Building PLCs Through Learning Walks, Ep. 162 Instructional Coaching with Ms. B

Building PLCs Through Open Classrooms, Ep. 162 Buzzing with Ms. B: The Coaching Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

Are you a literacy coach trying to help your school grow their literacy practices, I have got the video series for you. This email video course is all about the five priority for literacy coaches. It’ll walk you through the five areas of focus you need to have in order to grow your school, and amazing reading and writing practices. Change takes time, but we can make sure we’re on the right track by focusing on the right thing. Get this free video course at buzzingwithMsb.com slash literacy coach, you won’t be disappointed. Coach, I know you’re trying to figure this all out on your own. You’re investing in your own learning on your own time because you want to show up for your teachers in the best way possible. Building your coaching program is a huge challenge. And it’s even more difficult when you’re asked to know about literacy practices and how to support them. That’s why I created the competent literacy coach. This self paced course gives you the knowledge strategies, processes and downloadable tools that you need to be competent in your coaching work every single day. The new update to the reading and writing module includes information about literacy that will help you grow your school practices, and grow your students into skilled readers and writers. Check it out at competent literacy coach.com And stop reinventing the wheel.

Chrissy Beltran  01:16

You’re listening to buzzing with Miss B, the coaching podcast where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach. And every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an instructional coach, resource creator and coffee enthusiast, and I’m your host, stay tuned for practical tips and honest coaching talk that will help you coach with confidence.

Chrissy Beltran  01:41

Hey, coach, and welcome to episode 162 instructional rounds for PLCs. One of the goals of my coaching work has always been to build a community of learners. And the trouble with education is once you get hired, you’re often stuck in your room and you don’t get to see any kind of teaching. That’s a real problem, right? People get used to that. And they don’t expect that they’re going to have to see anybody else and that anybody’s going to come see them. They’re like I my own island, close your door and do what’s best for kids. Right. But that is not always best for kids. Some teachers say that have really great reasons for saying that, such as you know, maybe access to materials as being restricted, and they believe you know that that’s wrong or that, you know, there are lots of situations in which teachers are really trying to do what’s best for their students. But whenever that becomes a way that many of our teachers function, and we have teachers who should not be closing their doors, because we all need to learn something, it’s not good for kids, it means you don’t learn anything, you don’t get the benefit of anybody else’s learning. And really, it’s a very kind of individualistic American way of doing things that isn’t great many other cultures, and places, value community and teams in a way that we do not. And I think that we know that, that teams can work together to create great things and to support each other. So that’s one of the issues that we have teachers get used to that and then it doesn’t support their learning at all. New teachers often leave for this reason as well, because they don’t get the support. They don’t feel like they know what they’re supposed to be doing. And the problem there is right now more than ever, we have a lot of very, very new people in my classroom, people who have never been in a classroom as an adult to see teaching, whether they are alternatively certified and their program didn’t require classroom time or enough classroom time, which alternate certification is totally fine with me. I’ve no issues with it whatsoever. Programs are lacking whether you’re alternatively certified or traditionally certified, whether that was your actual degree, your program could still have been lacking. Mine certainly was lacking in some areas. But at least I got to see classrooms and people who don’t get to see teaching happen. That’s a real challenge, because they are trying to do something they’ve never seen done. How do we we wouldn’t do that in other professions, right? So that’s a real problem. And even now, we have teachers who are not certified at all, they come from a completely different field, a completely different area. And we’re just asking them to pop in and be teacher. Guys, I have a lot of thoughts on that today’s not the day for those thoughts. But know that I think that is awful.

