Building Your Coaching Program, Ep. 152 Instructional Coaching with Ms. B

Building Your Coaching Program, Ep. 152 Buzzing with Ms. B: The Coaching Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

Hey, Coach, when you think about the beginning of the school year, how do you feel unsure to helpful, overwhelmed, you’re not alone. Since the dawn of time, instructional coaches have been left to figure things out on their own, resulting in frustration and failure. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, let’s start the year with a roadmap that tells you exactly what to do each day for the exponentially important first 20 days of school. The things you do that first month of school will make or break your coaching year. Let’s do the right things together. Head to buzzing with mfi.com/startup to join the waitlist for my instructional coaching startup course. The course opens in mid July, but if you join the waitlist, you’ll receive a coupon code for 15% off when the course opens up. I can’t wait to help you start strong and coach better this year. My favorite summer coaching event is just around the corner and I want to see you there. This is the fifth year of the simply coaching summit, the first virtual conference for coaches, and I’ve been a part of it every single year. This online conference for instructional coaches is on July 10 11th, and 12th. And it’ll give you everything you need to change your school one step at a time. The summit is three days of keynotes, live workshops and pre recorded session, I’m giving a workshop about what coaches should do the first couple of weeks of school focusing on building your coaching menu from start to finish. But there’s so much more to this summit that you have to see for yourself, head to buzzing with buzzfeed.com/summit to save your spot. The best part is that you have six months to watch the videos. So if your summer plans didn’t include some cozy PD at home on the couch, you can watch them when you’re back at school. Check out busy with Miss b.com slash summit and I will see you soon. You’re listening to buzzing with Miss B, the coaching podcast where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach. And every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an instructional coach, resource creator and coffee enthusiast, and I’m your host, stay tuned for practical tips and honest coaching talk that will help you coach with confidence.

Chrissy Beltran  02:13

Hey, coach, and welcome to Episode 152, building your coaching program. Today we are going to continue our focus on establishing your coaching program, whether you’re a new coach or a returning coach, with this episode about how you can think about the kinds of work that you’re going to do and how you’re going to show up for your teachers. When you’re starting out as a new coach, or when you’re reflecting on your previous coaching work and you want to try something different, it’s really helpful to take a step back. And so what I want you to do is, before we get into anything else, I want you to do a little bit of writing about your coaching program and what you envision it to be, I want you first to think about who do you want to be as a coach. So I’m gonna give you some sentence starters. And I know this is the podcast, you may not be sitting somewhere that you could write. But even if you have a little note app open on your phone, or if you can come back to this later on, these are the things that I want you to think about. I want to be a coach who blank, I want to do this by blank and blank, I believe that the coach teacher relationship should be defined by blank, the majority of my time should be spent blank. And at the end of the school year, I want to look back and say blank, let’s do just a few sentence starters, to kind of get your head in the right place for building your coaching program. Now the first thing that I’m going to talk you through today is looking at your school’s data to make sure that you have an idea of what’s going on in your school. And the challenging thing is that data, of course, doesn’t paint the whole picture. But it can give us a good idea of what’s happening as far as the way kids are responding to certain stimuli, right. So there are several different kinds of data that you can look at. And there are different ways that we can look at this data. Okay, so what you want to do is, is record data that you have from your school, and then break it down by content area, standard test grade level, or teacher. And if you create your table, you can create these tables in Google Sheets, or you can actually use some forms that I have in the first 20 days code of coaching resource that you can grab in my TPT store. You can look across your data and make some observations on each form in order to solidify your thinking about that data. It can be helpful as well. Whenever you plan your conversation with your administrator that you really do need to have early on in the year. It can be helpful for you to bring those forms and that collection of data and your observations with you to your dialogue with the administration in order to support and justify the areas that you have chosen to focus See your work on because the benefit of looking at data is it can give you an idea of where you want to move as a coach and what kinds of support your teachers need in the near future and over the long term. And it really helps you set up how am I going to approach professional learning on my campus. So areas of strength that you see happening in specific classrooms can be used to help you choose a model classroom, or to have colleagues model lessons that can assist other teachers. So one of the great ways that I like to spend my coaching time is to get teachers into other teachers classrooms, and to make sure that they have opportunities to see each other in action, or at least on video. So that’s a really great way to use the areas of strength that you’ve seen. areas of strength in certain classrooms or grade levels can help you understand, you know, the the actual information that you’re getting from your data, because you’ll know that what is working, you’ll know what is being successful in those classrooms. And it can help you God and kind of guide you in figuring out where you want to spend your time and energy in your coaching work, because you’ll know that certain things are working well in certain places. So maybe we just need to do more of that in other grades or other classrooms. areas of strength and a specific standard can be helpful, because it will help you discern which standards teachers are most comfortable with. And those can be leveraged. If you just have success in one area. Maybe you could take what they’re good out there and apply it to an area that they’re struggling in areas of growth can help you figure out some really important things to they can help you figure out what PD is needed for your teachers. What common language or vocabulary teachers may need to develop for themselves so that they can support it in students, what changes are required in your programs or your school’s area of focus, because we do have a voice often in setting what our priorities are going to be for that year. And so if you can see serious gaps in specific areas, you may be able to bring in some resources or professional development around those areas. It can help you identify goals for coaching and school growth, because we do want to talk in a few minutes about how to set goals based on what you’re observing. It can help you identify interventions needed for students and interventions needed for teachers, because some of our teachers do need some really, you know, focused, precise support in very specific areas. And they may not even realize what those areas are until they look at the data.

