http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct11/vol69/num02/The-Principal-as-Formative-Coach.aspx

We’d love to hear your stories. Do you know any principals who use student work for teacher evaluation and feedback?

Some key highlights of the study to think about

• Reading gains are greatest in schools where teachers receive a larger amount of coaching.
• The PLC impacts coaching
• “The teachers who got the most coaching were new teachers, teachers committed to the school and the reform model, and those who were found, through baseline surveys, to be more likely to initiate work-related interactions with other teachers.”
• The schools where the most coaching took place were smaller in size

To read info about the report see

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/05/04/31literacy.html?tkn=UONFrEbwD1klXF2Yl8jJP9bnveX6913kVYB6&cmp=clp-edweek

As a coach, how do you measure your impact on student learning (formally or informally)? Do principals hold you accountable for student change?

We hope to hear from everyone.  One of my of this  favorite stories conference was the nice lady from CT who came up to me an d explained that after this conference she has realized that she has been functioning as a literacy coach for some time now, although, I believe, she was hired as an ESL teacher and hadn’t actually volunteered or applied for coaching.  Did anyone go to any meetings at IRA that they would like to share about? I was excited by the poster session I attended on coaching (especially the research on the use of video for coaching). Lots of interesting work being done in this area in the area of Math instruction, but this is one of the first time I heard about it being used specifically for literacy. Looking forward to hearing from you all.

Jane David writes about the importance of vocabulary instruction for reading comprehension. Of course, as literacy coaches, this is something we know. But this article supplies great talking points for discussing the importance of explicit vocabulary instruction.  I could definitely see using this article, or quotes from it, to begin a dialogue about how teachers teach students new words. Here’s one quote that I find particularly important, “Because different kinds of words require different approaches— and students’ needs vary by age, background knowledge, native language, and motivation—teachers must know and be adept in selecting among multiple strategies (Blachowicz et al., 2006)”. That being said, we need to remain flexible and offer students many strategies.

One technique I have used with teachers is to introduce several techniques for “solving” a word. I like to use the word solving because it implies the kind of deeper thinking that goes into problem solving. The sentence is filled with clues that help you solve the meaning of the word–you just need to find them. The student needs to learn to become the detective in order to figure it out.  For younger students, we make a game out of it. They become word detectives and each mini-lesson listed below is a tool that they can use of their journey (it’s a hook that works every time!). Here are some of the word solving tools that I model for teachers as mini-lessons:

• Sentence Clues: Look at the word in the context of the sentence. Take a guess at the word based on the meaning of the sentence and then SUBSTITUTE your guess back in and make sure it makes sense. Students often make a guess without checking it.
• Take the temperature of a word. Is it a negative or positive word? This is an easier step to do, but still necessitates using some context clues. Students often pick up on the gist of a word without really knowing it and can tell you if they think it is positive or negative
• Break it down. Look for prefixes or other word parts that may help you figure out its meaning. Check to make sure your guess makes sense.
• Speak another language! Do your students speak Spanish or French? Often times, this can help them take the temperature of the word. “Malicious” –malo..

These techniques can be modeled repeatedly through simple mini-lessons that provide examples, or anchors, that teachers can keep up around the room to refer to later. Having this list of strategies hanging in their classroom becomes a reference chart that students can use as they make their way through a text. As students read a text, we ask them how they figured out what the word means. There is no right or wrong way–rather the way they go about solving the word is the focus (and of course getting to the correct meaning). As a side note, I have observed many teachers who do not clear up confusion about a word.  This can lead to misunderstandings.

If you are the literacy coach in a building, there needs to be some unified approach to teaching vocabulary. If you are beginning this process with your school, I suggest starting by asking yourself and others these questions:

What do teachers feel about vocabulary instruction?

Who teaches vocabulary? Is it everyone’s responsibility?

What words do teachers teach? How do they present it to students? How do teachers assess student vocabulary?

How are words celebrated?

This last question is one of my favorites to approach. In one of my schools, we decorated the first grade hallway with new words that students were learning. On their way to the bathroom, they would see the word and talk about it. Some teachers encourage students to use new words and underline them in their writing.

How do you approach vocabulary instruction with your teachers?

How we deal with this:

Ignoring the testing craze is unrealistic. States are stressed, principals are stressed, which in turn stresses teachers, students and, of course, parents.  You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Here are a few ways we suggest dealing with testing time.