Chrissy Beltran  04:28

So we lose a lot of people because they are very uncomfortable. And our new teachers who have not seen classroom teaching are not prepared to be teachers at all. It’s also why our veteran teachers just do whatever they want. And I’m not saying all veterans are bad or any or all new teachers agree. I’m just saying veteran teachers, teachers who have been teaching for any length of time. They’re all on their own. We’re not building team capacity, right? So this month that I’m focusing on PLCs. I’m doing it very purposely purposely because I feel like if we can starts the year establishing that our teams are going to work together, then we can make change happen in our schools, you are not going to make change happen across your school, one classroom at a time, it’s just not going to happen. And I know that many coaching programs will tell you that it’s all about the coaching cycle. And it’s all about individual teachers and working on whatever they want to work with. But I’ve worked at schools and the reality of working at schools as a teacher and a coach is if you want to create change across the school, you’ve got to get people together. And people have got to start having those conversations that challenge your thinking and shape their thinking. We’ve talked over the last few episodes, about or the last episode, we talked about what PLC can look like. And that PLC is not the time we spend together. It’s not the meeting, it’s the group, it’s a community that learns together, the PLC is the Professional Learning Community, not the time that they meet once a week. So we need to stop thinking that all the change happens during a 45 minute meeting, and realize that we have got to get people into each other’s classrooms for real learning to actually happen. Okay?

Chrissy Beltran  06:07

If this has never been done, it is going to be a challenge, I’m not gonna lie. It’s gonna be tricky. But today, we’re going to talk about some of the things that you can do to set yourself up for success and a process that you can actually follow, that may support your teachers in embracing this new kind of learning that is scary and challenging. So there are things that we can do over a couple of years, that can change the culture at your school and support teachers coming together. And that’s what we have to think about is this is not something that’s going to happen overnight, we are playing a long game here, as most most coaching work is, and really is education is in general, right? We’re not educating a child over a year and saying they’re ready, we’re doing things over time to help them grow. And that’s what we’re doing with teachers too. So, first, let’s talk a little bit about why we need to do instructional rounds. There are so many benefits of rounds for coaches and for teachers. Okay, so I’m going to talk about both. For coaches, it’s helpful to do instructional rounds, because we can use that information to plan PD and PLCs around areas of need. If we are seeing certain patterns pop up, and we’re responsible for professional learning, then we can plan things that will support those areas. If you see a pattern in terms of let’s say that many of your teachers are struggling with hands on instruction and math, or many of your teachers, you’re not seeing examples of how they are building fluency in the classroom, then you can say, Okay, this is some PD that we need to go through together as a whole school, that’s your whole school PD, you also may say, okay, are certain or specific PLCs may need to work on these areas. It’s also really helpful when you come together with your team. And you can talk about some things that you see as a pattern, and do some problem solving around it during your PLCs, like during your actual sessions. And I shouldn’t probably call them that, right. But the actual time that you’re meeting with your teams, that’s whenever you could talk and say, Okay, this is whenever we can get together have some dialogue about the challenges that we’re seeing, because we’re all kind of avoiding teaching this. So can we talk a little bit about what’s going on there? There are also benefits for your whole school, right? It helps us build a common language and an understanding of what things look like, like I mentioned before, we do not give teachers enough opportunity to see what things look like. And then we’re like, why don’t they know how to do this? Well, they don’t know how to do it, because they’ve never seen anybody do it.

Chrissy Beltran  08:35

We also want to make sure that teachers are sort of focusing on this inquiry model where we’re bringing in questioning and as teachers to question, why are we doing this? How is this working? Who is this benefiting? Is this working for our kids? Is it just working for me? Is this just because I can’t figure out the management any other way? You know, why am I doing what I’m doing? Those questions can be supportive of teachers changing their practice and positive ways. We want to structure our PRPL fees, to have real discussion in digging into how kids are learning and what we need to do to support it. And that may require us to change, right? But if we are changing because we can see there’s a need together and we want to embrace doing something new, then we’re more likely to get quote, buy in for that change. So I’m going to talk a little bit about a process that we can follow a few steps that you can try if you have never implemented what a instructional rounds as a campus and if your teachers are not used to being in other classrooms. Okay, so first, I recommend that you start with Ghost walkthroughs and I have talked about this before on the podcast. A ghost walkthrough is a great way to support your alignment, and also just to get people comfortable having other people in their room and being in other people’s rooms. So I’m going to share a little bit about how we structured these ghost walkthroughs because they were really instrumental in getting our teachers into each other Is classrooms which had not happened prior to that. What we did is we said, Okay, on this day after school every Thursday, we had learning Thursday after school. And we said one learning Thursday, we are going to visit each other’s classrooms, they are called Ghost walkthroughs. Because no one is there in the classroom, except for the visitors. The teacher is not teaching just the teachers are visiting each other’s rooms in a group. So the way we did it, is because our principal had assigned each support person as kind of a liaison, she called the liaisons to a grade level, that support person went with those grade levels. So like my first year, several years in a row, I have third grade, that’s my team. And we went together as a team into fourth grade classrooms. Now you don’t have to do it that way. You can do it differently. You could do them visiting their own grade level, you could have them visit a different grade level. But it’s helpful to kind of get them to see somebody where no one has a personal investment, just to kind of start the process. So we did that. First, we went to a different grade level. First, you can go to grade level below or grade level after and we were looking for alignment, we were looking for certain things that would help us identify Are we all, you know, addressing the same kinds of standards are we all working with in similar strategies and what’s happening with our teaching? So we actually what we did is we recorded on paper, everything we saw around the room, we had like a four square chart, and one of them was anchor charts. One of them was just like classroom setup, like what kinds of spaces were in the classroom, is there a classroom library is there a teaching space is there you know, reading corner any of those things, we had a space where we recorded learning targets, which was you know, they were actually being asked to do learning targets for the first time that year.

