How to Introduce Yourself as an Instructional Coach, ep. 242

How to Introduce Yourself as an Instructional Coach, ep. 242, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

Are you ready for some back to school coaching fun and to win some great prizes, play back to school bingo with Miss B this year in my Facebook group, instructional coaching with Miss B, I’m hosting a fun game that will set you up for your first day of school and give you the chance to win. Just head to a Facebook and search for the group instructional coaching with Miss B. Once you’re in, check out the pinned post at the top of the page to join BTS bingo, print out your board, complete the tasks and turn it in. It’s that easy to play, and I can’t wait to share the prizes with you. Let’s make back to school this year a little more fun. 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. And welcome to episode 242, of instructional coaching with Miss B today, we are talking about how to introduce yourself as an instructional coach. This is part of my series called instructional coaching startup, and it’s about your coaching identity, specifically, because we really want to make sure that we have a good handle on who we are before we go to introduce ourselves to teachers, or else we’re going to be fumbling for our work. If you are a new coach, if you are a coach with a few years of experience, or a coach who just wants a do over of last year and you really want to get yourself set up for success this year, my course is the right thing for you. It is at buzzing movements b.com startup, and it is currently open if you’re listening to this in real time, so you can get all the materials and guidance that you need to introduce yourself as a coach and to do so much more in the first 20 days of school, and really set yourself up for success. That’s at buzzing with Miss b.com/startup so when I first started coaching, I had no idea how to introduce myself as an instructional coach, and this is back in the olden days when people weren’t talking about this online, and Canva was like not a thing. So the first day of PD at my new school, I sat with the new math and science coach, and at the beginning of our PD, our principal took a few minutes my new principal, I’d never worked with her before, to share about the changes the school had undergone, and there were many, and she introduced us as the new coaches, and she called us the experts. At the time, I didn’t realize how that one word would set me up for a very different kind of relationship early on with teacher, the word expert implies a few things to teachers, including the worst thing, which is, I know better than you, so you should do what I say. I had teachers asking me, you know, well, you’re the expert, so what should I do? Kind of in one of those like challenging ways, I had teachers who just assumed, you know, that I was going to boss them around, and that teacher coach relationship is tenuous at best. In the beginning, no matter what, most teachers either don’t want us coach or they’re just kind of ambivalent about the whole thing, and they don’t really care to work with you at all. Either way, they’re not like, excited about you. They’re just like, Okay, your coach. Lovely. How is that going to affect me? Because it may not affect them at all. How many schools have a coach who hardly ever works with teachers. So the introduction to you as a coach can either start building a bridge to a relationship that has credibility and empathy, or it can start tearing down the space between you in this episode, because I wanted to get lots of different ideas, I figured crowdsourcing was the best way to go about this topic. I’ve invited several different coaches to share about how they introduce themselves to teachers. So you’re gonna hear from a math coach, a middle school coach and more. And to get us started, I’m gonna share about one of my favorite ways to introduce yourself as an instructional coach, and that is coffee with a coach, or cookies with a coach or cupcakes with a coach. This is a fun way to sit down and communicate with your teachers, but I would recommend that you do this with any of your teachers, whether you’re new to your role or not. You can do this even if you’ve been a coach for eight years at the same school. What you’re doing is you’re getting everything out in black and white, and you’re making sure that everybody knows what your role is, how you’re there to support them, and that you are there to support them in goals that they have as well. So this is how it can work. Okay, basically, you provide some tasty treats and you invite teachers to come. Now, there are different ways to structure that, obviously, but I do recommend that you make sure that you have a time frame, either identified for each teacher to come by, or if you have to do it, maybe before or after school that you to, you do take a few minutes with each teacher and chat with them. Some people will put teachers on a schedule. Some people will just say, come by to your conference during your conference time, and they’ll be set up in their office all day long. There’s a lot of different ways to make it work depending on your school structure, but the basic idea is, you’ve. Got a fun set up with treats, coffee, cupcakes, cubbies, cupcakes, cookies, whatever. And then you invite your teachers to come and get to know you as a coach, and you get to know them. So it really sets up a dialog with your teachers, and you can have a purposeful and fun interaction that can help you establish your coaching relationship. So what you’re trying to do is introduce yourself as a person, and there’s going to be more details about what you can do to do that throughout this episode, also to introduce your your coaching menu of support. And I do recommend you have a coaching menu. I have some templates. Actually, you can grab them at that well, a free template for you if you want to grab a freebie, because those are always fun. If you go to buzzing with Miss me.com/coaching menu, you can actually grab a free coaching menu guide and template right there to use if you are creating your own coaching menu for your own copy with a coach. You can also use coaching menu menu for other things, and I have shared about that in episode 117 if you want to go back and listen to that one, to that one and really learn about all the different ways that you can use your coaching menu. But basically, you’re choosing supports that you can plan to offer this year, and you’re putting them on your menu and saying, This is what I’m here to do. These are the ways that I can support you in the classroom. Some teachers have never seen it filled out before. I know I never did. I never knew what my coach could do to support me. So to see it in black and white, it’s kind of nice. This is also a good opportunity for you to be a real person and share about who you are as a person, because teachers build relationships with people, not just roles, right? It’s a special kind of relationship, because it’s a coaching relationship. However, they need to know the coach of the person. You also want to listen and ask questions for you to get to know the teacher, because they are also a person. And you want to remember that they are whole person outside of a school, just like you are with a whole life. You want to build bridges through commonalities. So it’s really helpful to listen take notes about little things that they say after they left. You can write down a few thoughts. For example, if they say they love gardening. I had a teacher once who told me that her distressing habit was pulling weeds in her front yard. And think about that all the time, and it just was so unique and different that I thought, oh, that’s something interesting. That tells me something about this person. So then you can actually make a little note about what you want to kind of follow up on with this person. You can ask them about their goals for the school year and record what they say, so that you can follow up with them in a week or two, or even sooner, and just kind of pop in say, Hey, I know you were working towards this, and I’d love to talk about what I can do to support you in that area. You’re unlikely to set up really focused coaching work from this first meeting, although there are some people who are going to walk in and say, walk in and say, Look, this is what I want from you, and you might be able to get the ball rolling immediately. With those people, there are some very efficacious teachers who are also very interested in support and know what they want, but most teachers don’t. You’re just going to make some notes, and then you can follow up on those notes the first couple of weeks. So one thing you can do is create a schedule to where you have each teacher assigned a time slot and you can request them to come by. Now your principal is going to kind of determine whether you can request or whether you are, you know, saying this is your time slot. You’re coming by. That that really is going to depend on your school structure. You can also say, come by during your conference period. I will be here all day, and I have treats for you. I would love to just get to know you really quickly, you know, maybe five, seven minutes. You can also just do before school or after school, and everybody can come by if they’re able. You could do that for several days. So if you say, Okay, I’m going to meet with these grades or these departments on this day after school, come by. I’m going