Chrissy Beltran  07:23

I also recommend that you look at your data, but that you also get input from teachers, you will get so much more support if you get feedback from teachers on the areas that they feel comfortable with the areas that they feel like they want to grow in, and how they want support from a coach to look. So I definitely recommend either sending out a survey, or even just talking to teachers is a good place to start. But a survey is nice because everybody can send you their responses. And that can be part of the data that you use. As you’re trying to build your coaching program. You can use a resource that I have in my TPT store, which is teacher feedback forms, feedback forms and surveys. And that’s easy to find. If you go to teachers pay teacher’s dot com you search for either Chrissy Beltran, or buzzing with Mrs. B, and then look for teacher feedback. And that will pop up, I think that it’s really helpful to start planning around, not only what the numbers say, but what the teachers say. And you’re more likely to get by in there, because it’s going to come from teachers, it’s in terms of what it is that they need. You may even have some meetings where you look at data with teachers. But if this is all being done, like kind of very, very early in the school year, it might not be time for that yet, you might not have gotten your PLCs really working together a lot yet. So if you’re not there yet, that’s okay. You start with a data and get input from individual teachers. Once you have that information, you can use it to set some goals. And this is important because you need to know where you’re headed and what it is that you want to do with your coaching time. It’s important to make sure that you have probably around three goals, maybe four for your coaching work, and you want them written down somewhere that you can see them on a regular basis. Because this helps you focus your work. If you are kind of loading from day to day scheduling things that you know in random ways, it can be really hard to know if you’re actually having an impact. And if teachers are getting something out of the support you’re providing, because you’re playing Whack a Mole. Instead, if we have some coaching goals, and we can look at our tasks for the day and make sure that we are somehow reaching those goals. We’re working towards those goals every week, and making sure we’re moving in that direction. So I recommend writing them down, keeping them visible. If you can put them inside of the cover of your little notebook. You can put them as a screensaver, or as the background of your desktop or your iPad. You just want them in a visible place. And I’m going to walk you through a little bit of how you can think about your goals and what kinds of questions could help you figure out what you want to focus on. I also recommend that you take these goals with you to your administrator dialogue to ensure they’re actually in alignment with your admins view of your work. For example, if you start saying that you want to start moving into technology integration, and they’re going, Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re still trying to figure out how to teach word study, then maybe technology integration isn’t a great goal for that time of year, you can come back to it another time. But in the meantime, we’re going to talk to our admin and say, Okay, this is what I was thinking based on data, I have this reason for choosing these goals. And then we can get their feedback to make sure that they have at least a vested interest in the goals that you’re working on. So that you know they will be supportive of those, and that you will be aligned with what their vision for your work is. And they actually have podcast episodes, about how to talk to your administration, I really recommend that you go back to those because so many times we just kind of assume that we’re on the same page, and we are absolutely not. And it’s a real problem, because it interferes with our ability to support our teachers. So if you want to go back and listen to episode 22, or 23, those are about defining your coaching role and sharing them with your teachers. And then in this season, earlier in the season, I shared about a lesson from my confident literacy coach course. And it was all about how to communicate with your administrator, specifically about these things. And that’s from Episode 138, communicating with school administrators from the course. So you can check that out if you’re looking for how you can structure that meeting with your administrators. For now, let’s look a little bit more about goals and how you can actually write them and what they should include. I believe that goals should be actionable and realistic. And so if you again, I have episodes out about smart goals, if that’s the direction that you want to go in, you absolutely can you do not have to. But that is something that a lot of people do to make sure that their goals are actionable, measurable, realistic, that’s Episode 24, SMART goal setting and how to structure your time, effectively. It’s a good episode, I think it’ll really walk you through that goal writing process, if you have something you need more guidance on. Basically, your goal should include the actions you will take in order to make that happen. Because I personally think like a goal of 90% of students will be successful on the reading assessment is not practical. It doesn’t say anything about what you’re actually going to do. When you’re looking at your calendar for the month. Are you looking at it going well, which of these tasks is helping 90% of my students be successful on the reading assessment, it’s too vague, it’s too broad. What we really want to do is say, Okay, let’s think about how we’re going to get our kids to be more successful in reading. And that may look like providing PLCs, and PD and data review specifically about certain components in reading, you know, focusing our coaching cycle work on integrating certain strategies during reading time, or implementing a new program. If we want our kids to actually be successful, we have to spell out how we’re going to accomplish those things. And those things are our goals, the things that we say, this is what we’re going to do with our time. Those are the goals that we can then use to make action plans every single month. So how do you decide what’s important enough for you to focus on that needs to become a goal? I’ve got a few questions that you can ask yourself after looking at your data, and getting your teacher feedback. So we’re going to take these three things together. To build our goals, we’re going to take our data that we looked at, we’re going to take the responses that our teachers provided to us and then we’re going to take our own thinking about those things and what we have seen. So the first question I want you to ask yourself is what is currently happening on my campus, you can use your survey data, or just observational data to get a sense of where you are, as well as actual numbers. How do I want to change teaching and learning this year? Semester, or month? What kinds of changes do you want to see that’ll help you think about, well, what do I want to focus my energy on? What is most essential for student success right now, sometimes, our goals are very big. And maybe those are three or five year plan goals. But you don’t have three years this year, you have a year. So let’s be practical and say okay, what’s essential for students to make a change? What absolutely must happen in order to support my students and help them be successful right now? What needs to be in place? And the last question that I want you to ask is, what is what’s the one thing can we change that would have the greatest impact on students in the long run? We know certain things are important, but some things are going to affect our students more than others. We want to spend our time on the really important stuff because your time is so very limited. Once you have an idea of what kinds of things you want to focus your time on this year, you can use those ideas to build a coaching menu. A coaching menu helps you define which supports you’re able to offer to teachers and it gives you a concrete tool for sharing your role and those supports with your teachers. It’s like a specific artifact that teachers can look at to say, Oh, this is what they’re doing. Okay, got it. And I’m actually giving a session for the simply coaching summit where I teach people, I’m gonna walk you through the process, it’s a workshop, about creating your own coaching manual, we’re gonna go step by step, and you’re going to build a menu, and I’m going to give you the download, it’s going to be editable, so that whenever you leave that session, you are ready to take that menu and use it with your teachers. Absolutely join that. Because it is going to be such a good practical session that you can immediately immediately apply to your coaching work like day one, you can walk in with this tool, and you’re gonna walk away ready, you know, and there’s, that’s priceless. So definitely check out the assembly coaching summit this year, because my workshop is going to help you create your coaching menu, that’s what you’re going to walk away with.