Chrissy Beltran  11:51

So they were still trying to figure it out. So we recorded what targets we saw in the room. And then we also had a space for student work. So we were looking for evidence of what students had done. So we use that Foursquare organizer. And we walked around the room just quietly, we spent about probably six minutes in each room, maybe a little bit more. And we wrote down everything we saw in that room. And then we silently moved to the next room. And then at the end, we sat and we had a dialogue about our observation. What did we notice? Across the grade level? Did we see alignment in certain things with all that was really helpful to kind of bring awareness to, we’re all kind of doing our own thing. Some of us are really good at writing learning targets, and like the way that style was written, I don’t like mine. And I really like this. So I’m going to try that. Can we talk about how we’re going to align some of the strategies that we see some of the student products, because the reality is, alignment often does support students in those schools, especially where teachers are learning something new, trying out different things, and they’ve never done it before. I have found that, as a teacher, I did not have any sort of alignment. As a teacher, there was very little that was expected of us all to do. There were a few things, but for the most part, we all kind of did our own thing.

Chrissy Beltran  13:04

And over time, I realized that that was creating tremendous gaps and kids that I would get from one class versus another class, I was teaching kids who had all wildly different experiences depending on which teacher they happened to get. And if we can come together and align some things and say, You know what, this is going to be supportive of our students in the best way possible, then we can meet their needs better. But without buying from the teachers, we can’t do that, right? We cannot do that if teachers don’t believe that there is a reason that it needs to happen. It was a lot of fun. For me, as a teacher, I’m not gonna lie. I planned whatever I wanted, I obviously I kept on my standards, I focused on those first, I differentiated for my students, I provided intervention based on their needs as well, I use my data. And I also really was thoughtful about what kinds of experiences I wanted them to have and what kinds of materials I wanted them exposed to. And I kept them in line with any materials that our school was using, for example, if we had a math curriculum or something Sure, I but I adjusted it totally, to whatever I thought was best. And I think I did some really great work. But maybe I could have done some other things that would have been really great if I had aligned a little bit more with some other people that might have gotten some good ideas, right. So as a teacher, I was fun. And I loved it. But I don’t know that it was best for kids all the time that we’re all doing our own thing.