Chrissy Beltran  08:36

to meet with these grades or these departments on that day after school, come on by. Those are different ways that you can structure it. I know one person who didn’t set up in their office because they felt like that was not going to be centrally located enough, and they wanted to catch people at a good time, so they set up in the faculty lounge, and that way, whenever people came in for lunchtime, they could catch them and, you know, just have a little conversation with them and give them some treats at lunchtime. You could also do it early in the morning, because they all schools have those early birds. How it’s never an early bird. I am still not an early bird, and I listened to a brain researcher, scientist when one time, named Dr Medina, who said that you’re just born that like by the time you’re two or three, you can already tell if you’re an early riser or a late I don’t know what those are. I guess it’s a late riser, a late Stayer upper, which is what I am. So he said that you’re just your brain is just wired that way. People who wake up early naturally. I don’t understand it. I think it’s a miracle, and you are so blessed. And I do not have that gift. I have to force myself to wake up early. And you know, I worked at an elementary school for 14 years where I had to be there at 730 and seven o’clock on Mondays for the leadership meeting. How dare you so. Anyway, some people are those magical early risers that get to school way early, and that’s how they start their day, for some reason, and they feel prepared that way. Catch a catch a. In the morning, think about your people and do what you can to catch your people at a time that it’s good for them, and make your notes and follow up. That’s how you really use the coffee with a coach. So now we’re going to hear from our guests about how they introduce themselves to teachers, and you’re gonna hear a few different methods. I cannot wait to listen in on the things that they share with you, and I know you’re going to get some really good ideas.

Mona Lehl  10:24

Hey, I’m Mona of Mona math, and I am a math coach and consultant for grades K through eight here in Chicago, Illinois and virtually across the country, when I am introducing myself to a new staff at the beginning of the year, one of my favorite things and most important things that I do is I make myself useful. So what I do is I get into their classrooms and I start introducing myself to the kids, to them, and just being there to support them. Now at first that might seem really intimidating, like, what is this adult doing in my classroom? But I like to position myself as a teacher just being out of the classroom. Now for a few years, I want to stay close to kids and to teaching, and so I also want that to come through to the people I coach. I want them to see me as an authority, but I also want them to see me as someone who gets it. So I get down on the floor and I talk to kids in turn, and talks. I listen in to what they’re saying when they’re talking in their groups. And if I can, as soon as I can, I get the teacher to agree to let me model. When I can model a lesson, it shows the teacher that I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty, and I’m not perfect, but I’m here to help you make math amazing, and hopefully that model lesson can show the teacher something that is new and different and exciting. A lot of times in math, my work is not strategies and, you know, lesson planning, it’s really just showing Teachers and Students and Families and leaders what’s possible in math. So when I can get in right away at the beginning of the year and start modeling lessons in as many classrooms as possible, it starts to show everyone what’s possible in math, that we can get every kid engaged in deep, meaningful math discussions and critical thinking. So yeah, I think nothing speaks better to introducing myself to a staff than showing them that I can right there with you. I’m in the work with you. So yeah, that’s that.

