A Day in the Life of a High School Instructional Coach with Allie Freeburg, ep. 235

A Day in the Life of a High School Instructional Coach with Allie Freeburg, ep. 235, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:00

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Chrissy Beltran  01:23

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Chrissy Beltran  02:43

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissie 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, hey coach, and welcome to episode 235, of instructional coaching with Miss B today, we are talking about a day in the life of a high school instructional coach. This is for secondary coaches. But of course, we can all learn from each other regardless of our role. And we’re going to speak with my guest. Speak with my guest, Allie Freeberg. This is part of my day in the life series. Every summer, I try to talk to coaches with different kinds of roles, people who serve their schools a little differently. And I’ve been on the lookout for a great high school coach to speak to. And whenever Allie suggested that she was interested, I took her up on it right away this time of year, if you’re listening in real time, it can be a really good time to kind of redefine your coaching role, or if you’re going to be new to this role next year, to get a good handle on what you want your coaching work to look like. So if you’re trying to do this work, or you think it’d be a good time to do it, grab my free startup mini course. It’s actually a jump start course that will get you started for the school year. So if you go to buzzing with Miss b.com/jump start, you can grab my mini course. Go straight to your inbox, and it includes your three by three vision. It includes helping you define what you want to accomplish and some really great tips on setting yourself up for the school year for success. So grab that mini course, it’s free at budding with Miss b.com jump start. And let me go ahead and welcome my guest, Allie. So welcome to the podcast, Allie. And thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me as a quick way to get to know you. We would love to hear about a few things. Who do you help and how do you spend most of your time and energy at work.

Allie Freeburg  04:42

So I work with all of our high school teachers through coaching co planning, PLCs and PD, so I spend most of my time coaching individual teachers, whether that’s through planning meetings with them or being directly in their classrooms, and then also planning our professional development. Days and our PLCs

Chrissy Beltran  05:01

great. And the other thing that I’m gonna ask about might seem unrelated, but I’m on a mission this year to share hobbies with people. We spend so much of our time investing in school and our education and work, but we also need to make time for ourselves as humans. So what is a hobby that you

Allie Freeburg  05:17

love to do? So something that I actually do on the side is I teach a boxing class at a local gym. So boxing and other just workout classes, strength training, pilates, those are really my outlet for what I do after work. And you know, just mental health as well and physical

Chrissy Beltran  05:38

Awesome. Thank you. So we are talking today specifically about secondary coaches, mostly in high school. And there are lots of different models of high school, obviously, and just because somebody’s in high school doesn’t mean it’s always gonna look the same. But I had a lot of requests to talk to some high school coaches about specifically their work with high school. So if you could walk us sort of through, like a day in the life of coaching at your high school. I would love to hear about that. And it doesn’t have to be like all encompassing, but you could, I mean, you could do a week in the life, if that’s easier, because I know different days look different, but if you could share about kind of what your work, your work looks like on a normal day,

Allie Freeburg  06:13

yeah, yeah. So like you said, different days look different now. Two days are ever the same, but generally, I would categorize it into three buckets. So meetings, individual teacher meetings, team meetings, I’ll go we had lots of different types of meetings, being in classrooms, and then my individual planning time. So an example day. So I did kind of think through an example day. So example day would probably start with not probably it starts with a morning meeting. And that’s a PLC that, like, that’s on Wednesdays. For example, we have PLCs. And then I actually do teach one elective, and that’s totally by choice. I wasn’t when I was hired for this role. You know, it’s pure coaching role. And then a year ago, I was asked if I’d like to teach this elective. And I was like, yes, it’s an intro to education elective, so it makes sense, and that’s every other every other day. So I teach that every other day, and on the days I don’t teach it, I plan for it, then I get into classrooms, so classroom visits or walk throughs, and then usually a planning meeting with a teacher. Lunches in the middle. I do have a 20 minute lunch duty, but 20 minutes, not bad. And then I usually have some flex time for myself. So I need to plan for PD. I have a one on one with my principal. I have a data analysis meeting. You know, I need to update my own data sheets. That’s that flex time. And then I can, if I find time at the end of the day. I love to end in classrooms as well. Or a lot of times I’m planning up until you know that bell, that final bell, awesome.