Chrissy Beltran  14:26

So we also gave teachers plenty of warning before we did our first round of ghost walkthroughs because you don’t want people to feel like you’re jumping in to catch up people have these word gotcha Celica. Gotcha. Okay, some principals probably are doing gotchas, and some are not and some are just doing their jobs. Okay. So it can be tricky to kind of set the right tone for that. After we visited a different grade level. We went back and visited their grade level like the next week we said okay, now we’re going to visit your team. And so third grade went to third grade and We spent a few minutes, like I said, about six to eight minutes in each classroom, and then we debriefed afterward. This was a challenging dialogue, okay, because they are feeling tense, because they know, they just sat in the rooms, they went from room to room, maybe they never really looked at that before. And they saw things that were different. And they saw things that were, some were really great, some are maybe not so great. And it kind of calls attention to things that are, that could be, you know, an issue. They see it clearly, all of a sudden, right. And so that is a more challenging conversation that whenever you go to a different grade level, because they have a personal investment there, it’s their space. So we noticed we charted out some learning targets, we tried it out our observations based on everything that we had recorded. And we observed some things specifically in our learning targets. We talked about academic language that, you know, we saw that included in the targets, but it may have been different in different classrooms. Some classrooms, were using completely different academic language to describe the same terms, we were trying to align our language, we saw different verbs being used in those learning targets. So in one classroom, maybe the teacher said, Well, we’re going to describe something and another classroom, they identified it, it is important to know, well, what are we having kids do? And does that actually align to what we’re asking them to do? And there are different times, if you’re working towards a standard, you’re not going to jump into the standard a grade level, I don’t believe you can do that. You need to go backwards and start from like scaffolding up to that standard.

Chrissy Beltran  16:26

But if we never get to that standard, and the standard maybe says apply, and we’re never doing that there’s a problem there. We looked at our shared reading targets, we noticed read aloud targets, some people were putting different targets on the wall. Like they were saying, Oh, well, this is the most important thing to me. So I’m gonna put this on the wall. Some people were putting a target for this on the wall. So it was kind of like varied what was going on the wall and how it was being used, because some of them had been up there for like six months. So we I mean, that was just the truth. And I’m not saying learning targets are the be all end all of all things. This is just what teachers were asked to do. And I was trying to make it meaningful and purposeful. Because what was the point, if we were just putting them on the wall for nobody, you know, it was just a waste of time. So then we talked about next steps. And so we came to some decisions about how we would actually address these areas that we saw. So we said, okay, and PLC will start with a with a standard RS with the TEKS, and break it into parts in order to scaffold this the actual target, and then we can sequence them, then we will put those those sequence targets on our lesson plan so that everybody has them, they know what the lesson is aligned to and what the kids were expected to do. By the end of the lesson. That was the whole point. What are kids being expected to do? By the end of the lesson, we’re focusing on students, right? And then teachers, I, the idea was that they would have it on their lesson plan. And they could just that was their target, right? And that was how they were going to introduce the academic vocabulary to kids that was going to connect to what they were doing. We noticed which like, which targets are we going to put on the wall, we kind of made a decision? Are we gonna put this that this what are we choosing, and we put them up on the wall, according to the decision that the team made that like a team consensus, okay. other grade levels, talked about making sure that we were really planning for certain subjects, because sometimes in we would run out of time we spend so much time on reading, we wouldn’t plan very well for writing that was a very common issue, especially whenever we were barely getting used to planning together during those timeframes.

Chrissy Beltran  18:24

And so that was a real challenge for teachers to like, well, I’m doing my own thing and writing, that’s where we’re all doing our own thing, because we don’t plan for it together, okay, that we have to consider the time that we come together to plan and figure out how to make better use of that time. So it was really helpful. It sounds like oh, you’re holding teacher, and they all have to do the same thing. But a lot of it was about aligning academic language. That’s really what we came up with by the end of this process. And it helped us even I was a literacy coach. But for my grade level, I actually was responsible for helping them in other areas as well. I supported them in math and science if they needed it. And I would set things up with a math and science coach if they needed that extra support. So I mean, I wasn’t just doing literacy. So in this case, we actually talked about how you know, we need to decide our math, we had word walls, content area, word walls for math and science. But what was going on was all different stuff. So we’re like, okay, where are we going to get the vocabulary? What vocabulary is going to go on the wall? How are we going to decide what is relevant to our kids like how you know, but at least have like a standard of certain things that we’re having to go on the wall because they’ve been explicitly taught to students. We were explicitly introducing content area vocabulary, which we know is important. So this was a really great conversation that we had and it wasn’t even about live teaching. It was just about what was on the wall. Now some teachers we know they don’t put a lot of stuff on the wall. I know when teacher who put 99% of things into her notebooks, which in certain subject areas, I did that a lot to my kids all have their notebook, they all have their personal vocabulary, word walls, all these things. So you know, in that case, we looked at student artifacts as well because it was relevant to what kind of teaching was going on From the ghost walkthroughs, we moved to instructional rounds where we actually visited classrooms when teaching was happening. The most important thing that I can share about setting up instructional rounds, is that we need to ensure that teachers understand what the point is, the point is not to go in and say, good job, Oh, that wasn’t good. We’re not looking at it, we didn’t even do like glows and grows. That’s not the point. The point is to talk about some sort of problem of practice that we’re seeing in our schools and how it played out in that classroom, and how that knowledge can help us solve some problems. Right, we want to know what we’re looking for.

