Teachers are one of the most important factors in student achievement. How can we provide impactful instructional coaching that centers teacher voice and transforms teacher practice?
Many educators will tell you they’ve had a coach who changed their teaching trajectory forever. Maybe you’re thinking of that person right now. For educators looking to take action to transform teacher practice, coaching can be an incredible lever. But how can we move toward that kind of impactful coaching as the norm for every teacher?
When enacted effectively, coaching has been shown to improve instructional practice and student outcomes. Part of coaching’s power is in building coherence across a system through developing shared understandings, modeling practices, and brokering ideas. This work closest to the classroom is primed to be the “special sauce” of impacting students’ day-to-day experiences…but it can’t do it alone. We know that one-on-one coaching is most impactful when combined with professional learning and teacher collaborative time like Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).
And yet, while coaching can be a catalyst, its effectiveness is often hindered by common challenges.
Student Achievement Partners (SAP) grounds our coaching work in five foundational pillars aimed at transforming teacher instructional practice to better serve all students:
Centers students’ thinking and learning
Leverages teacher assets and funds of knowledge
Fosters pedagogical and content-specific inquiry
Promotes teacher agency
Builds trust through collaboration
So, how can we take coaching from a good idea to a game-changer? SAP’s vision of coaching is focused on taking action that is aligned to a powerful vision of instruction and fueled by relevant data about current teaching and learning—including the voices of teachers, students, and families. We offer sample coaching tools and work in partnership with schools and districts to activate the potential of coaching through context-specific customization.
- e² Reflection Tool™: A tool for teachers to ground themselves in the reflective, personal work of teaching; identify assets and opportunities for growth; and name initial focus areas for learning and support.
- e² Coaching Observation Tool™: A simple “single point” rubric (space for evidence of strengths/assets and evidence of further need/support) to set or track progress on specific instructional goals that can be used for coach observations, peer observations, self-observations (video yourself!), or leader observations.
These tools, and all of our coaching work, are grounded in e² instructional practice indicators, derived from SAP’s e² Instructional Practice Framework™ . This framework focuses on pursuing grade-level, joyful, linguistically sustaining, and responsive and sustaining teaching and learning for all students. To support coherence, the same e² indicators that drive our coaching work also show up in the e² Learning Walk Tools™, which are used primarily by leaders to gather data about the current state of teaching and learning across many classrooms. Same focal practices, different use case. We believe that when we’re aligned across our system and using common language, we can go further faster in supporting teachers’ and students’ growth.
Emily Wark, a building literacy coach in Ann Arbor Public Schools, has been collaborating with Student Achievement Partners to support a curriculum adoption. Emily shared that incorporating e² resources into teacher PLCs has been impactful because they…
“…emphasize collaboration at the core of the coaching process—supporting a partnership between coach and teachers. This collaborative dynamic fosters a sense of shared responsibility, with all members of the team contributing to the creation of strategies and solutions.”
We are excited to offer these tools and resources to the field in this spirit. Let’s continue to work flexibly, cohesively, and with teachers and students at the center to make good on the promise of instructional coaching.
Join Us
We invite you to learn more about these tools and their transformative potential by joining our upcoming webinar:
📅 Webinar 2: e² Coaching™: Taking Action to Transform Instructional Practice
Ideal for: Instructional Leaders, Coaches, Professional Learning Leaders, and Teachers
Date: Wednesday, February 26
Time: 6:00-7:00 PM EST
Want more?
These tools are free and open source, but SAP loves to work in partnership to revise, refine, and align to your school or system, as we did with the PLC resources in Ann Arbor referenced above. If you’d like to learn more about our coaching work or build customized coaching supports, reach out to our team at [email protected].
