5 Things to Do If Your Teacher Teams Aren’t Aligned, ep. 264

5 Things to Do If Your Teacher Teams Aren’t Aligned, ep. 264, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran (00:03.406)

coach and welcome to instructional coaching with Ms. B. Today we are talking about a brand new series that we’re starting all about coaching teams. And one of the biggest issues that many teams have is that they are not aligned at all. Today we’re looking at five things to do if your teacher teams are not aligned. This might mean they’ve never really worked together or if they work together they didn’t really have any kind of alignment, accountability, common language, they’re assigned. So we’re gonna get into all of this today.

and what you can do about it. The five things that will really make a huge difference. And trust me, I work with a lot of teams that are not aligned, and these are the things you want to do first. Now, before we get started with that, I want you to think about how many times you sat in a PLC meeting with teachers where the conversation is so optopic that the whole meeting is just like a waste of time. Or even worse, teachers don’t talk at all. One person might dominate the conversation, and everybody else just kind of gets to like, hm, hm. And nobody shares a thought beyond what the other person is saying.

I’ve got a free download that I really think you’re gonna love. PLC discussion dice are easy to use with teachers and they help you focus on the topic that you’re trying to accomplish and encourage participation from each teacher. So grab it in the show notes for the episode at buzzingwithmissb.com slash episode 264. So I wanna start off by kinda painting a picture of how we try to grow alignment and it’s not effective, okay? So one year, my district decided to focus on instructional rounds.

And I’m not against instructional rounds, okay? Let me just tell you what happened when we did them, okay? It was stressful for everybody because district leaders would sort of like pounce on the school in a horde, like maybe eight of them at a time, and they’d have to be welcomed and met with all day and catered to, and there had to be a schedule, and we had to have teams to walk them around the school and introduce them to classrooms, and it like this whole thing. And teachers were prepared for their visits. They knew they were coming, and they even had an idea of what time because we had to make a schedule.

So the teachers planned their dog and pony lessons, making sure they had something to impress just ready to go. And of course, the district leaders usually weren’t that impressed, right? Because they were comparing each teacher to the favorite teacher they ever worked with. That’s one of my experience. I would sit and have conversations with them and think, were we watching the same lesson? That’s not what I saw happening, right? It wasn’t fun. It left us all feeling pretty deflated. And then the teachers were not given any feedback about the visits because that is not the purpose.

Chrissy Beltran (02:24.32)

of instructional rounds. Instructional rounds, it’s a very specific process for a very specific purpose, and I believe it can be an excellent process when it’s done for the right reasons and in the right way. Instructional rounds are often used as a way to grow practices in classrooms, but when the people visiting the classrooms aren’t teachers, that’s not what’s happening. You’re building a common understanding amongst the people observing and having the conversations.

not amongst the teachers who are actively trying to solve problems in their own practice. So unfortunately, it’s often the direction school districts go without the understanding that they need to make it effective. This is where instructional rounds get overwhelming and muddy because they don’t address the needs of the teachers. So today, I’m sharing some strategies that you can use to help align your teams and not just to align the school leaders observing your teams because…

I get that that’s where they wanted to start, but I feel like that’s kind of where we stopped as well. If your teams aren’t aligned, there will be signs. They may not speak the same language in team meetings. And I mean that in terms of academic vocabulary or referring to things and asking, like some teachers will be like, well, I do word study. I do word work. I teach spelling. Are those all three the same things? Maybe, maybe not. They are probably doing different things at different times and maybe using different curriculum or nothing at all.

and I say this as a teacher who used nothing at all except for my standards. I built my entire curriculum every year because I could not stand the resources that we were provided with, the ones that actually have like a full curriculum. But you know what? I was going rogue, okay? And this was a long time ago. People really aren’t doing that anymore. It’s hard for them to help each other out because everybody is on their own track when teams are not aligned. I’ve been a part of teams like this and while…

I, who tend to be a lone wolf, like I mentioned in the Great Call- the Qualities of a Great Coach episode from earlier in the season, I enjoy the autonomy. I know it didn’t really support our new teachers, and it didn’t really support me in a lot of ways because I didn’t benefit from conversations with the rest of my grade level. We didn’t have a lot of support in alignment, really. On the other hand, I’ve worked with teams who wanted to be so very aligned that they were doing the same workbook page on the same day at the same time.

Chrissy Beltran (04:37.974)

Everybody wrote down what they were doing on Monday. They pulled directly from the curriculum. Nobody was thinking about whether it was aligned to standards or kid needs or not. And everybody had to be on the same page at the same time. And that’s the other end of the spectrum, right? We want to be somewhere in the middle where teams benefit from each other’s knowledge and prepare for and reflect on student learning together with aligned common assessments and assignments if possible, but where teachers can use their own judgment to move on or reteach if kids need it. And also,

Delivery is going to vary because teachers are humans and things are going to look different. If teams are disjointed and everybody’s on their own page and you’re recognizing this at your school and you’re really feeling frustrated, here are a few things you can do to help them start coming together. The first thing is you can focus on things you can manage. People are tricky to manage. Teachers, I feel like, in on the bell curve of trickiness to manage. They’re like all the way in the top 10%.

