Goal Setting for Your 30/60/90 Day Action Plan for Instructional Coaching, ep. 203

Goal Setting for Your 30/60/90 Day Action Plan for Instructional Coaching, ep. 203, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

When I work with new coaches, the two words they use to describe themselves most often are excited and nervous. Even to an experienced coach, the New Year can bring butterflies and back to school nightmares figuring out what to do to set yourself up for a successful year can feel like putting together a puzzle when you don’t know what the picture looks like. Instead, let’s start the year with a 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  01:22

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  02:36

Hey coach, and welcome to episode 203, of instructional coaching with Miss B today, we are talking about goal setting for your 3060, 90 day action plan for instructional coaching and so again, if you have not joined the action plan challenge, you can do that at buzzing with Miss b.com/action plan. It’s a really great free mini challenge. It’s four days, and it’ll walk you through what you need to do to set yourself up with some actual goals that will really help focus your coaching work, and then a plan that will help you achieve those goals with checkpoints. So definitely check that out. It’s a really great little mini course right to your inbox. How easy. I also have the action plan resource for you in my store. If you go to buzzywith.com you can grab the action plan toolkit, and that includes all the resources that you need to do, all of this work, all the printables, the data forms, everything that you’re going to want in order to help you actually create an action plan that will guide your coaching work this year. So today, we’re going to talk about goal setting for these three different levels. And in the last episode, I introduced your tiers one, two and three for your instructional, coaching, support. Now, whenever we look at tiers, sometimes we’re looking at in the school setting. We’re talking about, oh, Tier one is what everybody gets, and it’s on grade level. Tier Two is differentiated, and then tier three is maybe where, like children that need the most support, then they reach that tier. That’s not the way I’m using the tiers. I’m using the tiers as the way that we meet teachers needs at three different levels. We meet our whole school level at tier one. Tier Two is where we differentiate for each of our teams. And then tier three is where we work with individual teachers. And we can’t work with all of them all of the time, right? It’s just impossible. So there are going to be teachers that you work with a different time throughout the year, and those are the ones that are going to fall into your tier three support. So whenever you are goal setting, we’re looking for big ideas to focus on, right and the focus for these goals comes from your data. In Episode 202, I walk you through a whole plan on how to use four different components of data to create a big picture of what is going on at your school. We talked about looking at actual like data, numbers, you know, in terms of assessments or behavior or management, classroom attendance, whatever it is you’re looking at. We talked about talking to your administrator. We looked at getting teacher input, and we looked at actually visiting classrooms and doing a classroom. Sweep across your school to get a picture of what’s really happening, and putting all those four pieces together as kind of pieces of a puzzle to help you paint a picture of what’s going on at your school and notice patterns. So some of the patterns that you might be looking for are going to fall into these areas. I’m going to share a few different different categories with you that you may be looking at in order to grow your teaching practice at school. You might look for academic vocabulary, questioning level of rigor. You might look at management and how teachers introduce behavior expectations, what that looks like in the classroom, and how we are responding to misbehaviors. We might look at lesson design and alignment, and with that, maybe we’re looking at curriculum that you use and whether that is actually being implemented in a way that works for kids or not, and for teachers bridging to testing situations. This is a good one. If you look at your numbers data, and it’s not great, and then you look at your classroom data, and you actually see like in your classroom suite, so when you’re talking to teachers, you see good things happening, but you’re not building that bridge. That could be the area to focus on. Maybe teachers don’t know how to take the great learning that’s happening in their classroom and use it to support kids in a testing situation, because that is a very unique situation, and we don’t want to do that all the time, but we do need to teach kids how to get there and apply what they know to those situations. So maybe bridging to a testing situation as an area your teachers are struggling in, it could also be instructional methods or strategies. What are teachers doing to actually help kids learn? Or are we doing a lot of just sit and get and teacher delivers? You know, what kind of in great engagement strategies are we using? Are kids interacting with content and each other? Or again, are they doing sit and get and also, one of my favorites, are we using reading and writing all day long as tools to learn. Reading and writing are not things we learn how to do. They are like we do have to learn how to do them, obviously, but the point of them is to learn. Learn through them, to use them to learn. So if we are not using them to learn, we are not really learning. And all the ways that our amazing brains allow us to learn. So we need to use those as tools. Are we doing that? So now what we’re going to talk about you have these different, different focus areas. We’re going to say, how do we apply that to goals? Well, we’re going to look at goals for each level. Okay, we’re going to look at a goal for each tier, your whole school tier, your teams and your individual teachers. And these goals like I explained earlier, they get well, like, like I’m explaining now, they can be nested. Okay, they can be nested in terms of, if you are focusing on one thing across your whole school, for example, if you are looking at your new curriculum, and so maybe your whole school is focused on a new curriculum that they’re going to use, okay, or a new strategy that they’re going to use. Let’s say that you’re talking about visible learning, or you’re talking about using empowering writers. This could be the big category that all your other goals fall under. It doesn’t have to be, but you can do it that way. So if you have tiered support within this one goal or this one big focus, this is what it could look like. It could be that your first focus, or your tier one is that you’re going to do whole school. PD, on writing across the curriculum, or empowering writers, or visible learning, whatever your big category is, and the adults get to participate in that curriculum. They learn about the rationale. They learn about how to use it whole school, right? The main focus of your whole school stuff is rationale, because it’s probably going to look different in different in different grades and different content areas. So then your tier two support is going to be each grade level or each content area team is going to explore their own standards and identify opportunities to use age appropriate strategies in their plans. Okay, so like, let’s say that if you’re using empowering writers, this is just the first program I thought of guys. It’s really no other reason if you’re using empowering writers with your elementary school, and your whole school gets trained on empowering writers, then you move into tier two and you say, Okay, we’re going to look at pre K kinder. They’re each going to look at their own curriculum, and they’re going to see what needs they have and what opportunities do they have to use it? So we can plan it into their lessons.