1. Teach Test Taking skills. Don’t fight it. Take a few days to model/demonstrate how to teach test-taking strategies.
2. It’s not only test data that shows student learning. Show how other formative data can be indicative of how students will do on tests. For example, perhaps you go and observe in a class and note that students struggle with inferential questions. You know that the test asks students to do this often. Use this as an opportunity to talk to teachers about how they help students to make inferences and how often students get the opportunity to practice this skill.
3. Use test scores as a spring board for further investigation. Look at a variety of formative assessments when trying to understand student performance on a test. For example, let’s say Rodney is a good reader but does poorly on state tests. Do a running record on him and listen to him read. Is he struggling to decode? How is his fluency? Perhaps he is just running out of time and can’t finish the test.
4. Use good texts. Practice test-taking with good literature. Who says that you need to use the boring passages out of practice books to review test taking strategies. Go ahead. Choose a passage from “Monster” by Walter Dean Myers to discuss script writing.  Or how about noticing the alliteration in a Prelutsky poem?
5. Show the impact of content area teachers. Highlight the importance of reading non-fiction with students and show how every teacher can be a part of students’ increased comprehension. Did you ever look through a state test? You may notice that many passages are non-fiction. Nowadays you can find websites, menus, maps, and graphs as all part of the reading passages. In fact, this is a great opportunity to talk with staff about the importance of all subject areas to contributing to a child’s success in reading.  How does the social studies’ teacher help address reading comprehension? Can the technology teacher teach children how to “read” websites? Maybe the art teacher can show children how to look critically at advertisements?
6. Develop school wide strategies and a language of assessment. This is one of our favorite ideas. People get so focused on test-taking that this is often a good time to talk about how not to waste time each year reteaching things students already know. In the past, we have used test-taking angst to begin conversations about an integrated strategy to approaching non-fiction texts (we recommend Strategies That Work k-8 by Stephanie Harvey). This has also been a good time to begin discussions about how data about students can be shared year after year so no time is wasted.

All year long most schools with coaches and commitment to best practices focus on performance based assessments, formative assessments, portfolios, etc…however it’s a standardized test with old fashioned pencil and paper that makes or breaks schools and the students they service. How does your school deal with testing time? What strategies or support do you offer your teachers? How do you avoid going “test prep” crazy?

Does she have more pressing matters that she needs to attend to? Is she concerned this will monopolize her planning time? When beginning your work with a teacher, there are many factors that can affect how your coaching on any individual day will go. As you plan your sessions, consider the following factors that can affect your meetings:
1. Environment: Where does the meeting take place? How are you positioned during your discussion? Who is else is present?
2. Context: What happened earlier that day? How much time do you have to meet? What else is the teacher trying to accomplish during this time?
3. Perspective: What type of experience does the teacher have with being coached? How do they view the process? Are they comfortable sharing information with someone outside the classroom? Are they comfortable reflecting one on one, or in larger groups?
4. Knowledge: What type of knowledge do they have about this area? What are their strengths as a teacher? What are their challenges?

Meetings can be affected by any number of factors, and although you cannot always know all of these situations, it often plays a very real role in the way your coaching sessions play out. Just imagine the difference in a coaching conversation about students’ essays in the case of a teacher who feels that a coach’s main purpose is to critique the teacher. It takes time to get to know people and their teaching style. It also takes time to analyze student work. Coaching takes patience, and there will most likely be times when you will receive a mandate from your district or principal to have teachers follow a certain instructional method immediately. Imagine the scenario where your district decides that all teachers should have students keep writing portfolios. The district will provide professional development for the teachers, but you will be in charge of coaching them in their classrooms about how to use portfolios.
As you develop a plan, your approach will naturally differ for individual teachers based on their experience and the students in their classroom. For one teacher the professional development they receive and feedback from you might be enough to experiment with writing workshop, while other teachers will require day-to-day classroom help, and still others
might resist changing their writing curriculum at all.

Considering some of the following questions can help you plan how best to structure your meeting.

1. Is the teacher familiar with the difference between evaluating student work for a grade versus analyzing it as a formative assessment of what the student understands?

Teachers are under pressure to assign students a grade. Mostly, when they look at student work it is to evaluate it and decide on a letter or number grade. However, this is definitely not the purpose of looking at work with a teacher when you are conducting formative coaching. The purpose is to analyze the students’ strengths and weaknesses to determine the next course of action. The need to assign a grade can be distracting and can lead to a superficial analysis of the student work. Therefore, making the distinction between analyzing student work and evaluating it for a grade is important. When you first begin to meet with teachers, you will want to make sure that you are very clear about the purpose of looking at student work together. Help them to understand that data will serve as a tool for analyzing what students can do and for developing future instruction.

It is often the case with pressure to assign a grade that teachers can feel limited in the amount of time they have to give to such analysis. Therefore,it is usually wiser to start by only looking at one or two pieces of student work rather than work from the whole class. Once you have demonstrated how analyzing formative assessments will be helpful, it is often the teacher who will want to look through the work.
2. What is the goal of meeting with this teacher? How can discussing student work be a part of this goal?