So it’s unlikely you’re gonna see tons of alignment in the first year of working with a team, because if they’ve had a lot of autonomy and suddenly you’re asking them to come together, that feels very limiting. Change takes time and alignment is a bad word for many teachers because it feels like it oppresses their creativity and individuality and their own teacher judgment about what their kids need and what’s best for their kids. So starting with getting teachers to talk about their practice is a great place to start that hopefully doesn’t feel as overwhelming.

We want to put up a problem of practice during a PLC meeting and ask teachers to discuss their approach and how it can be solved. You can use these meetings as opportunities to build common language around teaching and learning, and that’s going to be the foundation for all the work you’re going to do with your teams after that. The second thing you can do is data meetings. And data is very hard practice to start establishing in a school because, again, it feels punitive. It feels limiting. feels like these kids aren’t numbers, and hopefully you know all those things.

as you are moving into your data reviews. But you gotta look at data together. Now you can broaden what data means, but you still need to look at something to where you all have a conversation point, like a third point in your triangulation of what’s happening in your classroom. So you wanna have teachers discuss what they see and have teachers with strengths model what they did with their students to achieve the results they’re getting.

Chrissy Beltran (06:56.546)

You also want to keep the easiest way to manage this is to keep teaching materials in the room where the data meetings happen so you’re prepared for teachers to step in and share. like I would always have the document camera set up and ready to go in case we had a test that we were looking at and teachers had a copy of their test. One teacher who got like a really great score and a certain standard could say, well, this is what I do. And this is what I require kids to do on their assessment. And then they could stick the test up there and actually model it for us in the moment. You can learn more about this.

in episode eight where I talk about things to consider whenever you’re doing data reviews. The third thing you can do with teachers and teams of them to get them aligned is look at student work together. This one is so powerful, I actually think it might be more powerful than data. Now, some of you might not agree with me, but as a teacher who taught all subjects and later specialized in teaching literacy, you know looking at writing data is not the same as looking at student writing.

Looking even at a math score is not the same as looking at a student math test. We need to put student work on the table and discuss it and create guides and rubrics. We need to analyze the work.

you

Chrissy Beltran (08:22.328)

We need to analyze the work to calibrate what we’re looking at for each teacher. We want our teachers to be aligned in what they think good quality work looks like, how they think they can get there, and what they’re actually asking students to do, and how they’re getting students to change the way they approach certain things. We need to talk about how teachers achieve certain results and how those teachers model for each other, just like I mentioned in the data meetings. And I actually teach coaches how to do this inside the Confident Literacy Coach at ConfidentLiteracyCoach.com.

There’s like a whole lesson specifically on student work reviews. The fourth thing we need to have teams of teachers do is get into each other’s classrooms. And this is actually going to take up points four and five because it’s so important. If you have teachers who are so far from alignment that they’re afraid to be in each other’s rooms, like they’re afraid to have each other’s guests, they don’t really want to do any of this work, start with ghost visits. And I’ve mentioned this a lot in this podcast.

In a ghost visit, you visit a classroom after school and you record evidence of alignment. Okay, you can look for evidence or artifacts like learning targets, any posted information in the classroom, what tools students are able to access and use, manipulatives, anchor charts that demonstrate what work has been done together, who wrote on the charts, all those kinds of things, student work. You can look at actual student notebooks or anything that’s in the classroom that kids use regularly, posted questions or notes.

that kids have taken. All of those things are so valuable because they give you insight into what’s happening in the classroom, but it’s less stressful because nobody is actively teaching at the time. So the teacher is not putting themselves in as vulnerable a position because everybody’s coming to their room after school or, you know, whenever, like, PE or some time that there’s nobody in that classroom. After school obviously works better for middle school, high school. So…

Ghost visits are just such a valuable way to make sure that your teachers are starting to get into each other’s rooms without freaking anybody out too much. I mean, they still freak out a little bit. I’m just gonna be honest. Step five is peer classroom visits. This is visit a colleague. We need teachers to observe their teaching in each other’s rooms and doing that has such an incredible effect on teaching and learning in each classroom. You can go as a team, much like instructional rounds, but I find the real value in having the host teacher answer questions.

Chrissy Beltran (10:46.392)

questions from their colleagues before and after the lesson. And colleagues can provide feedback if that is part of your purpose. It’s not really required, but it is nice because if I have people in my room, I want to know what they’re thinking, right? You can learn more about that in episode 254. I really dug into it there. When we overcomplicate systems for alignment, it can feel punitive and very limiting. So instead, we want to focus on getting teachers to open up, to talk, to discuss.

to share and to welcome each other into their classrooms. This is how we grow alignment in a very supportive way. You can actually grab resources for these PLC meeting purposes in my TPT store. So if you head to teacherspayteachers.com and search for buzzing PLC forms, you’ll find my stuff. You’ll find so many PLC meeting templates, organizers, and so many more things that will help you grow your teacher teams. Next week, we’re actually talking to Dr. Shannon Lafargue about teacher.

collective efficacy. So I’m really excited about that. It’s a term that we’re seeing everywhere and we want to make sure we understand it. We’re going to dig into what collective efficacy looks like and how to support teachers across your school to grow efficaciously. And until then, happy coaching!