Content-Focused Coaching cultivates the skills educators need to empower students’ to engage in intellectual habits of reasoning, discourse and mastery of important, relevant content in the academic domain being taught.

The goals of Content-Focused Coaching are to:

• Design units and/or lessons focused on “big ideas” or “essential questions” and connect these ideas to standards, curriculum materials, pacing calendars, and other resources in use.
• Help teachers design and implement content-rich lessons which help every student learn to high standards.
• Discuss and create strategies, plans and methods to teach specific subject material in ways that give all students access to complex ideas.
• Foster professional habits of mind and discourse based on a core theory of learning and teaching.
• Enrich and refine teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge.
• Encourage  educators to communicate with each other about issues of teaching and learning in a scholarly, professional and collaborative manner.

This requires developing new strategies and techniques based on assessment of the pedagogical skill and content knowledge each teacher brings to the classroom.  In working with individual teachers and small groups of teachers, our Master Coaches use three steps to promote effective instruction.

PRE-LESSON CONFERENCE

Our research and experience has shown that thorough pre-lesson co-planning is the the part of the process that leads to the most significant improvements in instruction Ineffective lesson planning is often at the core of why many students fail to learn. Many teachers have not been taught to plan deep, differentiated, rich, robust lessons centered on big ideas. cognitive skills, strategies, and applications Students of varying cognitive and emotional experience, make it essential to develop lesson plans that scale to each student’s individual capacity. Orchestrating individualized instruction for a classroom full of students requires careful planning, when our goal is to accommodate the needs of students requiring extra attention as well as motivate those students capable of excelling.

DIRECT OBSERVATION & DEMONSTRATION

By modeling specific instructional moves through working shoulder-to-shoulder with teachers, our Master Coaches provide real-time examples of how to meet individual student’s learning needs.  Coaching is an “apprenticeship” model of teaching that provides immediate, substantive feedback to teachers during the lesson. Content coaches actively confer with teachers as they enact their lessons. Occasionally and with a teacher’s consent, our Master Coaches drop into a lesson to demonstrate a talk move or highlight a student’s idea, before handing the reigns back to the teacher who can then practice the new move on the spot. Collaboration of this sort begins the process of learning new strategies and techniques which can be tried on by teachers and shared with colleagues across grade levels and disciplines throughout the school and district. This type of learning in action mimics the age-old apprentice model of teaching and learning and has been shown to quickly expand teachers’ instructional repertoire and upgrade their practice.

POST-LESSON DEBRIEFING

Follow-up is required to review the lesson plan’s effectiveness, analyze evidence of student learning and provide feedback on the teacher’s practice. Debriefing questions typically include:

• What did the students learn and what is our evidence?
• What does the student work reveal and what specific feedback might we provide each student
• How might student work products, comments and questions during the lesson guide our next lesson design?

Content-Focused Coaching can be practiced one-on-one, in small groups—by grade level or department—and across professional learning communities in large Coaching Institute sessions, based on the needs of the client.  As the work progresses, a co-teaching/co-coaching model is used to develop teachers’ collaborative skills in planning and teaching rich, effective lessons without outside assistance.

Our Coaches serve in an advisory capacity to help inform instruction and provide useful suggestions, materials, demonstrations, and tools to assist teachers. We do not dictate the material or methodology to be used within the classroom. Instead we focus on using the resources at hand more skillfully.  In situations where the coach and teacher differ on approach, the teacher maintains the final decision on how to teach the class. This fosters mutual respect and frank communication among all parties over the long term. Success is determined by evidence of learning—not through implementation of a favored technique—and both the teacher and coach take responsibility for the success of the lesson.

As trust is established, skills get refined, and the “word” gets out—this partnership approach between coach and teacher enhances collaboration among educators throughout the entire school and district. Teachers begin to coach one another. When educators become facile collaborators, they in turn foster more productive student collaboration and learning. As trusting relationships and effective techniques spread among teachers, they make their way into more classrooms and more students learn at higher levels.

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.