Coaching 3

Sorry my post this week is kind of brief—homecoming week is so crazy, but it’s almost over!

Page 102 Questions

1. With what types of communication do you feel most confident? What do you see as your strengths in this type of communication? 
I feel like my strength would be critical communication. I think that, as a person and as a teacher, I tend to be fairly good at helping people evaluate ideas and situations. I think that I am usually fairly good at deducing the right kinds of questions to ask to help people discover and express what they think about things, and I hope that will transfer into a strength of mine as a literacy coach.

2. With which types of communication do you feel least confident? What do you see as your needs? How might you improve your confidence or skills so you feel more confident?
While I feel like I’m pretty good at helping people be evaluative, I don’t feel like I’m very good at taking it to the next step and being collaborative. I struggle to help people take their evaluations and turn them into new ideas without taking a more dominant role and inputting my own ideas when they say that they can’t think of much of anything (if they easily think of ideas, then that’s a different case). That’s definitely a weakness of mine, and I need to work on being more collaborative. I really want to learn how to help people think of new ideas without giving them those ideas myself.

Question for You

• What are some ways that you all promote collaboration with others? How can you help people come up with ideas without dominating the task?

Reflections About Strategy 1

• How ready am I for literacy coaching? I have a pretty good understanding of the curriculum and the alignment, especially since I spent a week this summer helping my district align their English curriculum and create lists of pertinent academic vocabulary in relation to literacy. I have a decent understanding of what literacy instruction looks like in my school, but I would benefit from seeing more of the SPED English classes. I am very familiar with the literacy resources at my school, since I teach literacy for life. I am also fairly familiar with the demographics in my school, in terms of race, language, socioeconomic status, and special needs. I have not worked much with my principal to lay the foundation for literacy coaching, but I would love to do that at some point. I do, however, know who the “experts” and other literacy leaders in my school and district are, and I’d love to work more closely with them. I’m fairly well-versed in literacy instruction, although my weakness is the foundational skills like decoding (which is still occasionally relevant for adolescents). I am slowly gaining knowledge and confidence in relation to adult learning and literacy coaching, but I have some definite room to grow there. I am a younger teacher, but I feel like my colleagues respect and trust me, so I think I am building up my credibility. I try to be a good listener, but it is something I am always working on, and I’m excited about how much we are learning about that in this course. And I have not had much time to see many curricular initiatives at my school, but I think I am already very reflective about them. All in all, I am surprised to see that maybe I am more prepared for literacy coaching than I first realized, even though I have plenty of work and practice to do.

• Is my school ready for literacy coaching? In terms of administrative support, we have a very strong emphasis on professional development, but many teachers seem resistant. I would love to see the school culture change and perhaps see some types of professional development being implemented that the reluctant teachers are more willing to get behind. Our principals are all very strong curricular leaders, and three of them have been academic principals at the school before, so they are very supportive of anything that improves the resources and standards at our school. There is decent professional communication among teachers, but I do think there is some room for improvement. We do have a defined literacy curriculum in our district that is meant to be aligned with CCSS and PASS, and it follows a progression from grade to grade. Unfortunately, the higher level grades focus more on English studies and less on actual literacy development, which I think is a bit of a weakness. We are, however, held accountable for implementing the curriculum appropriately. We are great about having a shared understanding of language and assessment, especially since we have monthly standardized benchmarks across each department (we are very data-driven), and we have district-wide academic vocabulary for every grade level. We do have some school-wide goals for improving students’ literacy development, at least in terms of helping struggling readers, but I would like to see some improvement there. Unfortunately, most teachers are very much closed to the idea of having others in their classrooms, and there has been some backlash about that as of late with principals making casual observations in everyone’s classes. Fortunately, schedules are fairly conducive for literacy coaching. We are all accustomed to frequent meetings before school, although a literacy coach would likely have to be allowed quite a bit of free time during the day for observations and meetings. Overall, I think my school could handle having a literacy coaching program, even though there are some areas that would need to be worked on while that was being implemented.

Meeting
When and how should we all get together about the survey results? I personally think Adobe Connect works fine, unless someone else has a better idea. I can’t do it tomorrow night since it’s our last night to finish up our homecoming float, but pretty much any afternoon or evening after that should work for me.