Chrissy Beltran  20:42

So before we got started, we would highlight a specific problem of practice, and identify what we were looking at before, we would visit the classrooms. And what we usually did is, we’d say, Okay, today, we’re going to visit this classroom, and we’re going to look for this, this and this. And then maybe the next week, we would visit another classroom, we’re looking for those same things, right? We wanted to be very focused. So let’s say that the problem of practice is that we are struggling with student engagement during a certain component of the day. And we’re seeing this teachers are saying their kids are not engaged, right? So then we’re going into the classrooms, and we’re looking for that. And we’re saying, Okay, how are we supporting this? Is it working? What are some things that we can implement, we’re looking for that specific thing to have a dialogue around it. That’s a true is true instructional round.

Chrissy Beltran  21:35

Now a more collaborative model. Instead of somebody else setting, the problem of practice is making sure that teachers are setting the focus and identifying the issues that they really want to figure out. Because that’s, that’s how we want to we don’t want this problem of practice to come from. Somebody else sees this as a problem with practice, or the district put out a calendar, and this is what we’re going to look at those are fine, those are good way to start. If you’re stuck, it’s more of a traditional way to go. And having a calendar that focuses on a different public problem of practice each month, that could be your focus or your for the month, and that could work, you could provide PLCs and learning around it. And then you can go see it in action in the classrooms, for example, classroom management, lesson framing, how we give direction, academic language, you know, those are all things that you could do. However, I really do believe there’s benefit in the teachers, setting a focus for that collaborative amount that that collaborative conversation, and that creates a more collaborative model. And that’s what we are, we’re a professional learning community. So if we can get teacher input on the problems or practice, oh, my gosh, how much more meaningful is that going to be?

Chrissy Beltran  22:39

So we visited grades above and below first, because the real challenge is saying, Okay, I’m a third grade teacher, my PE time is at nine o’clock. And whenever I’m available, that nine o’clock, and no, none of my colleagues are available at nine o’clock, almost all third grade teachers are going to PE at the same time. So instead, we said, Okay, you’re free at nine o’clock, fifth grade, is doing this subject area at this time. So we’re gonna go visit fifth grade. And that’s what we’re gonna see, we usually tried to keep it just one grade level above or below because we found that to be really relevant to teachers more so than branching out farther than that. But sometimes, you know, do you do what you got to do. And what it often meant is fourth grade had to people visiting them, because they would have fifth grade visit and third grade. And so fourth grade was always a little bit stressed out about that. So if you need to branch out a little, that’s what you need to do, it’s fine. So then, we want to make sure that our teachers are starting out in that way, where they are visiting classrooms, and seeing learning and action coming back and having a dialogue, setting norms around that can be really important, because we want teachers to know that we are not there to criticize their teaching, we are there to think critically about how teaching is working on our campus and what kinds of things we can learn from watching this lesson, whether that’s I learned exactly what they did, because it was, you know, really good strategy. I’ve never seen that before. I figured out how to solve my problem, or one thing I noticed is this, the teacher responded this way. I’m, I’m applying that to my own teaching. I wonder if that is going to, you know, like, I can think about okay, if I did that in the same way, how would How would my kids react? I saw this child react this way, I don’t want that reaction. What can I do proactively to change how I’m addressing kids and to respond in a more positive or purposeful way. So these are all things that we want teachers to think about as they’re looking at these classrooms. I do recommend setting norms and I have a process for setting norms.