Vanessa Ellis 12:38

Hello, everyone. My name is Vanessa Ellis. I was a middle grade social studies teacher for 12 years, the 2024 Georgia Teacher of the Year, runner up. And am currently a school based instructional coach for all content areas, grades six through eight in Muscogee County, Georgia. I am honored to be featured on this podcast, because as a second year coach, it has been a saving grace for me, just as I’m sure it’s been for many buzzing with Miss B listeners, I am going to briefly explain how I introduce myself and my role to teachers at the start of the school year. The first thing I do is determine how I want to do this. There are a number of ways you can introduce yourself, but I decided to create a brochure and have a block of time during pre planning to go over it face to face with teachers. I created my brochure from scratch in PowerPoint, but the inspiration for the design came from at classroom creations on Instagram. She’s actually a first grade teacher, not a coach. But I gravitated towards her template because it was simple, cute and easily replicable. I will provide a copy of my brochure for Chrissy to put in the show notes. Next, I had to determine what information I wanted to include. The cover simply says, meet your instructional coach with the school year, an image of our mascot and a headshot of myself. The inside far left panel includes some basic professional information about me, how long I’ve been in education, a few accolades and how long I’ve been at my current school. Instead of writing a biographical paragraph, I chose to do bullet points with emojis, so it would be a quick read and esthetically pleasing. I also included a brief definition of what an instructional coach is. I used Jim Knight’s language about partnership, and I also emphasized a student centered approach to coaching. So here’s how I defined instructional coach. An instructional coach partners with teachers to improve teaching and learning in order to increase student achievement. It was important that I include. To this definition, because not everyone knows what an instructional coach does, and I wanted to establish myself as an ally, as a resource, and someone who is concerned with improving student achievement, not just being a nice, friendly face or a helper in the building. The middle panel includes a list of coaching services, things I do for teachers. So this list includes lesson plan, feedback, Resource Locator, in which I help search for ideas or resources for an upcoming lesson content creator, where I would have teachers share their vision with me and create their requested resources. I would help to arrange peer to peer observations. I would conduct classroom visits and kind of have a focused observation based on what the teacher wanted me to look for model strategies and also technology support. So although I’m happy to help teachers in this capacity, the real magic is in the work we do together. So the far right panel is a list of coaching services that are collaborative with the teacher. This list includes being a sounding board and a listening ear to discuss ideas, strategies and solutions with the teacher, diving into data and analyzing that data and coming up with next steps, instructionally, reviewing student, work, co teaching, facilitating, coaching cycles, debriefing with teachers and reflecting over how things are going and planning those next steps, and then also providing Georgia leads support. So in the state of Georgia, Georgia leads is our evaluation system, and I wanted to offer a way to help prepare teachers for their annual administrative observation. So as an instructional coach, I know what administrators are looking for, and I just wanted to take some of the burden and the stress out of those evaluations by giving them some coaching in that area on the back of the brochure on the far left panel, I included testimonials of colleagues I worked closely with the year before, I intentionally reached out to friendlies, as Chrissy calls them, and asked them to send me a blurb describing our work together and or the Support I provided. I was sure to include a variety of teaching perspectives, even non core classes, so all teachers could see the benefits of partnering with me, I included little emojis to denote each content area, and it’s really cute, and it really makes it pop. The back center panel is contact information, again, using icons to distinguish my email address, my socials and phone number. Lastly, I included incentives for utilizing my coaching services. I only offer two things, coaching cash that teachers can redeem for small prizes and favors like duty free lunch or acute office supply. The second incentive is simply professional growth. Ultimately, we want teachers to work with us, because they see the value in improving their practice, as well as student outcomes. Once my brochure was completed, I printed copies to place in teachers back to school packets in their mailboxes, and additional copies were placed in my PLC room. I also requested a block of time to speak in front of the faculty and staff to verbally introduce myself and my role at the very beginning of the school year, I created a PowerPoint that included pictures of my family and a detailed breakdown of what I do at my school. The goal is to let teachers see my personality, to humanize myself and to distinguish myself from our administrators. Because, again, I am an instructional coach. I am not the boss. I am not a principal or an assistant principal, and I wanted to remind teachers that my role here is to support the educators in the building so that we can improve student outcomes. Hopefully, you were able to take something away from my little segment. I will include my contact information so you can reach out to me directly with any questions that you may have. Have a great day of coaching. Everyone.

