Instructional Coaching
Our Instructional Coaching & Consulting team provides personalized support to schools and teachers, working side-by-side to improve instructional practices, including classroom management, lesson planning and delivery, and student engagement.
Our approach integrates three key implementation frameworks to foster sustainable improvements:
Implementation Stages
A systematic process guiding schools from exploration through adoption to sustained practice, with clear goals at each stage.
Implementation Drivers
Specific practices that support educators, leaders, and organizational changes necessary for effective implementation.
Improvement Cycles
Structured feedback and continuous improvement to address challenges, build on successes, and remove barriers quickly.
Coaching is not a quick fix, but it can be a real fix - a powerful way to help teachers and students be more successful.Jill Jackson Jackson Consulting
Coaching is a process that engages the essential trio: Principal, Teacher, and Coach in supporting instructional change. The trio focuses on instructional practice that will impact student achievement. The coach is the teacher’s and principal’s tool to make it all happen.
Together, we will identify the instructional focus and how we'll work together to plan instruction. We will implement one or more of the coaching models, and provide feedback on the instructional focus.
A coach is one who helps teachers to recognize what they know and can do, assists teachers as they strengthen their ability to make more effective use of what they know and do, and supports teachers as they learn more and do more. Cathy Toll, Literacy Coaches Survival Guide
Why Coaching?
Effective teaching comes down to four things:
- Classroom management
- Student engagement
- Lesson planning and preparation
- Lesson delivery
When teachers refine their skills in these areas, student achievement improves. Coaching is the process by which principals, teachers, and coaches work together to develop, implement, and support these critical features of instruction.
Steps in the Coaching Process
Ways to coach: models for coaching
Demonstration
- Coach demonstrates lesson while teacher watches
- Meet for mutual reflection on lesson and determine teacher’s next steps.
Observation
- Coach observes educator teaching pre-selected lesson with pre-determined focus
- Meet for mutual reflection on lesson and next steps
Side-by-side
- Both coach and teacher study and prepare for a pre-determined lesson
- Teacher assumes lead role, with coach assisting via demonstration, correction and/or reinforcement of specific aspects of the lesson
- Meet for mutual reflection on lesson and next steps
Co-Observation
- Coach and teacher observe together another teacher who demonstrates mastery in the identified area of focus
- Meet for mutual reflection on lesson and next stops
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Professional Learning & Coaching
We are committed to supporting districts and schools through a comprehensive model of training, classroom coaching, and ongoing technical assistance.
We recognize that training alone will have a marginal impact on changing practices of individuals; as is documented through the research of Joyce and Showers, (1987). A comprehensive model of technical assistance includes supporting the establishment of organizational capacity as well as supporting staff competency to increase the likelihood that trained practices will be implemented and sustained.
There is solid and converging evidence about what approaches work in education. What has historically been missing is effective implementation of those practices: coaching staff so they know when, where, how and with whom to implement a given practice or intervention. This body of work was summarized in Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature (Fixsen, D. L., Naoom, S. F., Blase, K. A., Friedman, R. M. & Wallace, F., 2005).
Three implementation frameworks are the focus of the coaching and technical assistance that we provide to districts and schools to support successful and sustained implementation of research based practices.
- Implementation Stages: Implementation is a process, not a singular event. It begins with exploration and adoption. Each stage has tasks and outcomes associated with them, which leads to the next stage, ending in sustained full implementation.
- Implementation Drivers: An evidence based practice is a new way of functioning in order to improve outcomes for students. These new practices require new skills from individuals, including leaders. Organizationally the district or school must also change to support the new skills that are being developed. The drivers are the implementation practices that support the new way of work.
- Improvement Cycles: Implementation of any new set of practices will result in challenges along the way. Feedback systems will insure that we are building on successes and eliminating barriers along the way.
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