Instructional Coaching: A Success Story

Each week as I contemplate the topic of my blog post, I usually get so overcome by what instructional strategies I'm currently over-the-moon excited about trying out in the present or future that I forget to stop and reflect about past work with the teachers I collaborate with. This week, I'd like to share a success story (don't worry -- I won't be naming names -- confidentiality is important with instructional coaching!).

This story involves a teacher I've worked with for a bit of time now. He and I have gotten to know each other well and have developed a routine and a rapport that works for both of us.

Like many of the ambitious and dedicated teachers I work with, when I first began working with this teacher, he had a dozen goals, all kinds of areas of his teaching he wanted to work on. Upon my observing him teach and having structured conversations about his classes and his students, we were able to narrow his focus by prioritizing a few goals at a time. This was a key first step. Just like we wouldn't give our students too many areas to focus on improving at once, we can't bog ourselves down with too many goals, either! Through our time together, this teacher has developed mastery in several of his goal areas, allowing us to add in other goals to work on. Even though we had placed those goals aside for awhile to focus on our top picks, we hadn't forgotten them.

One area this teacher expressed a lot of interest in working on -- an area that would have high impact on his students' learning -- was his questioning techniques. He was struggling (as many of us have and continue to) with adjusting his questioning strategies so that he wasn't always calling on the same students. He knew he wasn't checking for the understanding of all his students. That's where I came in. As a second set of eyes in his classroom, I was able to make suggestions he could incorporate fairly smoothly into his teaching style. We worked together on his comfort level with "cold-calling" on students. I acknowledged his concern (a concern many teachers share) that he'd be putting students on the spot, and we worked on ways to scaffold a student toward a correct answer if he or she were struggling. We also worked on turning a student's question over to the rest of the class as another way to check for understanding, instead of it always being the teacher's job to answer questions. Eventually, when this teacher had vastly changed the way he asked questions in class (over 90% of the questions he asks now are "cold-calls" and his students are really rising to the occasion!), we were able to analyze when and why he sometimes falls into his old habits (typically when he was feeling rushed, nervous about getting to all of his lesson) and we worked on ways to prevent that from happening.

Nothing I've written about above is ground-breaking. These are effective, but simple, ways to change one's questioning techniques for the better. But the beauty of instructional coaching is the on-going, job-embedded professional development. If this teacher had merely read an article or attended a one-shot workshop about questioning strategies, he may have tried some new ideas out for awhile. But, as we all know, he may have eventually lapsed with this goal, becoming distracted by all the other aspects of one's day as a teacher. Instructional coaching can help, as I've been told by the teachers I've worked with, because it's more consistent, it involves conversations and observations and goal-setting, even because the teacher knows she's got an appointment with me coming up so she needs to get going on some of the things we discussed during our last conversation. It's a judgment-free, "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again," pleasant method of professional development that I think can help teachers to make big and small changes in their classrooms.

If you're interested in exploring your own questioning techniques (or any of the other myriad of instructional strategies out there!), just let me know!