a coaching cycle, all of those kinds of coaching basics. But it’s also great for experienced coaches. We have one person who’s come back every year that we’ve done it, and we do change it up. It’s not the exact same thing every year. So that works. She’s not just getting the exact same material every time, but we do a lot, and we’re building a lot to support coaches across the country and across the world. So we would love to have more people in our community, and you know, so that we can support as many people as we can. And we’re hoping to, you know, continue to grow and continue to support teachers for as long as we can. Awesome.

Chrissy Beltran 23:15
All right. Well, thank you so much, Katie, for being here today. Thank you. Have a really great day.

Katie Maciulewicz 23:20
Thanks. You too.

Chrissy Beltran 23:24
All right, Coach. I really like that coach acronym. I hope that you wrote it down somewhere, because I think that having that as a way to think about your coaching goals, even if you have to use a different format for your school, but considering those other pieces that Katie has added about the high impact and the context or the connections to the other rest of the coaching work that you’re doing, and maybe district initiatives. I think those are great additions to any coaching goals. So really be thoughtful about those pieces, for sure, if you do want some help in setting some basic goals to get your value set, all of your introductory pieces of your coaching work, remember you can go to buzzing with miss b dot com slash, Jump Start, and I will send you a free email mini course that’s going to help you do all of those things next week, my friend Arthur Aguirre joins us again. This time it is for a super special episode. It’s called instructional coaching lessons we’ve learned from Ted lasso. So this was a specially requested episode. There was a person in a survey who sent in a suggestion of someone that I should interview. And the person was Ted lasso, who, of course, is fictional, but I thought it was such a clever idea that I thought, You know what? We gotta take a whole episode and devote it to lessons that we’ve learned from this guy, because he is obviously a coaching gold mine. So definitely listen to that episode next week. Even if you haven’t watched Ted lasso, we’re going to talk without spoilers about plenty of things that you’re going to want to hear. That hit that we have learned from Ted lasso, that you can live lose in a standalone, you know, coaching setting, even if you haven’t watched a show. So. Join us next week, and until then, happy coaching. 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!

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