In working with Metamorphosis^TLC Master Coaches, our clients improve their collective practice—and reap the benefits of collaborative professional communities. We cultivate your professional community by investing in your people and working side-by-side with them. We assist you in reaching your goals because we know what it takes for district-wide improvement to occur.

Teachers, coaches, principals and administrators need to meet and work together to construct:

• Similar images of effective instruction and a common language for describing and assessing what they see in classrooms. This requires time for teachers and administrators to plan and observe lessons together to establish clarity and deepen understanding of effective teaching and learning in action.
• Similar ideas about what is meant by the term, “all students can learn to high levels” and how to address the needs of students who learn differently and come to school with different kinds of prior knowledge.
• This requires lesson design with built-in formative assessment strategies such as facilitated academic classroom discourse and reflective student writing to reveal what students are thinking.
• Similar and expanded repertoire of empowering intervention strategies to improve student learning.
• Teachers and coaches need to know how to design, identify, develop and adapt rigorous conceptual lessons to give all students access to big ideas and high-level strategies that facilitate higher order thinking.
• Similar understanding of the “big ideas” and what it means to teach to the big ideas. This requires revisiting conventional ideas about what is important, and examining tandards documents and other resources to name big ideas and prioritize primary standards over less important ones.
• Similar understanding of “evidence of learning” and how to gather it. This requires understanding the difference between already knowing and learning. It also requires teachers to understand that confusion, misconceptions, partial knowledge and over-generalizations are part of the learning process, and how successful teaching uses these cognitive “errors” as stepping-stones to learning.

Teachers, coaches and school leaders need time to meet as a team to examine their individual and shared beliefs and practices. To improve their collective practice, educators need opportunities to watch one another teach and collaborate as colleagues, designing robust lessons that provide students relevant, timely, and meaningful feedback. Teachers need time and guidance to develop a common understanding of the inter-related nature of their work, and how each person’s role within the school and district depends on the efforts—and expertise—of the group as a whole.

Find out how Master Coaches move an entire school or district to perform at higher and more satisfying levels of professionalism and significantly raise student achievement.