Chrissy Beltran  24:38

In my my course the confident literacy coach, where I walk you through exactly how to create norms for different experiences. And this one, you could create norms just for instructional rounds, because they are gonna be different than like planning norms, or then data norms or whatever. You may have norms for different purposes, like I think Casey mentioned in the last episode. So you can use that guide from The Confident literacy coach. It’s in The last module about working with teams. And I give you I spell out exactly how to set norms with teachers. So you can use that process to apply to this, this actual new process that you’re trying to create. Overtime, we have teachers who have visited as a team, the grade level above and the grade level below, if you can get them into their grade level classroom. Fantastic. That’s awesome. If not, if you can’t get everybody to go to the grade level, which is providing coverage, let’s say you have five teachers or six teachers in a grade level, you have one teacher, and then you’re going to cover all those other, you know, other classrooms, that’s a lot of coverage that you need. So here’s a couple of ideas that we can set it up to where actually might even be better. One thing you can do is you can record a lesson a video in the classroom and use that video coaching. I talked a little bit about this with Cory camp in the episode about video coaching that we did back in season two, and she’s from Sydney, Sydney is a great resource that you can use to support your video coaching in a secure format. So that way through recording kids, you know, it’s not going to get out, right? That’s absolutely concerned for us, we have to honor that kids are people with, you know, privacy in their lives. So you can record that lesson and share it with the team. And then you could talk about it as a team, if they’re not able to go visit the classroom, obviously, visiting the classroom is great. But a video is pretty good too. Another thing that you can do is if it’s just a small group of kids that you’re trying to show or share with your faculty, you can have that teacher pull a small group in during some time of day when the kids would normally be somewhere else like PE, we used to pull them in from PE just one small group, it happened like once a year, so it wasn’t cutting into the regular PE time. And they already got more than the required amount for the state. So then they would come in just a small group would come in, and the teacher would model that lesson or share that lesson. And then we could talk about it. You know, okay, I see that you’ve got a teaching point here.

Chrissy Beltran  26:53

And this is what you’re focusing your lesson on, you know, how can we bring in that teaching point throughout the lesson so that kids are constantly practicing the thing that you’re asking them to practice, those kinds of questions were really helpful to us. That’s one way you can do it. If you want teachers to see their grade level in a team and talk about it. Another thing you can do, if you want people to be in each other’s classrooms is you can kind of go into a pineapple PD model. And I really love that I believe this can come at the end of this series, because you’ve done so much great work in visiting classrooms and scaffolding that learning that you can put it at the end and say now, we can go into other rooms, and we’re more comfortable with that we’re comfortable having people see us, or anyway, we’ve had more practice in it. So what you could do is you could say, Okay, this round this month, we’re going to set up pineapple PD, each teacher is going to choose who they want to see, they’re going to want to see something specific in another classroom. And they can go see them with coverage during you know, during the daytime, if that’s the only way to make it work. Sometimes I would set up like a library visit or something like that. Or they could go see them during their conference time. And I can sometimes I would work with the guest, the host teacher and say, Would you be able to move your science time to this time of day, so your teacher, this teacher can come see it. Because it was really helpful. They were very generous with their time, and they were really helping out another teacher and that helps our homeschool when our teachers get better, right? So they were always willing to do that really kind. Sometimes I would have to kind of help that guest teacher figure out who they wanted to see. Because they’d say, Well, I feel like I really want to see some good test taking strategies, because in our reading test, I feel like I don’t know how to help kids differentiate between the genres on the test, and then apply what we know about that to help them be successful.

Chrissy Beltran  28:41

Okay, you know, who has really good reading strategies for their test this teacher, you know, I really want to see how they structure their independent practice time during reading because I have an independent practice time. I believe independent reading is important. But I can’t make it work with all the other things that we have going on during that time because kids are working on Word Study and all this other stuff. Can I see a teacher who’s good at that? Yes. So I also have excellent reading stations, I can set up a time for you to see them. You can be the facilitator. And then you can also have a debriefing conversation with each teacher if possible, or you can just give them a sheet if it’s impossible, sometimes reality is it’s impossible. If you are not able to meet with them, give them a little sheet where they can write some thoughts and responses. And then that’s like their processing, you know, they get to process that. Okay, so that’s how we can move from a school that has zero collaboration and they spend zero time in each other’s classrooms into a campus that actually will work together and has open doors that we can learn from each other. You know, I just love that model. I want to share with you today, my favorite thing my favorite thing right now is this little it’s like a lotion bar. And I love it so much because it is really the only thing that works for me when it comes to very Dry heels. I don’t know if anybody else gets that, like your heels get super dry and everything else is like