Chrissy Beltran  07:47

So, yeah, a lot of those roles are things that are tasks that you’re talking about, are things that all coaches kind of Yes. And I think you mentioned your school side. Is that right? What is the what was this in your email originally? What was the second school? Yeah.

Allie Freeburg  08:02

So we’re a relatively small urban charter school. We try to fill about 90 seats per grade level. We have four, so 360 you know, in a full enrollment. Okay,

Chrissy Beltran  08:14

interesting. Yeah, that’s actually so having worked with elementary schools, that’s I’ve never worked with an elementary school with that few students in it, when I started teaching, was wild as a fourth grade teacher, there were 1000 kids in our elementary school, and we called ourselves the fourth grade Armada because there were 8/4 grade teachers. It was, oh my gosh, yeah. It was a wild and then over time, it that enrollment, you know, it was because we were in a part of town where people were starting to move out in that area, and now that part of town is not where people are moving anymore. They’re moving farther east. So it’s just, you know, dynamic, like numbers change over time because of where people are living with a young kid, right? So that’s it’s that was a big one. And then whenever I started coaching at school, I worked out had about 600 kids, and that’s a lot smaller to me, because there were only maybe four teachers in each grade level instead of, you know, seven or eight. Just crazy. So yeah, school so varied, but I think that high school has some unique challenges due to the wide variety of classes that they teach and the way people are working in departments and teams. So what are some of the challenges that you face that are unique to high school, and then how have you worked towards solving them? And you could do as many challenges as you’d like, because I’m sure these are things that other people have dealt with too. Yeah,

Allie Freeburg  09:32

well, yes, I was as I was thinking through this question, you know, prioritizing my time came up, but I think that’s common, probably for a lot of coaches, so I’ll try to stick to high school specific. I know when I first stepped into this role, and this is my sixth year doing that, so I had some I have some experience, but the thing that was most daunting was I came from my own math classroom, and I have a math background. I do have a master’s in literacy, but, you know, math was my thing, and so. You step into an instructional coaching role. You’re coaching all the different content areas and content specific teachers. So my role is not specialized. I’m not just a math coach. I’m not a literacy coach. So I coach all the content areas, and I really have to honor that our teachers are the content experts, right? So when I was first, you know, when I first stepped into this role, I was like, Oh, my goodness, how am I going to go into a US history classroom? And, you know, have the respect of that teacher, but I really had to remember that even though the content is different, the high leverage instructional practices are the same, right? The classroom management routines that we look for are the same. So that was kind of my own affirmation to myself when I when I needed to give myself the confidence to go into these classrooms that I was like, I have no idea about this content. I was like, you’re looking for the instructional strategies. You’re looking for for management, you’re looking for engagement, right? All these things. And then as I stepped into more and more classrooms over time, that was how I built trust with these teachers. And then the content also started to come a little more naturally, right? I was like, oh, okay, I see what we’re doing here, you know. And then digging into the curriculum, of course, it’s going to you’re going to start to learn it. So by doing this and then getting into more classrooms, it helped me to build that confidence and become confident coaching across all the content areas.

Chrissy Beltran  11:26

Yeah, thank you for sharing about that. I totally agree. I think we come from whatever you know, grade level or focus or specialization we had, and we feel really comfortable in that area. And then whenever we have to go into other classrooms, and we don’t really know what’s going on, like I’m I do not speak much Spanish. I can read some, but I was a coach at a school in all the schools here are dual language basically, because I’m in El Paso Texas. So everything, they all have dual language classrooms. Not every classroom is dual language, but about half, usually in a school, depending on the population, will be dual language. So I have as a coach into classrooms that are being instructed in Spanish. And it’s wild, because if a lesson is, like, tightly organized and supportive of like, structured for kids, I have no problem following it, right? Yeah, like, once I start having problems following it, I noticed kids also seem to have problems following it, and that’s whenever things start to fall apart. So it is you do like you you’re asked to the coach thing that you are not an expert in in an elementary school that’s not always as complicated. If I walk into a fifth grade math classroom and I have not taught fifth grade math, I can usually figure out what’s going on pretty quickly. Into a chemistry classroom, and I’m dropped right into the middle of a lesson on something and I have no idea what’s going on. I’m not be able to pick it up and just figure out what’s going on. You know, it is absolutely about focusing, like you said, on the instructional delivery, on the, you know, strategies that are being used on management and your relationship with kids. So I love that you’re you’re using that as a way to bridge your teaching expertise into classrooms that are completely different than what you taught, right?