Before you meet with the teacher, it is good to discuss his or her goal. Does the teacher want to look at the work of the whole class, of an individual, or of a group of students? Knowing this will help you organize your time. As you begin to plan for your meeting, think about how looking at student work can help the teacher meet his or her goal. Sometimes, there is a mismatch between the type of student work the teacher has chosen and the teacher’s previously specified goal. For example, if a teacher wants to discuss comprehension and then selects to look only at one-minute timed fluency reads, this might not be a good formative assessment of the students’ ability to comprehend a text. Yet even when formative data and the goals of the analysis do not align, you can use this situation to help teachers reflect on their teaching with the formative coaching cycle. Sometimes, in fact, teachers need to look through the work briefly as part of a preliminary process of even choosing or narrowing a goal for the coaching meeting. In this case, having general questions can help lead the teachers to make observations about the student work. The following are some question stems you can use for this purpose:
• What did you notice about…?
• What are some of your thoughts about…?
• What/how might…?
• What are some possible…?

Garmston (2000) argues that some of the most important skills fora staff developer are questions that encourage teachers to think from multiple perspectives. Meditative questions, as he refers to them, are open-ended and judgment free and use language that is exploratory. These questions can help teachers identify areas on which they would like to focus their efforts.
3. How does the teacher feel about sharing student work with others? Some teachers may feel uncomfortable about sharing their students’ work with you. They may feel like the work their students are doing is being used as an evaluation. For example, one teacher always told me about the wonderful writing students were doing in her class. But then when we asked her to share the actual pieces with us and other teachers, the work was never available. Instead, she held the pile of papers close to her and handed us lesson plans to discuss. For this teacher, sharing student work was something she was not comfortable doing.
There are a few ways to address this dilemma. Sometimes, simply asking a teacher to share something that he or she is proud that the students were able to do is a way to open the door to begin to talk about students’ work. Starting with students’ strengths rather than discussing what they cannot do is a good start in getting to know individual learners.
For teachers who shy away from even revealing their students’ strengths, you might look at samples of student work that are not from their classroom and begin the process of analyzing this formative data collaboratively.

4. Does the teacher have a tool (rubric, checklist, criteria) for analyzing the work? When you begin to look through student work, you will notice work that seems exemplary, average, and far below standard for students on that grade level. How are you making these assessments of the student work? Are there criteria that you are using to determine what students should know? Often, teachers have an image of what on-target grade-level work looks like. For example, one teacher could quickly point out some student writing that was far below grade level. As we began to talk, though, it became apparent that she was unclear about what grade-level writing actually looked like. In her mind, she had a vague impression of it formed by years of teaching and reference to standards but not specific criteria. As she started to analyze the work, it became clear that without a clear vision in her mind, she could not provide models for her students. However, it is
often difficult to articulate this to other teachers and, most importantly, students. When you begin to look at student output, how will you know at what level they should be achieving? Many schools stress the notion of academic rigor. But how does “rigor” look in the work of a third-grade class relative to a fourth-grade class or an eighth-grade class? You and the teacher should be able to articulate what you want to see. For teachers who are unfamiliar with analyzing work, you may want to bring samples of rubrics or checklists.
5. How will the teacher respond to finding out what the students need?

The way you approach looking at student work will be shaped by the teacher’s response to the process. For some, the process of analyzing student work as a formative assessment can be eye-opening; for others, it initially feels overwhelming. With some teachers, we noticed that this process encouraged them to rethink and reflect on their lessons and goals. They were happy to sit and spend time looking through a running record or analyzing the work in a Venn diagram. Looking at student work allowed teachers to better understand the students and their needs as learners. As exciting as some may find the process, others were less patient. First, doing this takes extra time, which is a precious commodity. It requires skill to analyze what they see in front of them and then plan future instruction. Finally, it serves as the ultimate reality check as teachers begin to see that simply because they taught a lesson on a specific skill, this does not mean that students can apply it. On one hand, it is enlightening to begin to understand what type of instruction the students need, and on the other, it can be intimidating to realize that following a teachers’ guideday by day may not be the best way of instructing learners.
As you coach teachers around student work, it is important to be aware of the varied responses individuals will have. One cannot always assume that it will be the inexperienced teachers who will be the most intimidated or unskilled in analyzing student work. Nor is it correct to jump to the conclusion that a seasoned teacher will be unwilling to make changes to their instruction. It will take time to learn about how people respond to meeting with you. Number one advice: be patient. Coaching is about forming relationships. And this takes time.