Chrissy Beltran  15:55

I am going to spell out a brief description of the process here so that if you are going to create on your own, you can kind of figure out exactly what what you do with these basic steps. Okay. But if you need more help join me at the summit. So first, what you’re going to want to do is look back at your goals that you just signed on for this year. And you want to keep in mind the data that you looked at and use to arrive at those goals. From there, you can think about how you can support teachers in making those things happen. So here’s an example. If you’re planning on supporting teachers, and using a gradual release model during math, instructional time, here are some things that could help. Of course, your supports don’t only need to focus on your very limited specific goals, teachers are going to need things outside of these goals. But it’s a really good place to start brainstorming for those goals and for how you can help teachers accomplish it. So we’re talking about helping teachers use a gradual release model during math instructional time. And these are some of the ways that you can do that, that could go on a menu, you could have learning PLCs. And they would be about a gradual release model. You could have a book or a video study about the gradual release model, you can make resource recommendations for resources that would be useful for each step of the process. So like, Okay, what could I use during the I do? Well, we’ll probably get a model with some manipulatives. What can you use during the week do let’s pull some of these problem solving situations from this resource, right? You can model lessons in classrooms. Using the gradual release model, you can co teach lessons using the gradual release model, you can co plan those lessons that you’re going to model and co teach. You can acquire resources for intervention because sometimes teachers don’t have the tools to do the new thing that we’re asking them to do. And they’re creating them from scratch. You can also have teachers observe other classrooms where the model is in place. Once you’ve brainstormed a list of supporting things that teachers could benefit from, as they are trying to do this thing, you’ll want to sort them into level the support to make sure that you have supports that are not very intimidating, such as like recommending resources. Having a maybe a book study is not super intimidating, because nobody’s coming into your classroom. And then you also want to have support that actually happened in the classroom and make maximum impact, like modeling and co teaching. Providing supports at different levels for teachers will ensure that there are access points for teachers to get your services, regardless of their comfort level. Because sometimes we just need an open door. And that open door could be Hey, I don’t have anything to use for tutoring. So we want to have resource recommendations on there. Because a teacher can approach you and say I know that you can recommend resource resources for me. What can I use tomorrow for tutoring to teach, you know regrouping.