Allie Freeburg  13:03

And you’re looking at what the students are doing, right? You don’t like you’re going into that dual language classroom, and you’re not you’re not like listening, you’re not trying to translate what the teacher is saying. But you’re looking at, do all the students know what they’re supposed to be doing? Are they engaged? Are they thinking? Are they reading? Are they writing, you know? So Exactly, yeah, focusing

Chrissy Beltran  13:23

on the students is a really good way to do that, especially if you’re uncomfortable with the content or unfamiliar. Yeah. Did you have another challenge that you wanted to

Allie Freeburg  13:31

share? Yes, so we, like we mentioned, relatively small high school, so we don’t have multiple teachers teaching the same course. You know, I mean, this year we do. We have two teachers teaching algebra, but generally we have one teacher for global nine, one teacher for global 10, one teacher for ELA nine, one for ELA 10. So this makes PLC is unique, because even though a teacher might be in a PLC with other members of their department. Each person in the department teaches a unique course. So our teachers are amazing. They are all they’re open to collaborate, they’re open to feedback, but it’s you know you when you’re looking you want to bring student work and look at data. You can both be looking at a global nine tests that one teacher gave and the other teacher gave, because there’s not two teachers teaching it like if you compare strategies that way. But like I said, we we work through that, through other ways that our our teachers collaborate, and we’re we’re mindful about differentiating our PLC, so we’ve played around with it through the years, and sometimes we differentiate on a focus area, like we have people opt into something they want to work on. Sometimes we differentiate on experience, experience. This year, they’re in departments, and they’re all working toward we call them case studies here, but it’s really project based learning, more authentic learning, hands on learning. So everyone can share, you know, strategies to get to that type of learning and brings, they can still bring student work, right, and just provide feedback on the task that was given and on the type of work that was received. How interesting.

Chrissy Beltran  15:16

And so then, can you share a little bit of the structure of what that what those PLC meetings look like like if you follow a specific structure for them, sure.

Allie Freeburg  15:24

So we they’re like, I think I mentioned they’re on Wednesday mornings, and they’re about 45 minutes. And we have an instructional leadership council. So that’s four teachers, and I lead this council, and they are our teachers who lead our PLCs. So we have, we actually have five. I lead one other one. But so to say we have five PLCs, four of those teachers myself lead one. And we so this council, we meet, and we always plan the meeting. But the general structure of it is, you start with a greeting, right? Just how’s everybody you know? Yeah, hopefully deeper than How’s everybody doing? Either? Would you rather question something? Just to break the ice, it’s early in the morning, and then we start with our learning target. What is the target for today, that what is kind of our task? And it’s always force related to our bigger goal, right? They know the bigger goal this year is we’re creating case studies. We’re creating really high quality curriculum that forces kids to critically think and hopefully in an authentic context. But a task for that that day might be like, I can brainstorm guiding questions for my case study, right? They have an idea, and now they have to think about guiding questions. So then they’re usually, there might be a reading, like, we find a professional reading that can kind of get everybody to frame that work and think about, okay, what makes a really good guiding question? And then some work time. So then we ask them, either on paper or digitally, if we’re trying to, you know, also get our eyes on it. Ours being like our leadership team to to write down what they’re thinking, write down their brainstorm, and then the following week would build on that. So the following week might be some peer feedback on that, or might be then, okay, now write your learning targets for those guiding questions. You know, how are you going to get to them? And then we just continue building

Chrissy Beltran  17:21

so they kind of select the specific unit that they wanted to work on through this program. Okay,

Allie Freeburg  17:26

yes, we like to, I mean, we try to give as much autonomy as we can. So we say, you can tweak a unit that you’re in, you can reinvent a new unit. And then we also honor experience and comfortability with this type of teaching. So teachers who we know have are tried this. We say, We want you to try it this year, like plan for a unit. Know, you know that you’re doing in March, April, I could be starting September. And teachers who this might be their first time, we say, plan for next year.

