Why You’re Not Seeing Classrooms Change with PLC Meetings, ep. 210

Why You’re Not Seeing Classrooms Change with PLC Meetings, ep. 210, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

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Chrissy Beltran  01:03

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Chrissy Beltran  01:49

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  02:15

Hey coach and welcome to episode 210, of instructional coaching with Miss B, we are continuing our series on your coaching strategy toolbox. That is our series for the entire month of October, if you’re listening in real time, or for a collection of five episodes if you are not. And this is the second episode in the series. Last week we talked about your low impact strategies, why you need them, and how to leverage them. Today we’re going to look at moderate impact strategies. So these strategies include a little more time investment from you and from the teacher, and they require more teacher willingness than those level one those low impact strategies. Now the resource that I have for you today is actually a free data form. If you go to buzzing with Miss b.com/episode 210 you can grab the data form at the bottom of the show notes for this episode. It’s a really great guide to hosting a data meeting, a data PLC, a data dig, a data review, whatever you call them, and it comes little bookmarks too, and then a planner about what you’re actually going to do in response to the data. So check that out. I’ve used it with so many teachers and I have found those conversations to be pretty impactful for a data meeting. And then, of course, if you are looking for PLC resources, you’re going to want the PLC toolkit. Okay, so the PLC toolkit includes street resources for like six or seven different things that PLC teams do together, including looking at data and lots of other things. So the episode that we’re listening to is called why you’re not seeing classroom change with PLC meetings. And it could be PLC meetings, it could be team meetings, it could be lots of different things that you were doing, but basically take place outside of the classroom. So the moderate impact strategies that I’m talking about include many things that you probably do at PLC meetings and some other ones, okay, things like looking at data, creating assignments together, or creating assessments together, making a plan for behavior, looking at planning collaboratively all of those things, including professional development, I consider moderate impact strategies, because in general, we do not see the impact from those things that are taking place, usually outside of the classroom that we Would coaching where that happens directly in the classroom. Now, again, just like I said last week, this does not mean they’re bad, but it does mean we have to think differently about them, right? Like we said in the level one strategies, those low impact strategies that I shared with you last week, those are, are there to serve a purpose for you as a coach? Coach to build that relationship. But we ABC, always be coaching, right? We have to always be coaching and thinking about how we’re going to leverage this into more coaching work. So for our moderate impact strategies, today, we’re going to talk a little bit about what the problem is with them while they’re fantastic, what’s not working, probably, and how you can make them work for you as a coach and support teacher change. If you feel like teachers are not responding to your strategies that you’re doing at your school, try to use a few low impact strategies to build rapport and to demonstrate your credibility. So here’s the issue. Let’s say that you have data PLC meetings and people are shut down not interested in communicating with you. You may need to move back to those now, don’t drop the meetings, because that’s just a fact of life, and we’re going to have to get used to those meetings, right? But drop back to those low impact strategies and build that relationship with your teacher level one strategies are great for building relationships. If you consistently work with those teachers, individually, you can build trust, you can demonstrate credibility, and you can combine them with the moderate level strategies in this episode to get those doors to open to you, so you can really do some fantastic high impact coaching work. So just a quick note about that, though, it’s not a path. You don’t have to go, like 123, you don’t have to say, Oh, I start with a lot with the low impact and move to the moderate. No, no, no. The reality is, you’re going to be doing all these things at the same time with different people and different teams. It’s likely that the moderate impact strategies, many of them you’re already doing with coaches or with teachers, because you’re going to do them in a group setting, like planning together, and so you may be kind of like moving out of order, and that’s fine. That’s it doesn’t go in order. These are just different kinds of strategies that are in your toolbox. You don’t pull out like a screwdriver and then you move to like a circular saw. And that you don’t do them in levels of increasing difficulty. You just, you know, use them when it’s appropriate. You differentiate. So let’s talk about moderate impact strategies, and what they are. These include strategies that take place generally outside of the classroom, but they should be directly tied to the things that teachers will do in the classroom if we want them to actually make change. Moderate level strategies can be less invasive to the teacher that actually like coaching cycle work in their classrooms. You can use them to demonstrate credibility. You can support teachers in ways that grow their knowledge base and grow their skill and build school alignment, which is super helpful and important. These are the strategies that I’m sharing about today, planning, collaboratively, creating assessments and assignments, reviewing student work together, maybe dissecting or evaluating it, analyzing it, data review, professional development, and then book or video studies, opportunities to learn right these strategies often take up so much of a coach’s time. So when I think back to the hours I have spent planning for professional development alone, holy cow, I feel like, for every hour spent in PD, you spend like two hours preparing, when I think about how much time I spent looking at data and preparing myself, preparing to plan with teachers, you know, saying, Okay, this is what we’re coming up on. I’m going to gather some things that I can share. We’re going to these are the standards that we’re going to look at. I need to build my knowledge base to be sure I’m prepared. It’s so much time that we invest in these and some coaching experts actually don’t think that this should be part of a coach’s job. If you talk to them, they say, No, coaches should just be coaching. They should not be doing all these other things. And while I do think coaches do so many tasks that should not be in our plates, many of these tasks are aligned with teaching and learning in the classroom, as well as growing the teacher’s knowledge and skills as a whole across the school. So I can’t imagine a school being successful in making growth if we’re only tackling individual teachers and not teams across the school. I just can’t envision it. I’m struggling to picture a school making real change for kids over time, if we’re not doing things that build the school, I don’t think we can do it just by building individuals. So I really, truly do believe these things are necessary for a school to grow. However, they are not the whole job, right? And so they very easily could become the whole job if we didn’t hold the line and say, Hey, I need to block off time for my coaching work, individual coaching work,

