Content area
Full Text
A SIMPLE BUT POWERFUL INSTRUCTIONAL COACHING CYCLE NETS RESULTS
While working with coaches from Oregon and Washington, researchers developed a simple but powerful way to conduct instructional coaching. First, coach and teacher collaborate to set a goal and select a learning strategy. Next, the teacher learns how to implement the strategy. For the coach, this means explaining and modeling teaching strategies. Finally, instructional coaches monitor how teachers implement the chosen strategy and whether students meet the goal.
"Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance."- "
- Atul Gawande (2011)
A tul Gawande's comment is often used to justify coaching. What people overlook in his comment, however, are the words "done well." Coaching "done well" can and should dramatically improve human performance. *However, coaching done poorly can be, and often is, ineffective, wasteful, and sometimes even destructive.
What, then, is coaching done well? For the past five years, researchers at the Kansas Coaching Project at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning and at the Instructional Coaching Group in Lawrence, Kansas, have been trying to answer that question by studying what coaches do. The result of that research is an instructional coaching cycle that fosters the kind of improvement Gawande describes.
One coach who uses the instructional coaching cycle is Jackie Jewell from Othello School District in Washington. A participant in one of our research projects, Jewell used the coaching cycle when collaborating with Melanie Foster, a new elementary teacher in her district. Foster had sought out Jewell for coaching because she felt she needed to improve the way she gave positive attention to students. While Jewell would happily have focused on increasing Foster's positivity ratio, instead she suggested that it might be worth confirming that encouragement was the right goal.
To start, Jewell recorded one of Foster's lessons using her iPad and shared the video with her.
After watching the video separately, both agreed that Foster was effective at encouraging students. But Foster saw something else she wanted to work on: student engagement. Her students were not staying focused during small-group activities. Armed with this new insight, she set a goal that students would be on task at least 90% of the time during small-group activities.