Chrissy Beltran  17:57

Okay, interesting. And so then, and then they actually give in terms of, like, Okay, I’m an English teacher for like, ninth graders, and I have selected a unit on, I don’t know, voice or something. And then this English teacher has selected a unit on, I mean, something completely different. But then they have conversations as they’re working through this process to speak with each other. I like and I love the that you can really get some vertical alignment conversations going when you have a smaller team that way. Because 100% Yeah, you can say, well, this is the way we introduced it in ninth grade. And so you’re probably going to want to extend on that in 10th grade and not do the same exact thing that we did in ninth grade. Getting anything out of that.

Allie Freeburg  18:35

Yes, that you’re absolutely right. That’s a huge benefit. And that comes up all the time and naturally. And our because our departments are small and they’re tight, yeah, they are able to really work together in that way. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  18:48

I like that. And I think it’s interesting. Can you talk a little bit about how you created the sort of opt in PL fees where they could choose, you know, something that was relevant to them, that they were interested in? Did you start out with, like, certain themes or topics, and then they pick from those well,

Allie Freeburg  19:02

so this year, so it always kind of goes back to our strategic plan, right? It has to fit with the school wide goals. So in the summer, the leadership team, including my principal myself, we sit down and we think about, what are our overarching goals for the school for this upcoming year. And this year, we really did. We, we kind of chose the focus. The focus was case studies. But I’ll give you last year, for example, because we’ve, we’ve been building this year after year. That’s, that’s the beauty of working with the same principle for many years. But last year as kind of a kickoff to where we are this year, we were just trying to deeper, to increase the rigor, and to start building up that on that idea of deeper instruction. So we did that through surveys, basically. So we told everyone where we were headed, where we wanted to go, and we just gave choices. I think we started with a lot, you know. Maybe eight to 10 choices, and we narrowed it down to about four, and we provided text. We kind of did a book study for each choice. So one of them was like deeper learning through literacy practices. One of them was through protocols or active engagement. Trying to think last year, what else did we have? I putting you on the spot, Chrissy, every detail that’s okay, yeah. But we do it through surveys, basically, and also, being a small school, and we word of mouth, if teachers, you know, come to us and say, like, Hey, I’m really thinking of this idea. And if it relates well to our goal, we will, of course, try to offer that if we can.

Chrissy Beltran  20:42

Yeah, I love that. I’ve done something similar with book studies and some focused work after school, whenever teachers could opt in, because they didn’t all have a common planning time or a common PLC time, because meetings were, you know, at different times of the day based on, like, their Pe times or but after school, we had, every week a learning opportunity. And so that, I would say, like, we would offer several different book studies, and different school personnel would sort of lead that book study, and then they would do some work and planning around what they had taken away from that. And we thought that was, that was successful. We really enjoyed that. And it gave people, like, some autonomy in their learning, and some, you know, choice, and they could kind of choose the direction they were interested in. So I love that.

Allie Freeburg  21:21

Yeah, I think Go ahead. I was just gonna say, No, it was successful. The book helped really, like, anchor people. And, you know, i i Someone referenced their book, just, you know, earlier this week, they’re like, Oh yeah, I remember when I was reading building thinking class. Or no, that’s this year, building thinking classrooms this year. But their protocol text, you know, like, they just brought up one of the protocols. And I think I’ll do that again. So that was up for me.