Chrissy Beltran  09:25

PLC meetings are where we tend to tackle a lot of these tasks, right? And you may call them team meetings or whatever your school, whatever philosophy of approaching your teams that your school has, you know whether it’s the whole school PLC team meetings and smaller grade levels, however you call it, this is where these tend to take place. Looking at student work can be super, incredibly powerful, I’d say, even more powerful than data, really, and data review and book studies and planning together, all these things happen, usually with your grade level teams or your department teams. So as a teacher, I sat in a ton of team meetings, and honestly, I. Didn’t always tell you what I was supposed to get out of it. Why not? I was so confusing. Well, I’m not even sure sometimes if the people facilitating the meeting could tell you what they wanted us to walk away with. Maybe they had a really great vision in their brains and what they wanted us to see during that that time, that 45 minutes, but they didn’t tell it to us. They didn’t have, like, a learning target as an adult look. I know that people don’t like putting up learning targets. I know that people joke about how it’s pointless. I don’t necessarily think it’s pointless. I didn’t love it when I started using it, either, but I found a way to make it work for me. But as a teacher, I would have appreciated a learning target to say, Hey, this is the point of this meeting. What’s the point? That’s what I wanted to know. When I didn’t understand what I was there to accomplish, I really wasn’t going to use it in my classroom. It would seem like something extra, like a bonus that I could just like, drop. Okay, thanks. I’ll do this stuff, and then I’m leaving. And I left all my brain learning there on the table. When we’re working with teachers in teams or in groups. It’s absolutely imperative to have a focus on what we want them to leave with that will bridge to their classrooms. And so many times we leave out the bridge, and guess what? If we don’t build the bridge, they’re not building the bridges. Studies show that even adults don’t transfer learning from one context to another. I mean, some do, but not many. If we work with teachers in one space and then ask them to apply it to their own space without any bridge building, we have to be really thoughtful. I mean, we’re not going to be successful if we don’t do a really thoughtful approach to how teachers are going to use this in their classrooms. I remember my first year as a coach, I spent so much time with teachers, planning together, right? We’d plan for each component of reading, meticulously evaluating resources to choose the best ones, and writing lessons together that should have supported teaching and learning. But then I visit the classrooms and nothing the plans that we had planned together were not happening. They did the planning, and then they went back to the classrooms and wrote their real lesson. Their real lesson plans that we’re actually going to use. Oh, like, oh my gosh, talk about a sucker punch, right? We would look at data, and then they’d go back and change nothing about their instruction to respond to the data we had just looked at. We did PD and learn new ways to respond to reading or for example, right? And then nobody would use them in their classrooms. It was maddening. It’s not like the teachers thought they’d come to those experiences and just got them done and then they were going to return to the real world when they left the meeting. So then, how do we build a bridge? Well, there’s a couple things that could be going wrong here, we need to consider what’s missing, is accountability missing, or is support missing? And there are different ways we can provide these two things, even as an instructional coach who is not the same kind of accountability measure as like an admin at the end of a learning experience, then throughout, but certainly at the end. And these are all learning or planning experiences, in one way or another. We need to deliberately plan a bridge. And unfortunately, just writing a lesson plan doesn’t mean the bridge is there, because they can just like, drop off that plan in the trash can on the way out and do something else. So when we ask teachers to build a bridge, we are asking them to envision what the concept or method would look like in their classrooms and where it can go. They really have to picture it. They need to find the date and the time. They need to make it fit into their schedule. They need to know when it’s going to happen. We can also ask teachers to make a commitment. They can commit to using that this information somehow in their classrooms, and this can make a good exit ticket for you to follow up on. So there are a couple of ways we can get teachers thinking about how they can build that bridge themselves to their classroom and really support them in that. And even beyond that, we can offer to be the bridge. So here are some things that we can do when we’re using a low impact or moderate impact strategy and we’re trying to make sure that it actually impacts classroom. If your teachers need support, this means teachers are struggling because they don’t have something they need. They don’t know how to do something. They are unsure if they need support. I’m going to give you a few examples of things that you can do during a PD, if a teacher is unsure or confused about something, you can offer to model the lesson or have them observe a colleague instead of just answering their question. That’s how we are leveraging ABC always be coaching. If you, let’s say you’re doing a data meeting, you could plan a learning opportunity for teachers around the specific skill that teacher that students need. So like, let’s say that you look at some data from a writing assessment, and kids are struggling to write complete sentences. You can say, okay, whoever did really well in this area. Can you teach us how you actually taught your kids to do this? And you can set up a special time for them to do that. You could say, can we come. Cord. You can you can we come visit you? Or you can plan professional development around the topic. If no one really has a strength in that area for planning, you can offer to co teach the lessons that you have planned together, or to observe them or to model them. But co teaching is fun. Once you get comfortable with it, it can be really fun. And then set a date and time to meet before you teach a lesson together, to make sure that you are thoroughly planned and know who’s doing what. And have a whole episode about co teaching that you can go back to. It’s a good one. You’re going to want to check it out. It’s like episode, I don’t know, six or something. It’s a it’s an early one. If your teachers need accountability, this is a true challenge for instructional coaches, accountability is kind of not our job description. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t have like group accountability to each other, because we are accountable to each other. There are norms that we set that demonstrate how will we how we will be accountable to each other. We are accountable to our students. We are accountable just as human beings, we are accountable because we live in a society, and this is a kind of little microcosm of that society. So how can we use like group leverage and expectations to sort of build that accountability? Well, here’s a couple of examples. If you plan an assignment together, or maybe, maybe you plan a whole unit together, right, either way, after you teach the assignment. You can look at student work samples together to see how it went. When can we schedule that? Right? Let’s look at the calendar. We have another meeting coming up in three weeks. Will that give you time? You know, you can bring your document in, whatever artifact we decide everybody’s going to bring them on that day. If they are planning together or doing assignments. You can, yeah, you can examine the whole class of Art of Work samples, or you can just bring one sample as an artifact. It depends on how you want that to