Chrissy Beltran  30:09

it’s just not thick enough. So I have this little honey bee bar. And it’s like a lotion bar, and you just kind of like rub, I use it for my heels, you can use it for whatever you want, but I use it for my heels. And it, you put it on every single day. And then I put on a pair of socks. And it is seriously, it changes everything. And so I’m going to tell you the proper name, it’s called the honey bee bar. It’s like a because it’s actually made from this company that uses like, B type stuff in all of their products. It’s called honey house natural b bar, and I use the vanilla one. And you can get it online. It’s a great product. So that’s my favorite thing right now because it’s the only thing that actually works. It makes my heels not look like I’m a caveman. And who doesn’t want that. So okay, so today, if you go to buzzing with this b.com slash Episode 162, you can actually grab my PLC discussion dice, I have a free one for you. And that dice will help you guide some conversations with teachers if you find that your teachers are not really communicating very well. So go to buzzing with Miss b.com slash episode 162 Scroll down and you can grab those dice. You can also get the complete collection of dice in my TPT store. So go to teacherspayteachers.com Search for Christy Beltran or buzzing with Misty, it’ll pop up either way. And they are my PLC discussion dice, you print them, you take them off, oh, I even have one. If you’re watching the video on YouTube, they look like this. And then they have some really great questions to help you think about what you’re seeing for data for planning for talking about new learning, they’re really great. So I want you to grab that tool, if that is a tool that will help you for your PLCs to get people talking in a low key, fun, easy way. I actually want to share with you that what is coming up soon, I mentioned a little while ago, is I am about to launch my confident literacy coach course. And this is big, because it’s got a whole module about PLCs PLCs are so challenging.

Chrissy Beltran  32:11

For coaches, it’s hard to get started, it’s hard to make them work, especially if they fail before. If you have not been able to work with PLCs in a way that you feel as productive or purposeful. This course is absolutely for you go to confident literacy coach.com. And you will be signed up to know when the course opens. It’s opening next week, if you’re listening to this in real time, it’s opening in like actually two weeks. And you’ll be you’ll be notified as soon as it opens. Because it will this PLC module is is it’s got so much good stuff. It has the norms in it. But it also gives you specific processes for planning together and all the tools you need. Using data together and looking at student work together as like an artifact to discuss our teaching. It is going to change your PLCs because it changed mine. It took me a few years to figure it out. But once I figured it out, I loved PLC. I look forward to it. Before I figured it out. I dreaded it. I hated it so much. So I would like was sick every Tuesday morning whenever I knew as PLC team day, right? We’re actually going to work with our teens. So I can’t recommend enough for you to go to confident literacy. coach.com Sign up for the waitlist. Next week in Episode 163. I am talking to Lindsay Lyons about one of the things our PLCs can do together and that is writing curriculum. So Lindsay actually works with teams and they write curriculum based on social justice. Her strategies are great for social justice curriculum that we it’s like looking at your what you actually have to teach. But we’re figuring out how it’s related to social justice and using that as kind of the mode for writing the curriculum. So it’s making it relevant. It’s great if that’s what you do, but it’s also great no matter what kinds of planning you do, because some of the ideas she shared I loved in this episode. So definitely listen back next week, episode 163 writing curriculum together with Lindsey Lyons as we can sit continue our PLC study on the podcast this month. And until then, happy coaching

Chrissy Beltran  34:11

Thank you for listening to Buzzing with Miss B The Coaching Podcast. Want more coaching ideas. Check me out at buzzingwithMsb.com and on Instagram at buzzing with Miss B. If you love the show, share it with a coach who would love it too. Or leave me a review on iTunes. It’s free and it helps others find this show. Happy coaching!