Chrissy Beltran  21:48

Yes, it is. It’s so nice to refer back to something that you’ve done together. Like, okay, it works. Got some they got something out of it. I think that if somebody’s listening and they’re like, Oh, my school is so big they don’t have this common planning time like this, I wouldn’t be able to do so much choice in that way. They could even just have grade level teams or departments choose. So you could say, okay, English department get together and you guys decide on the tech that you’re going to investigate in this way. And so it’s like, it’s could still be done. It just wouldn’t be, maybe individual choice would have to be a team choice, yes, in that way, if you have, like, a larger faculty,

Allie Freeburg  22:20

yes, and that’s, it’s funny that you say, like, it would have to be, you know, department or team time, because as we’re kind of approaching the end of the year right now, and we finish up our case study work this year, and we’re thinking of hub to PLCs next year, we’re, we have a survey going out, you know, next week that’s asking, kind of like, what to individually, questions about how they’re feeling individually, what they’d like to work towards, but also, like, if you had to set up goal for your department, what would it be? So, so we can start to kind of make those, see if there’s common goals that are already in people’s minds. I love that. That’s

Chrissy Beltran  22:55

a great question. And is there any, are there any other challenges you wanted to share about

Allie Freeburg  23:00

the Okay, so the last one, I’ll say coming off. But as you know, coaching involves modeling lessons, right? So modeling lessons or strategies in high school can be tricky. I think because of the age of the students, they’re really aware of who their lead teacher is. And I never want to undermine the teacher or take away their power, right? And for teachers, your curriculum, high school teachers, especially content specialists, their curriculum is packed. You know, it’s hard for them to find the space to allow me to come in and and model a lesson that they don’t know. But you know, is it going to go really well, they’re gonna go poorly. It’s also not my space or it’s their space. So to overcome this, I found that micro modeling and co teaching is really the most successful method to still get that modeling in. But maybe it’s not an entire lesson there. It’s not even 10 minutes, right? It’s just a couple minutes. Or it’s just those quick, you know, kind of one teach one assist model, but you plan for it, those quick interject, interjections or accommodations that you’re providing in the moment. And I mean our teachers too, throughout the years, I’ve built relationships, and they’re great about allowing me to come in. And most of the kids know me, being a small school now they know me, so that helps, but the teachers will always say, Mrs. Freeberg is here to help us today, and now, now it’s good. But at first I was like, oh my goodness, how am I going to model with you know, going into a classroom that’s not mine.

Chrissy Beltran  24:41

Yeah, modeling is stressful in the best of circumstances, but I agree that there are some special challenges there, including the content. If you’re right content at that level, it’s like, okay, how am I going to model a lesson in this classroom that I have never taught? You know, calculus, right? So, yeah, I love that idea. Can you give some examples? Some things that you would you would focus on for micro modeling, sure.

Allie Freeburg  25:04

So micro modeling across the content areas. I mean, the big one is, is management techniques, or just techniques to gather a class back right when you’re doing some really great station work and it’s time to transition. How do you model catch and release, catching the class back and giving those clear directions to get them to the next, the next step. But even instructionally, I’m thinking of, for example, an English teacher and I, you know, we’re co planning or looking over a lesson where students were reading some poetry and they were doing like a three read protocol, where they were first just listening, and then they had to read it silently as themselves, and then a third read, and the teacher was just, she’d never done that protocol before, and so I just quickly micro modeled those directions for her. Okay,

Chrissy Beltran  25:57

yeah, I think that the little direction how to introduce assignments or tap those are really good candidates for micro modeling, because sometimes the directions that we give, or the new like, we don’t have a firm understanding of what it is that we’re wanting kids to do, because we’re not really grateful with it. And so then if somebody else can show this is what it looks like, then you could say, oh, okay, it’s like having a vision for something. It’s completely different than imagining it. So I love that. That’s a really great strategy for for supporting teachers in those small little pieces that isn’t overwhelming to them and isn’t weird for the kids, right? Yeah, that’s great. You mentioned like your principal is very supportive. So could you share a little bit about how you leverage this relationship to really support the coaching work that you do with teachers?

