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When you were watching the Olympics this month, did you get some practice making judgments? Even though I don’t know much about diving, I love watching the graceful moves the divers execute between board and water, and I get caught up in the experience. In my enthusiasm, I start shouting out scores as soon as the diver hits the water. I comment on how tight the tuck was or how smooth the entry was, making my evaluation before the judges post their scores. Sometimes I’m close to the actual scores, and sometimes we’re miles apart. It’s laughable that after a few minutes of watching I have become an arm-chair expert, when in reality I know almost nothing about what is going on! Sometimes the same thing happens when I visit a classroom. It is easy to jump to judgment after spending a few minutes in a classroom. Easy to notice what is not happening. Easy to feel myself expert when I know almost nothing about what I am really seeing. When I find myself jumping to judgments, I remind myself t...

Bob Bowman knows something about coaching: He has coached swimmer Michael Phelps to his record 28 Olympic medals. Bowman offers some advice about coaching that applies in educational settings, too. 1. Abandon the “one size fits all” mentality. Swimmers have different approaches and gifts, and so do teachers, so coaches should individualize their support. The Gradual Increase of Responsibility Model for Coaching (described in previous posts), can help instructional coaches pick an effective coaching tool. 2. Determine the gold standard. Bowman suggests being process-oriented and focused on the things you can control. “Be a little better today than you were yesterday,” he said. Doing that day after day leads to remarkable change. As coaches, we can focus on individual goals (for ourselves and others) and also organizational goals (for the school or district). Establishing clear targets and keeping them in focus is an important coaching task. 3. Continue to develop your skills. For Instr...

This week I am in Haiti with 30 amazing educators who are part of a teaching exchange. It is my second experience participating in a professional learning experience with Haitian educators, and, like last year, I will be going home with new insights and more humility. One memorable experience happened on the day we asked teachers to chart questions or challenges related to classroom management, since that was an area they said they wanted to address during the exchange. Working with grade-level peers, each group wrote three questions about challenges they were facing. Then we asked them to come up with two possible solutions for each challenge. At first, many of them looked at us with bewilderment. “You thought someone else would be providing these solutions, didn’t you?” I asked, reading the surprise on their faces. There were many nodding heads. “Well,” I continued, “the very best people for solving these problems are sitting around the table with you. You know your students, you kno...

Are you vexed by student achievement data that doesn’t meet the muster? Get ready for some exploration! Successful solutions require thorough investigation, and that investigation works best as a collaborative activity. Your faculty will be more likely to buy into the solution if they were on the answer exploration expedition! If you’ve used protocols for digging into the data, identifying causes , and looking for the issues underlying those causes , you’ve surfaced topics that are ripe for exploration. The Chalk Talk Protocol can come in handy again. Write topics that were identified as underlying causes in the middle of a big sheet of bulletin board paper, one per sheet. For example, your analysis may have revealed class schedules as a potential underlying cause of low student achievement data. Write this topic in the middle of the paper and do the same with the other possible causes that have been uncovered. Teachers silently move from topic to topic, jotting down thoughts, drawing...