Chrissy Beltran  09:25

From there, we have individual coaching cycles that can be around these areas. Specifically, if you’re using this nested model where all of your goals are focused on this one thing some schools, that’s where you are, right, we really have to get good at something, and this can be the way to do it. If you are, like, needing something to anchor all of the learning at your school, you can do it in this nested model where all your three levels are focused on this one thing. So even that individual coaching, you’re like, Okay, I’m going to support you in this area. We can do it in what. Whatever way you choose. Here’s my coaching menu. These are the different strategies I can provide, but we’re going to focus the content on this area. You can do that if your school has to get good at this one thing. So make it a big one, something that is going to support all of your teachers all day long. If this is the thing you’re going to choose, okay, a different way to do it, instead of that nested model, is to have different goals for each tier. That is also okay, because your school may be in a place where that is where you are, so maybe, let’s say your tier one whole school stuff is you’re going to introduce to a new curriculum, you’re going to dig into materials, you’re going to give out a calendar, scope and sequence. You’re going to let teachers plan lessons during your PD, like you’re your PD, like you’re going to actually dig into those lessons. They’re going to practice on each other. Then your tier two goal could be completely different. So maybe you have teachers in certain grades or certain content areas that are struggling with grouping their students for small group assessments and for small group learning. Maybe you have groups of teachers who need support and data. Maybe you have groups of teachers who are needing to build assessments. You can tailor those small group goals, your tier two goals to meet the needs of your teachers. Maybe you use your teacher surveys to do that and see which teams needed to focus on which goals. Then you have your individual classroom work right, your tier three, and that could look like anything you needed to look like. And your teachers can choose what they would like to work on and how they would like to work on it right, what strategies you offer that they would like to try. So based on these three different tiers, you can take them in different directions, depending on the needs of your schools. It can be nested or it can be completely different. Okay, so you’re gonna want to make sure that if you’ve got this nested philosophy, that things are actually trickling down from the top, that your top level work supports the middle, supports the individual teacher, right? If not, it doesn’t have to trickle down, but it can. You can refer back to that whole group stuff and your individual coaching. It just depends on what teachers need. If you’re basing it on teacher need, you are not doing that nested approach. You’re just being responsive, right? So from there, you’re going to want to set checkpoints for each goal, and to do that, you’re going to want to break down your goal into action steps for the 3060, 90 days. So let’s look at our sample goal and break up your plan over the 90 days. We need to break larger tasks down into smaller learning opportunities at these three different levels. Here’s one, two and three, right? Whole group, small group, individual. So let’s talk about a sequence of learning. Let’s use the example of academic language. Okay, maybe this is a possibility for your in service day, which is the first time that you’re going to introduce this to your whole team. Maybe you’ll read an article, watch a video, build a list of words for different content areas in the first month of school that are actually aligned with your curriculum in each grade. Identify focus words for each week in each grade level. Discuss how academic language is assessed. These are things that you can do whole school, right? And because you can differentiate within your PD, teachers will be able to say, well, in kinder, this is how we can assess in second grade, this is how we can assess in you know, in math, we naturally assess, because kids cannot complete the math problems without being able to