Allie Freeburg  26:40

Yeah, of course. So I was lucky enough to have worked with my principal when I was a teacher, and so when the role became available, the coaching role, one reason I was competent in applying for it was because of all the respect that I have for her. I think what helps is we share a very similar vision of what both teachers need and what students need. So it makes our planning, you know, naturally cohesive, but specifically so she supports me by protecting my role. I think we often hear coaches get pulled into subbing scenarios or duties, many duties, or just pulled in different ways that might not prioritize coaching. And she has always been really adamant that I’m not a building sub. I my role is purely coaching, right and PD, and so she makes sure that I have the space to do that, to do that work, and then also the systems and structures that she’s put in place for our school. So our school, our school has a pretty unique schedule, where our students have a later start. They start at 850 and what this does, it allows for structured meetings or planning in the morning to happen. So that’s where we can have our PLCs. We can have our department meetings, we can have our team meetings. I can meet with that instructional leadership council that I referenced, and then also just give us some flex time in the morning to planning. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  28:17

I like so later start for kids, yeah. Like it’s so important for them,

Allie Freeburg  28:21

yeah. And she so she really values that time. She values professional learning. And so our schedule did. It wasn’t always that start, and so she really fought to have that in our schedule, because we were running into the issue with our smallish school is we couldn’t find common time in the day for all departments teachers to have, you know, third period off,

Chrissy Beltran  28:47

yeah, yeah, that’s a common High School Challenge. The late start is a great way to address it, and I think that, but it’s also really beneficial to kids, because we know Studies show that especially high school students need to sleep less late morning, yeah, and maybe they would be doing a little better if they were not exhausted. I mean,

29:05

I know code. We have had that in high school. Oh yes,

Chrissy Beltran  29:08

that would have been great. I was whenever I moved to El Paso in high school, their band practice was in the morning, so I had to be at school even earlier. School Day started, and I’m not an early person morning.

29:19

I’m still not a morning person,

Chrissy Beltran  29:22

exactly. So that would have been nice a late start. I would love to hear this is the main question that I get around like high school specifically, is, how are you making positive change happen at your school? Because I think that people feel like they have a lot of brick walls when it comes to working with teachers and making change happen. And I mean, it happens at all levels, but in high school, it’s a little different, because teachers, I think, have been used to doing their own thing for a really long time, and they can be very good at content, but maybe not so much instruction. And so those are kind of like the needs that we see at that level, people who are very knowledgeable in their. Field, but not as much in how to get other people to be knowledgeable. And, yeah, so how do you make positive change happen? Like, what do you how do you go about framing your work in that way?

Allie Freeburg  30:11

Yeah, so I think a couple things. I mean, I’m trying to think where to start. So I think what we do a really nice job of is, and when I say, we like our leadership team as we have our larger school wide goals, but we know how to tailor coaching and our professional learning to what individual teachers need. So we have the systems in place that allow many different avenues that allow for coaching. And so I think I mentioned before, we’ve had our PD or PLCs based on experience in the past. But what we always do is we always have teachers who are new to our school or new to teaching in general, or even switch content areas. So, you know, a teacher used to teach US history. Now they’re going to global nine. They would fall into this category where they’re in a separate PD with me, with just a new teacher. PD, so that we can really dive into what they need individually, whether it be curriculum, and that’s kind of usually the case for someone switching content areas or just strategies when you’re entering a classroom for the first time, and then you know, in that same vein, the teachers who have more experience and are experts in their content, they’re still in their own LLC pushing to improve their instruction right through getting more students like you said to to understand that content that they’re so so well versed in. So I mean, PLC, PLCs in general, is something that we worked on over time, and I think that have improved over time. And I think having the instructional leadership team that is composed of teachers who help me plan it and facilitate them makes a big difference, because they’re the ones who are really in it, right? They’re the teachers who are in class in their own classrooms every day. So their feedback is invaluable when you know something that we’re trying to push out doesn’t really go as planned. That we can really be reflective as a group as to why that might have happened and what solutions we can put in place moving forward. And I think teachers recognize that, and they see that like we’re not trying to put things in place that don’t feel good to them or don’t make sense to them, and we’re we’re willing to shift and change to meet their needs and of where they’re at, or based on where they’re at. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  32:47

I love the first thing you mentioned about the new teachers having a special. PD, I really love that because, I mean, really they need onboarding, and what usually happens that they get, maybe sometimes they’ll get, like, a district level or whatever, introduction to the bigger picture, but not to the school. And I feel like whenever we neglect that, we are fighting that battle all year long. You know,

Allie Freeburg  33:12

we actually keep them in this cycle for three years, one to three because, I mean, the first year, you’re you’re you’re learning the school you’re just learning, you’re just getting your feet wet, you’re and then the second year you’re a little more comfortable, right? And then the third year is where we can see those bigger changes start to happen.