Chrissy Beltran  16:52

work. If you think about the opportunities that your team has to support each other with accountability, like maybe there’s a share fair, and you’re going to have each team share with another team. Well, that’s accountability, right? They have to get good at something so they can share about it. Then you might have more opportunities to hold people accountable than you think, because there is, there is, there is inherent peer pressure that can be positive peer pressure if we leverage it in that team. So just to sum up, our level two, our moderate impact strategies may not be as effective as they should be because we are not focusing on bridge building to the classroom. They may need support to make that happen, or they may need accountability to make that happen. And either way, you can find some ways to structure into your your existing structure, even you can just add it in there to build that bridge. A little note about accountability, the way I remember as a like a teacher, young teacher, the way that we were held accountable for our small group intervention is that we would take turns going behind the glass. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that term before, there was a portable outside our school, and it literally was divided in half with glass on one, like in the middle, like that is it two way glass? Which doesn’t make sense to me why it would be two way glass, because you can only see out of it one way. So I don’t understand how that works. But anyway, like, as if you were in an interrogation room, there was glass in the middle. So then you would take your group of students into the one room on the side, and then the teachers who are going to observe you would come in on the other side, and they rotated through us to do behind the glass, like we would take our group in there, model a lesson, or share the lesson that we were working on, and then share the lesson plan with everybody, and then we would get feedback at the end. And I actually kind of enjoyed it. I looked forward to it, because I was like, Yeah, I’m working hard. I’m doing a good job with these kids, and I would like you to see it. I felt good about it. Not everybody did. And so that kind of accountability, it can be stressful. Do I think that some people got something out of it? I do. There were people who only went up to our coach to actually, like, prepare for that lesson before they went behind a class because they didn’t care about it before then. And that sounds terrible. Maybe I didn’t care about it. Maybe it’s the wrong phrase. Didn’t get it, couldn’t understand why it was supposed to be valuable, didn’t didn’t do it, you know, for whatever reasons. They had a reason. They weren’t doing it, until we went behind the glass, and then suddenly we have, like a reason to be better at it. Now, did they all continue doing it? Probably not right, but did some, yeah, I think they did. And so, you know, there are ways that we can authentically have people share their learning with each other, and we want to come into this with a good mindset that teachers really do want to do their best. They want they want their kids to learn. They want to do what their kids are going to need. They don’t always see how it will benefit their students or how to make it work. And that’s a bridge we’re trying to build. How is this going to work in your classroom? How could, how do you think your kids would react to this? These are questions we can ask to help people think. Think about the way that they approach our teaching, and take things that they’re learning out of the classroom and apply them in the classroom, build that bridge. So okay, if we keep focusing on our moderate impact strategies as a way to impact the classroom, and we’re always thinking about how we are coaching even when we’re not there. How are we helping teachers apply this? We can use moderate impact strategies to build a bridge to classroom. Work, right? Always be coaching ABC. So check out the data form. It’s a really great guide if you’re unsure how to go about a data meeting. And of course, there’s that PLC toolkit for you. It’s a really good toolkit. I’ve had some really great responses to it. That’s Teachers Pay Teachers or buzzing with ms b.com Next week, we’re going to talk about those high impact coaching strategies. We’re finally going to get there. We want to build to those strategies. We want to support teachers in their classrooms and in really highly impactful ways. And next week, we’re going to talk about what that looks like. I cannot wait to share that with you next week, and until then, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  21:09

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!