Chrissy Beltran  18:47

If you realize that you’re missing supports at a certain level, like let’s say all of your supports are very low level, very not intimidating, but then there’s no way to move teachers up the ladder, you may want to add something to fill out your list. I do recommend that the coaching cycle is on your list. It’s got to be on your menu because it’s something that we offer to teachers. But it’s not the only thing that we offer to teachers. The coaching cycle is a piece of what we do. And you actually have a lot of different tools in your toolbox. You can go learn things together, you can observe a colleague together, you can brainstorm things together, you can plan together, you can have a PLC about a specific topic, you can watch a video, there are lots of things that we can do as coaches that if we only focus on coaching through the coaching cycle, we’re missing so many opportunities to help teachers at different levels. And so I think that whenever you’re building your coaching program, you really need to make sure that you are including different kinds of support, and not just kind of like nailing yourself down to lengthy coaching cycles that keep you from reaching teachers in different ways. Now, so far we’ve talked about going through and building your coaching program by kind of identifying who you want to be as a coach, looking at your data and identifying strengths and areas Use of growth, getting your input from teachers setting goals based on all of those things, and then building your menu to ensure that you are providing the support that you need. Now, you couldn’t have established all of this stuff. But if only you know about it, it’s not going to be very effective, right, we need to make sure that our teachers know what it is that we’re doing. And that we are, you know, approaching them with a deliberate plan for how we’re going to work with them, how we’re going to build relationships with teachers, how we are going to let them know about our coaching work. Now, I did talk a little bit about how earlier in this podcast back in season one, I in episodes, 23, and 24, I talked about defining your coaching role, and then sharing it with teachers, I absolutely recommend that you head to those and look at them, because sharing your role with teachers is going to be an essential piece of building your coaching program, you can’t coach without people to coach, right. So we need to make sure that we are establishing that clearly and that teachers know exactly what you’re doing. Whether you are sending out an email in conjunction with hopefully other things, introducing yourself whether your admin is introducing you because you’ve had a conversation and you’re on the same page, whether you are sharing your coaching menu directly with individual teachers or teams of teachers, during some sort of a team meeting, we need to make sure that they know exactly what’s what so that they can take advantage of the support that you provide. That clearly defined role is going to be the foundation for all of your coaching work. And without it, your work is going to be an uphill battle. And you’re going to feel very frustrated and ineffective. So we’ve got to nail it down towards the beginning, get admin approval on everything to ensure that we are on the same page and that they are going to be supportive of the work that we’re trying to do. As you are moving through this, you’re going to want to build relationships with your teachers, organically. But I really want to clarify something. One thing that I’ve heard a lot from coaches is, well, I have a teacher who’s really resistant, they’re not interested in working with me. Okay, that happens guys, all the time, you’re not alone. And so sometimes the advice is, well, you know, just don’t work with them just build the relationship and like, make copies for him and stuff for a really long time until they want to have you in your class like classroom. That’s not the reality of coaching for most people. I certainly was not just permitted to sit back and allow teachers who were maybe not super excited about having me around, do their own thing, and just not take advantage of any coaching services, it was not a realistic thing for me to do. And I don’t think it was best for kids. I do know that there’s a lot of research and gurus who say to do that as well who are like, don’t push because, you know, teachers should be able to decide. But the bottom line is, the reality is kids deserve, you know, growth in their teachers. And we are responsible for trying to make that happen. You cannot force someone to like you, and you cannot force someone to grow. But what we can do is get in there and put our feelings of stress and anxiety and fear aside and say, Okay, I’m here for the kids. And I’m not going to push in and tell the teacher what to do. But I am going to get in that room and say, Hey, let’s find a good way that we can work together. This is where your coaching menu comes in. If you know the kinds of support that you can provide, you can listen for a challenge that that teacher is having. And so if the teacher is complaining about kids for literally any reason, you can look at your menu and think I can do that I can meet with that teacher, and we can watch a video on a strategy that might help her in this area. So you could tell the teacher Hey, I would love to come by and work with you on that idea. I know it’s really frustrating. And at least having you know, two heads are better than one having two people in the classroom. Maybe we can figure something out on and if not, at least we’ll have a good time. Right. So how about I come by on Tuesday at nine o’clock. And listening? So listening for those complaints and getting your foot in the door? Sometimes we’ve just got to be brave, and we got to do it. Because is it lovely to think that we can just only work with the people who are excited to have as well? Yeah, but that’s not real, real life. And I do always say start with a friendly? I do because yeah, if you can start coaching with somebody who wants to have you around, other people are more likely to want to have you around. If you get the reputation as the coach of forces everybody to do stuff. Yeah, that’s not a great place to be. But you can’t start with a friendly and then never move on. We can’t always only coach with people who are excited, although Okay, I will say there are some coaches who only coached the people who want them and that is the way their role is set up at the schools. I’ve never worked in a school like that. I’ve never personally been to a school like that. So you’re going to want to get a real clear definition from your admin on who is involved in coaching work. Because if it’s only people who are inviting you, you have to really work on what those invitations look like. And make sure that teachers have lots of opportunities to work with you in other ways, so that they do have the opportunity to invite you into the classroom. Building relationships doesn’t just look like Hey, how was your weekend, I brought you a McDonald’s smoothie, or whatever they sell, it’s a lot more complicated, because we have to actually get in there and talk about instruction and teaching. Now, if the teacher is pushing back, and is really making it difficult, then what we need to do is make sure that the teacher kind of has the opportunity during a PD or a PLC, to talk about some areas that they’re feeling a little frustrated with. And then that’s whenever we can step in and say I will help you with that. So give your teachers opportunities to talk about challenges they’re having regularly, so that you can help them and be the support for those teachers. Building relationships is ongoing. But it is absolutely a part of establishing your coaching program. So you’re going to want to have a thought to give a thought to how you’re going to build relationships with teachers. Now, at the beginning of the year, as well as throughout the year, I also recommend that really looking at your campus needs in an ongoing way is important. And so if you had data already, and you have a