identify the language. But we also need to teach them in isolation, like you can have these conversations. Right? Maybe you then have some after school. PD, where you learn five fun activities for building academic language, and that is, again, tier one. That’s for everybody. Then let’s say that you have PLCs for your tier two. And let’s say that for the first month of school, you’re going to choose a strategy to try out and use with focus words for each week. And so then the teacher say, Okay, I learned these strategies from my after school. PD, I’m going to pick one of those five strategies, and I’m going to choose one and I’m going to use it with the focus words that we wrote for our grade level the next week. I’m going to bring back an artifact and share about how it went so maybe I did vocabulary dominoes. I took a picture of the kids building with their vocabulary dominoes and explaining, and then I’m going to come back the next week and talk about this is what happened. The next step could be maybe PLCs for the third month, right? We’re moving beyond the first two months, and now we’re going to keep building our understanding. So maybe for month three, we’re going to have an assessment, we’re going to discuss results, and we’re going to plan next steps, because from here we are saying, Okay, we’ve been working with academic language for two months. You guys have tried out these different strategies. Let’s see what the result is. Let’s prepare an assessment, and then we can talk about data and move on. Make another plan, right? That would take you through your first 90 days, because the first two months are your 30 and 60 days, and then the third month is your 90 days. And that’s how you can set up your action steps, your individual coaching again, can be coaching cycles, or any kind of coaching work you’re doing with individual teachers could be about academic language as well. They could be trying out those strategies. You could I mean, this is a nice, broad topic, because you can make it work pretty much no matter what it is that you’re that you’re working on. You can do that and focus those coaching cycles around this. Or you can say, I will leave it open to you, and we will choose a goal based on what you need at the time. So from there, you want to add your check ins to see how you’re progressing towards those goals. And using some of the resources that we talked about in episode 202, to gather information is a good way to do it, because this is a 3060, 90 plan, right? So basically, what we’re saying at the end of 30 days, at the end of 60 days, at the end of 90 days, we’re going to check in and see how we’re progressing towards the goals that we wrote for each tier. You can also break it up by month, because 90 days basically covers your first semester, right? Roughly? It kind of depends on your school year, but a lot of schools that’s pretty much where you’re going to be is ending up your first semester around the end of 90 days, depending. So if you want to break it up by month, you could do that too, you know, and say at the end of maybe at the end of August, at the end of September, at the end of October. You could break it up that way. Maybe you give people August as a grace month, and you look at September, October, November, because December is kind of shot, you know, so short in some places. It depends on how you want to do it. But you want to do it, but you want to set your checkpoints, and you want to figure out what that checkpoint is going to look like. Okay, so in the next episode, we’re going to talk about some different ways for you to check in on your 3060, 90 day plan throughout the process. And so then we that’s gonna be Episode 204. We’re gonna talk a little bit about checking in with your administrator working towards your goals, figuring out how to make some adjustments. So I’m excited to share that with you, and again, I teach you how to do it in the Action Plan challenge, so you can get that at buzzing business b.com/action plan. Next episode, we are wrapping up your 3060, 90 day action plan with an episode about how to check in and evaluate how you’re moving towards your goals until next week. Happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  17:29

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