faulker008

We know that sentence stems are a support for English Language Learners, but I’ve realized they are helpful in all kinds of situations.  For example, this week, I shared some sentence stems with my son and his wife, who are going to kindergarten parent-teacher conferences for the first time.  (Can you tell me more about…..?  We are trying to figure out why……).  I also shared with my student teachers sentence stems they can keep in mind during writing conferences.  While doing so, it struck me how many of these writing conference prompts I have adopted into my coaching repertoire.  Questions that I ask when conferring with young writers are also useful in coaching contexts.  And these sentence stems and questions can be useful when I wasn’t part of the planning process or wasn’t there for the lesson.  For example: Planning conference: ·          I don't understand… ·        ...

When I can’t get a conversation out of my head, I figure there’s probably something to be learned from it.  Stick with me while I try to figure this out. I keep thinking about a conversation I had this week with Angela, an experienced teachers whose wisdom I value.  I was a guest at her school, and the only authority I had was by virtue of respect.  We had just had a conversation with a group of teachers about classroom management, during which I’d tiptoed carefully, knowing the research just didn’t support one of their much-used practices, the clip-up/clip-down behavior chart.  Angela lingered afterward.  I was grateful that the relationship we’d developed made her comfortable in speaking her mind.  “Sometimes I leave these conversations feeling like I’m doing everything wrong,” she said. My coaching mind went into overdrive.  This was an expert teacher, one whose classroom practice I’d observed and applauded – one who I sent others to observe.  ...

For the last year and a half, I’ve had the opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder with early-career teachers, problem-solving about how to keep teachers in the profession.  Teacher attrition is a big problem nationwide, with 30-40% of new teachers leaving the profession within their first five years.  This is a problem, not just for the teachers themselves, who have invested significant time and money in preparing for their role, but also for our profession and our students.  Potentially-strong teachers leave before getting their heads above water, so the profession loses the benefit of their talents and knowledge.  Their exit creates a shift toward a less-experienced profession, and this revolving door means students are frequently taught by teachers who are still figuring out the ropes.   One of the things that will keep new teacher in the profession is personal connections.  When we asked early-career teachers what little things would make a differenc...

Observing a teacher can be a useful coaching activity.  But being observed puts a lot of pressure on the teacher.  Novices, especially, may feel uncomfortable having a colleague in their class.  We can take the pressure off by asking, “What would you like me to do?” when planning for our visit. Our participation during a lesson can occur anywhere along the spectrum of co-teacher to fly-on-the-wall.  Different stances are going to be more or less appropriate based on the relationship you have built , where you are in the coaching cycle , and the coaching goals you have established with the teacher.  Here are some examples of roles you might take during an observation: ·          Co-teacher:   As you and the teacher plan together, include yourself as an instructional facilitator. ·          Back-up:  If the teacher requests it in advance, you can be ready to step in and co-f...

“Taking the bull by the horns” is one of those idioms we may use without considering its referent.  The origin of this saying is the practice of bull fighters or ranchers who had to face the animal head on and bring it to the ground.  A terrifying image!  Not surprisingly, conversations that we use this idiom to describe can also be frightening.  That’s why we tend to avoid them.  But avoiding a difficult conversation often means that it festers, zapping our emotional energy.  Difficult conversations are part of every relationship, and coaching relationships are no exception.  For example, Sandra, an elementary school literacy coach, became frustrated that whenever she went into Rachel’s classroom to model, the teacher busied herself with grading papers at the back of the room.  Pre-observation conversations where they set a purpose and created a structure for notetaking hadn’t resulted in a change.  So it was time to take the proverbial bull...

Are you working with a teacher who is frozen in old practices?  Being stationary is never sufficient when it comes to teacher learning.  “Teacher preparation” in universities is merely the beginning of a career-long journey in instructional improvement.  Once in the classroom, our “texts” expand beyond books and articles on a required reading list.  Our students’ responses become texts that we “read” every day, along with other professional resources. When confronted with a teacher who is immobile in the cycle of continuous improvement, we can “turn up the heat” in ways that warm, rather than burn, those with whom we are working.  One way we can warm the teacher to new ideas is by using a strength or a positive observation as a point of departure.  For example, if we find one question the teacher posed that invoked thoughtful responses from her students, we can lift this question from the lesson and hold it up for examination.  Warming in the glow of t...

If you are a mentor or coach, have you modeled failure lately? Movies and popular media are replete with Super-Teachers:  Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Pat Carroll in Freedom Writers, Edward Olmos in Stand and Deliver.  These caricatured teachers present a polished, uncracked model of teaching and teachers that is not only unachievable but disheartening.  It promotes feelings of inadequacy.  Failure, however, is part of the real-life of teaching, and those we mentor and coach deserve to see us working through this process.  They deserve to see us model the ambiguity and risk-taking that is part of teaching.  They deserve to see that sometimes taking risks ends in mistakes, in debacles, in failure.  And that learning from failure isn’t a quick and easy process.  If we don’t show them this side of teaching, we create a false ideal.  If we hide our struggles from our mentees, we perpetuate the feelings of inadequacy these false ideals cr...