Navigating Teacher Mentorship and Coaching: Strategies for Impact and Growth

PRESENTERS

Stephanie Blose

Stephanie Blose is a passionate learner and educator with 10 years of experience in both Early Childhood classroom teaching and Instructional Coaching. She holds a Master’s degree in Literacy with a K-12 Reading Endorsement and continues to feed her thirst for learning by completing various specialized trainings and educational conferences i.e. LETRS, Keys to Literacy, ICLE Data Teams, Model Schools Conference, Learning & the Brain Conference, School Turnaround Leadership Program. Committed to the beliefs that ALL teachers deserve coaching and ALL students can learn, Stephanie devotes her time to supporting teachers in honing their craft in order to make a large, lasting impact.

Dana Phillips

Dana is a dedicated educator, mother, and friend. She was the first person to go to college and graduate. She received a degree in English from the University of Arizona. While working for Austin ISD, she began her leadership journey acting as department chair, team leader, curriculum writer, and exemplary teacher. After completing her master degree in Teacher Leadership, Dana was recruited by TxCEE to be their Mentoring Coordinator.

TRANSCRIPT

Matthew Short:

I am pleased to introduce Stephanie Blose, who is an instructional coach at RAN Hourly College middle school, and Dana Phillips is a mentoring coordinator for Texas Center for Educator Excellence. So we’ll start by turning the session over to Dana to present first.

Dana Philips:

Hello everybody. My name is Dana. Phillip, let me grab my slides for you. And I was introduced, I’m the mentoring coordinator for the Texas Center for Educator Excellence. You might hear me use the word tech for short. I wanted to welcome you to our session today. I’m going to be focusing my portion on coaching and caring for teacher leaders and how we do that within the organization that I work for. So the Texas Center for Educator Excellence is a remote office for region 18 in Texas. I saw that there’s some other Texas folks here and that’s out of Midland. Granted, Texas is a big state, so I work in Kyle, Texas, which is near Austin, which is the center of the state. And then we are connected with Region 18. We offer calibration services. We work on a data management system for those types of calibration services or things like teacher incentive allotment systems.

We also host national board cohorts and then we work through teacher leadership support systems. One that I’m going to show you today, which is our mentoring support system. I was going to do a, who’s in the room? I’m not sure if we’ll be able to, I don’t think we’ll be able to see that, but I am kind of curious and maybe you can pop that in the chat if you are here as a classroom teacher, if you are a mentor, if you hold some other teacher leadership role on your campus, might be a department chair or an instructional coach, if we have any school or campus administrators here. Oh, some are coming in. That’s wonderful. And then district administrators or support staff. Great. Okay. Okay, great. Okay. Peer coaches, technology integration, lots of coaches. Wonderful. I’m so glad to have you all here. Great, thank you. So today what I want to explore with you is how the program that I work for and run equips our teachers to take on this role of mentoring new educators to ensure not only the new educators retention and their students’ success, but how it really also trickles up to that teacher leader as well. You’ll see some of that and then also just kind of point out some of the successes and challenges our mentors face and how we might guide them through that on their professional journey.

These are numbers we all know, so they shouldn’t be shocking to anyone even though they are shocking numbers. So we’re losing teachers yearly during the school year from burnout and low compensation. Those are the two that at least when I was reading on why teachers quit, those two stood out the most and that our public schools, which are really targeted right now, especially in the state of Texas, they we’re having these reports of our vacancies are very high due to these resignations and staffing shortages causing our campuses to hire teachers who might not have a certification at all or be going through certification as they’re actually working in the classroom. And many of those teachers are also not going through a standard certification process. They’re doing alternative certification. So how do we support these teachers? And then of course our critical issue of burnout. So as we talk today, we know that mentors are essential to helping with these numbers that we see here.

But also then how do we take care of the mentors so they’re not burned out since their role is essential. This is just concentric circles where I just wanted to point out, which I’m sure you all know, and many of you are the teacher leaders on your campus that are here today under here, whether you’re the teacher leader in gold or the instructional leader here in red, it goes both directions. So our mentors are not only essential for the work that they’re doing with the novice teacher and therefore what the novice teacher students are feeling and seeing and being provided in the classroom, but also our teacher leaders are essentially doing support work for our principals and our assistant principals who may not have the time or resources to be everywhere all the time. So just pointing out how important the role of teacher leader is to our whole educational system and why we need to take care of them.

The mentoring skills at, and I know this is a conference on thinking about skills, what the skills that we need to do our jobs well. So thinking about the mentoring skills that are mentors we need to build up in them. You can see some of them here on the screen and it’s not just their instructional knowledge. So you can be a great classroom instructor and have high scores and all of this, but really still kind of struggle with working with other adults. So working with students is one thing. Adult learning theory is another. And how do we help our mentors work with other adults in the field?