Chrissy Beltran  26:22

a tool that you’ve used to gather information from teachers, that’s great. But we need to make sure that we are not just doing that with old data that came from last year. But the we’re conducting needs assessments as the year goes on. So one way that I recommend doing this is conducting a classroom sweep, what I recommend is you actually make a chart, you know, you have a little forum for each teacher, and you’re going to visit all the teachers in one grade or all the teachers in across your school are all the teachers for one content area. And you’re going to record notes of everything that you see happening. And this just gives you a big picture idea of what’s going on. In general. After you do this, you can lay your notes out, and you can look across them and see areas of knee that you want to continue to focus on, it’s a really great way to get kind of a snapshot snapshots are not perfect, but it’ll tell you a little bit about how things are going. And then you can use that information to go further guide, like we talked about before your PD, your PLCs, you know offers for coaching cycles, opportunities to learn for your teachers. So that’s really important to continue to work through your needs assessments as the year goes on, because your needs are going to change over time. And we don’t want to get stuck doing the same thing all year and hoping that we see a change in features. As you are putting together your program, if you’re feeling like left feeling like this is really stressful. And I need a little bit of assistance here. I actually have a course that is coming out for you. It’s the 20 day instructional coaching startup. It’s basically the first 20 days of instructional coaching. And what I’m going to do in the course, is every day is going to have a short video that’s going to teach you one specific thing to do that day that will move you towards building your foundation for coaching, we’re going to work on it together. In a Facebook group, I’m going to walk people through every single day and ask people to share their responses about how they have done these things. So if that sounds like it’s something for you, I want you to make sure that you get signed up on the waitlist. And I will tell you in just a minute about how you can do that. Because setting yourself up for for a foundation of success at the beginning of the year can completely change the way your coaching work goes. And if you have felt frazzled or kind of like you’re floating around and you’re not really sure where to spend your time at the beginning of the year, this course is for you. It’s that instructional 20 days instructional coaching startup course. It’s going to change how your work goes this year. That is the end of this episode for building your coaching program and getting started. Next week we are going to continue our theme of establishing a coaching program and we’re going to talk to Dr. Jan Hasbrook about defining roles within student focused coaching. So we’re going to talk a little bit about how you can establish his coaching program by getting your coaching role down on paper, communicating with your administrator, you know, identifying the roles that you can serve that you know very for coaches throughout different times of the year and really established the role with teachers so that you have a strong foundation for success. So excited to share that with you. And until then happy coding

Chrissy Beltran  29:52

Thank you for listening to buzzing with Miss B the coaching podcast. What more coaching ideas. Check me out at buzzing with Ms. b.com and on Instagram at buzzing with Miss B. If you love the show, share it with a coach who would love it too, or leave me a review on iTunes. It’s free and it helps others find this show. Happy coaching!