Instructional Coaching: Identifying and Explaining

Magnifying glass by Auntie P, License CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Knight (Knight, 2008) presents eight components of instructional coaching: Enroll, Identify, Explain, Model, Observe, Refine and Reflect. I’ve posted about Enroll before; this post address the next two components.

In the Identify Step, it is up to the instructional coach to respond to teacher interest and schedule a meeting as quickly as possible. This meeting is for the teacher and instructional coach to agree on the goal of their work with each other. The instructional coach may observe the teacher’s class if the teacher would like a suggestion of teaching practice to implement.

The next step is Explain. The challenge here is for the instructional coach to adequately and accurately explain the teaching practice in the amount of time that she has with the teacher. Knight presents five tactics to help with explanations: clarify, synthesise, break down, empathise and simplify. A key idea in clarify for me is the importance of discussing teaching practices with other professionals in the same job to build thorough understanding of best practices. This is essential to allow synthesis where the instructional coach summarises the key features of the teaching practice. Synthesis can be combined with the breaking down of the practice. The instructional coach can help the teacher access the teaching practice by breaking down its components into manageable pieces to scaffold the process. This can help remove teachers’ anxiety. The instructional coach can further reduce anxiety by empathising with the teacher and anticipating the practical concerns that the teacher may have with respect to implementing the teaching practice.  And last, instructional coaches should keep the explanation simple without dumbing it down.

Reflection: My Takeaways/Extensions

I hoped that moving to ISP and working with other people in the same position would provide an opportunity for constructing shared understanding that would help me in my coaching work (clarify). This has happened informally but I would love to see the collaboration formalised. I’m also thinking about how I can make better use of Twitter, Google Hangouts and the rest of my professional learning network for focused professional growth to support instructional coaching.

One suggestion in synthesis was to create checklists that could help teachers identify the teaching behaviours of the best practice being presented. I think that’s a good idea. Teachers often ask for models of teaching practice being discussed/taught. We have been having conversations in elementary school about making better use of the strengths within our school; this could take the form of peer observations, allowing teachers to exercise greater autonomy and create their own checklists based on observations. Peer observations and even online videos can be very useful for contextualizing the teaching practice and communicating it more effectively. 

This post is part of a larger series on Coaching based on the book cited here. Click on Coaching on the top to see all posts in this category, or choose the category or tag or interest to you in the sidebar of the blog.

Book Citation: Knight, J. (Ed.). (2008). Coaching: Approaches and perspectives. Corwin Press.