5 Questions to Help You Reflect on the Year and Prepare for the Next

Goals and Motivation

You know that song, “Schools Out for Summer” by Alice Cooper? {if not, you need to stop everything and go listen to it right this second} It’s become kind of a tradition of mine to play it really loud and jam out in my car ride home on the last day of school.

School’s out for the summer!

Woohoo, so exciting. While I’m all for a little singing out loud celebration at the end of the year, I’m also a fan of taking a minute to reflect on the year and think about how it went.

How was your year?

Successful, frustrating, awesome, overwhelming?

Regardless of what your current feelings are on the closeout of this school year, the past is the past. But get this: the really cool thing about being a teacher or coach is we have a whole new shot at it the following year. A clean slate, a fresh start.

So what will you make of it?

Once you’ve had some time to relax a bit and get some pool time in, use one of those more relaxed summer mornings to do some reflecting. Pour yourself some coffee, grab the printable below, and use the questions to help you think about where you’ve been and where you want to go.

Click Here to Download

Your wheels are already spinning aren’t they? Good! I hope you’ll share some of your goals or thoughts in the comments below.

Alright friends, happy summer to you all. I’ll be posting a bit less often, but I’ll still be around.

Thanks for being a part of this growing community of instructional coaches and teachers working hard to navigate our different roles and do our best work.

How to Wrap-Up a Coaching Cycle

Instructional Coaching, Organization

This week I’ll be wrapping up my last round of coaching cycles for the year. Our coaching cycles typically begin with goal setting, then enter into learning, observation and data collection, and finally reflection.

For this final step in the coaching cycle, I turn to the “reflection” section of my Coaching Reflection Tool. This supports me in reflecting on the work done and resulting progress made.

I’ll grab my coaching notebook at this point and flip back through past observation notes, debrief notes, and any assessment data collected. The questions shown in the results section above help guide my reflection as I look back over our work. I’ll write out some thoughts in response to these questions, first in my notebook {paper helps me think} before typing my notes into our Goal Setting Tool.

Next, I’ll schedule a final coaching session with the teacher to review our work, assessment data, and reflect on our progress along with any next steps. I’ll add our collective thoughts and insights to our Goal Setting Tool.

Lastly, I’ll email the Goal Setting Tool to the teacher as a record of our work done along with a big “Thank You!” for their willingness to dive into coaching with me.

You may have noticed from my example email above that I also send along a coaching synthesis/feedback letter. This is an amazing idea I got from a coaching friend of mine in a neighboring district. Thanks Lexi! You can go into more detail, but here is an example of what one might look like:

As with student learning, closure in adult learning is important.

Reflection solidifies learning and helps clarify important next steps and new questions.

I hope this post has provided a handy, dandy visual guide for how to wrap-up your own coaching cycles as this year comes to a close.

Thanks for reading,

You Asked: Principal and Coach Roles

Instructional Coaching

I frequently get asked some pretty smart questions around the role and responsibilities of an instructional coach. And I always do my best to answer them all. As I was getting ready to respond to a recent question from a reader, it dawned on me {duh!} that I really should be opening up these question and answer sessions to all of you guys!

Because hey, we all want to be better and do more as coaches.

Well did you know there’s a great resource available to support us towards this goal?…each other!

We all have so much we can learn from each other’s questions and experiences.

So a big thanks to Cari for sharing her question, which is something that I’ll bet many of us can relate to:

Kristin,

I love your blog, your tips and tools are very helpful. I am a first year coach with a lot of PD and classroom experience. Since my principal hired me as an “extra” this year we have been kind-of winging my schedule and role. As we look forward to next school year we’d like to tighten up my schedule and responsibilities. Can you give me an idea of how you are accountable to your principal without sacrifying trust with the teachers. Do you meet with your principal weekly? Do you “hand in” a form? Are teachers required to work with you?
Thanks!
Cari

Ahhh….the delicate balance of building relational trust, accountability, and confidentiality.

Building relational trust is so super important. It also takes effort and time. An important first step is communication. When we began implementing coaching cycles at our school, we dedicated one of our afternoon PD sessions {agenda and support structures handout} to the topic of student centered coaching as a form of professional learning. This gave us an opportunity to share with all teachers the why, what, and how of coaching at Tollgate. In doing this, we were able to address the question of “Are teachers required to work with you?” and more importantly begin to build a culture of coaching. Once that culture is established, and you’ve worked to show yourself as a partner in learning to teachers rather than an evaluator, things are likely to go much more smoothly.

I currently meet with my principal at the end of every coaching cycle to fill her in on the work done and reassess where to head next with teachers. This schedule has worked well for us. I would say that I’m pretty fortunate in having a principal who fully trusts me and the work that I do. So I’m not required to send her weekly updates or track my time. I’ve also shared in the past how I’ve tried out coaching data trackers and our PD site as a way of keeping my principal informed.

In addition to my experience, I thought it would be helpful to see what the experts had to say on this topic:

Diane Sweeney shares a really helpful chart in her book Student Centered Coaching that defines how both roles can work together to create a culture of learning where coaching is embraced.

Elena Aguilar has a whole section in her book The Art of Coaching dedicated to ten suggestions for building trust with teachers, which includes how to have an initial conversation with coachees that establishes confidentiality. She suggests using a coaching log as a tool that can be used to report to supervisors.

Jim Knight’s book Unmistakable Impact is another great resource for this question. A few key take-aways include:

The greater the lack of trust initially, the more important confidentiality usually is. What is most important is that principals and coaches clearly delineate what they will and will not discuss, communicate that policy across the school, and act consistently with the policy.
Eight researchers and I visited five of the best coaches in Florida, drawn from a pool of 2,600. In each case, we discovered that each effective coach worked in close partnership with his or her principal.

Cari {and anyone else grappling with this question}, I hope this collection of thoughts and resources above has been helpful.

If you have a question/topic/challenge that you’re wondering about please send it my way! Remember, we’re often each other’s best resource for support.