Amy Rudd  19:58

Hello, everyone. My. Name is Amy Rudd, and I’m currently an instructional coach at two buildings in Akron, Ohio. I have a k5 building and a six, eight building. I’m so happy to be with you today. Thanks to Chrissy for inviting me to participate in this opportunity. So let’s get into it. How do coaches introduce themselves and their role at the beginning of the school year? I’m going to outline several ideas that you might find useful in doing just that for the school year. First of all, I think it’s important that you consider your Why. Why are you here? How will you help these teachers? Well, one of my favorite ways to connect with teachers is through the use of children’s literature. So I usually try to find a picture book that resonates with me at that time. For example, last year, I used the book I am one by Susan verde. It helps me to focus, think and relate as I introduce myself to teachers, then I move on to meeting with the school principal. I try to connect with him or her about the role of an instructional coach. I have worked to refine this message, which was originally inspired by Joellen Killian and the 10 roles of an instructional coach, with the help of another fellow coach leader, Allison Peterson, I narrowed these 10 roles down to six, and then I collaborated with my principals, and I determined how I can share these expectations with teachers. In the past, I’ve been given time at the opening day staff meeting. You can also use PLCs or professional learning community meetings. Another idea is you can create coffee cookies and conversation appointments with individual teachers during their planning period. So I found this process easier if you’re not brand new to a building or a district, but if you are new, you just might need to provide more clarity and connection with the building principles to get this timing set up right. Then I move on to sharing the core practices of what an instructional coach does, for example, our district follows the student centered coaching model by Diane Sweeney. We use that model to guide our work and coaching cycles and base our focus on student data. We look at the learning goals together based on what the state standards are going to require, and then we collaboratively navigate our coaching work based around the data. I feel that like when you support teachers through the lens of data, it removes the personal piece of that work and then allows more of the focus to be exactly on what scholars need, and then they are the center of your work.

Amy Rudd  23:30

The next thing that I like to do is I create an activity to experiencing, to experience just what coaching might be like. So I partnered with my principal to ask for time at the opening day staff meeting and do this coaching partnership activity. I work with my principal, and I pose questions to her as if she was a teacher, and then we take turns. I ask the question she answers, and then she asks the questions. I answer. Next, we have the teachers do the same activity, and they tried it out, and I teach them that this is really what coaching is like. I’m just here to ask you the questions, and then we focus on what you want to do to support your scholars. Then, as a follow up, I send a survey out to the teachers asking them the same questions, only answer them personally, and then after they respond, I take time to follow up with each teacher about what they put in the survey and then make appointments with them to get started in coaching cycle work, I use the Google tools, the Google Form, the Google Calendar, to create the appointments and just make sure. That you’re always where you say you’re going to be, and really support teachers in their needs. Some other ways that I’ve done building and connecting with teachers is offering to come into their classroom and meet the kids and do read alouds, especially at the beginning of the year, I have also, in the past, sent welcome letters to the staff, just introducing myself and letting them know a little bit about me, and then asking them questions and really working to build relationships with them. Every chance you can get to get your name in front of them is just another way to get your foot in the door and build those connections. In the past, I’ve also created an app where it’s a published Google presentation that they can save as a bookmark right on their phone, and it acts in the role of an app. So I tried that last year, and it was really helpful to have that whenever teachers needed to get in touch with me quickly. Another thing that I’ve done in the past is I published my learning in the Lou newsletters. And this has been really fun. I post these newsletters and all the staff restrooms so the teachers can read them when they’re in there at their leisure. It was really helpful. Like, I try to do these monthly and they would have a social emotional flair to them. Or also, just when I listen to teachers and I hear them talking about certain things, I try to put inspirational articles or motivational articles that will support them in things that they’re talking about. It’s just been a great way to stay connected with the teachers. I hope you enjoyed hearing these ideas that I’ve shared with you today, and please let me know if you have any questions or other ideas that you’d like to chat about Cheers to a great year. Bye. Everyone.

Chrissy Beltran  27:26

Alright, Coach, that was a lot of good stuff. I know there was a lot of information in there, and some of the coaches went really in depth to share with you about exactly what they did. And I love that they did such a beautiful job. And I thank them for sharing with us and the greater coach community. Now I want to remind you that my course is still open. The instructional coaching startup course can walk you through all these things and so much more to help you prepare yourself for the in the first 20 days of school next week, we’re continuing our startup series by talking about time management for instructional coaches. So it’s going to teach you how to start with your goals and then build your time out across the year based on those goals, because so many times we’re trying to figure out what to do with our time, and we have too many things to squeeze in, and we’re missing the point of our work. So this is going to help you stay focused with time management. It’s what I do, it’s what I do in all the work that I do, and I really believe it’ll support you, and until then, happy coaching the

Chrissy Beltran  28:24

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!