Chrissy Beltran  33:30

Yeah, I like that. And that’s like, you know, three years is usually kind of the when they’re considered new teachers, you know, like, kind of an introductory time frame. I also like, oh, the second thing that you said, and I’ve forgotten what it was you were talking about, oh, the team, the instructional team. Yes, leadership team. Is

Speaker 2  33:46

that right? Yeah, we, I LLC, we call it, okay. How did you go about forming that?

Allie Freeburg  33:51

So we, we, we have, like, we have a few shared leadership roles. And so my principal created a document that outlines what each role does within the school, what their responsibilities are and what the prerequisites are. So all of our ILC members have to be, you know, above year three, year three or year four, plus teachers. And be willing, you know, want to step into that kind of professional learning facilitating role. So they have to be, you know, comfortable leading meetings, right, and follow, providing feedback, but also receiving feedback and helping to inform where we go with that. So we do that basically through we send out that that document, and then we just ask people, you know, if you’re interested, email us or come see us. I think we’ve done we’ve surveyed in the past, but now we’ve had the similar people in the similar, similar roles, for long enough that we can just have individual conversations and. I’ve, I’ve recruited like, you know, we were, I tried to keep it, try to have like, one person per content area, like a math person, a science person, in one person at least per in this LLC. So, you know, one year we were short social studies, this year was retiring, and I was like, oh, we need another social studies person. And so I went to the teacher who I thought would be a great fit, because I and he is, he’s, he’s excellent. He accepted it, but I think he was, he might not have stepped into it on his own, but after that conversation, he’s like, okay, and he’s, it’s great.

Chrissy Beltran  35:35

I like that. Yeah, I think we have the opportunity in our position to sort of lift people up and be like, this is I do really think that you could do this. I think it would be great that they might not see in themselves, they might not even consider doing that kind of work if they’re not given that opportunity and like that we can’t if we don’t show them that we believe they can do it, they might not think about it. Yeah. So thank you so much for everything that you shared. I loved it. I really liked the way that you are running your PLC meetings, and I hope that they are successful for you this year as you wrap up your case studies. Thank you. How can people go about learning more from you? If they are interested?

Allie Freeburg  36:13

Yep, so I’m on LinkedIn, so you can search me there, or I’ll share my email with you as well. I mean, I don’t have a website or anything too fancy, but, yeah, those are the two ways that I would say to get in contact with

Chrissy Beltran  36:27

me. Awesome. Okay, I can put the email in the show note if people are checking out there. Okay, great. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here, Allie. Thank you for having me. The thing I love about this series that I try to do every summer. You know, talking to special coaches, coaches with different roles the day in the life is hearing how different coaching role and schools look everywhere you go, because I could visit one school and the coaches role will look one way, and I can visit a school two miles away, and it’s going to look different. And so I’m so thankful to Allie for sharing her experience with us and how she’s grown this coaching role over time, how they have really supported their teachers in learning and and becoming sort of like direction they they choose some of the direction and their own learning. I love that. So I’m so thankful that Allie came to speak with us today, and I hope that you loved it too. Next week, we are continuing our Day in the Life series with a principal who still does a lot of coaching, and this is a principal who moved up from an instructional coaching role into the principalship, and they are finding themselves doing a lot of coaching still, and they’re trying to they’re kind of talking a little bit about how the coaching support has shifted some of The challenges that have happened around confidentiality and and evaluation and how school leaders, including administration, can really serve as instructional leaders and coaches for their teachers, because I’m sure there are plenty of instructional leaders listening who are not simply coaches like that is not the way your role is defined, but you do so much coaching work, so I cannot wait to share that episode with you next week, and until then. Happy coaching. Now that you’ve got so much to think about, head over to buzzing with Miss b.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIBee and check out the podcast show notes. Happy coaching!