At teche, when we were building out our program to support mentors across the state, we had our system planning and the three critical elements there, I’m sorry, the three system planning that we wanted to really focus on is how are you planning to work with your mentors? What does the implementation of your mentor program look like? And then how do you monitor that? In thinking about coaching and caring for our mentors, I wanted to focus on the implementation there five and six, and then also under monitoring. So in other words, I’m going to focus today on mentor teacher training and support and how we support our mentors that way, how we coach and care for them, and then how do we make sure that the mentors are providing quality mentoring and also being given quality mentoring, receiving, mentoring themselves. And then lastly, how do we monitor the success of that program and how do we make changes when necessary?

I will give you through, after each one of these elements, I’ll give you a stop and jot time. So if you have something to write with or you’re keeping notes somewhere electronically, know that there is going to be a time for you to reflect on practices either that you are doing now or that you would like to make changes to. So first and foremost, I want to say as we’re thinking about caring and coaching, our mentors is having a basic foundation and level of understanding and language. What do we want our mentoring program to look like? So I work with districts all across the state and that’s one of the first things we always work with the admin is what do you want? Why do you want it? What is the hopeful outcome? And from that, we build our summer institute giving these mentors a foundation of best practices on how to support novice teachers, working with adult learners, understanding where a novice teacher is at any given time of the year, and then giving them opportunities to practice, practice, practice for observation, for feedback.

How is it different than the observation that an administrator might do? And we work really hard on teaching them and sharing and practicing how to create goals that are connected not only to the teacher evaluation tool but what they want in the moment with their students. That’s the most high leverage here on the right. You’ll see that once they attend here, we do provide them with a booklet of resources that they can go back to. Funny enough, we’re technology age times two now, but they still like the paper copy of the tools that we provide for them. So just thinking about providing coaching and caring in that way. What is expected of you? This is a difference I see in our program is that every month we have an opportunity to bring all of our mentors together in a virtual collaborative learning community. And in those monthly meetings we provide job embedded professional development and they actually collaborate with the mentors from all across the state.

So we have mentors in El Paso and all the way down in Houston or down in the Rio Grande Valley. So for us, that’s all across the state and we bring them all together. We offer three opportunities each month for them to come together and they talk about, share their experiences around in-time training topics that we’ve done research to say, okay, at the beginning of the year we’re going to talk about relationship building, then we’re going to move to goal setting, then we’re going to look at how do we use data to instruct to provide instructional options. All of that comes together and they work together monthly. So that’s wonderful. And I did want to show you as well, another way that we provide support for our mentors is we created a Padlet where it houses all of the work that we’re doing together and any necessary information they need. So here’s an electronic copy of that guidebook that we’ve given them. We give them some blank planning templates. We have some success indicators. And then you can see on the top there just some of the ways that we keep our mentors engaged when we’re not seeing in between the time that we’re seeing them on the virtual CLCs. So just wanted to give you that.

This is a Lightning Connect newsletter that I write each month and the point of the newsletter is for me to provide some evidence-based coaching strategies that are connected to that VCLC topic for the month. I also go back and look at what they said they were struggling with in an evaluation that we give, and then I write articles around just short articles providing resources for them. So I am going to just kind of slide through this quickly so you can kind of see what it looks like. Each month we highlight, excuse me, one mentor from all of the mentors that we work with this month. It was a woman in Brownsville, Texas. She gets an opportunity to share her experience as a Teche mentor and we record that conversation and then type it here. Then I write some articles around in time, just in time, what’s happening right now, articles that are hopefully to provide some encouragement, to provide some humor, but also to provide them some real, let’s see, real opportunities to take this learning and then use it with their novice teachers. So just kind of scrolling through so you can kind of see. And one of the things they say they love the most is having this to-do list so they always know exactly what they need to do and if they don’t remember, they can come back to the Lightning Connect. Okay.

So thinking about training and support, I have some questions for you and I know we won’t have a lot of time to answer them right now, but to just give you a place, a jumping off place to do some thinking. So for something like Summer Institutes, what do you believe that your mentors should know to be successful in your district? What kind of common or common problems or common solutions do you think need to be considered when you’re thinking about training and supporting mentor teachers? Where and when do they receive that information? The virtual collaborative learning communities, even if you’re not doing it that way, how you or why should you provide ongoing opportunities for guidance and support? If you’re going to do that, what topics do you think need to be addressed? Maybe based on the time of year or based on what you’re seeing come up over and over and over again between your mentors and novice teachers and then the Lightning Connect thinking about even if you’re not doing a newsletter, how you or why should you provide monthly highlights and updates? So I’ll just give you a couple of seconds to think about one or some of those questions.

Okay, great. So for quality mentoring, so we’re moving down to that critical element. Number six, thinking about how do we know that mentors are providing quality mentoring versus say a friendly check-in. And also how are we providing quality mentoring, ongoing mentoring to our mentors? So we use a structure that we call a fireside chat, and we also use what you see here in the middle as our kind of basis of an effective coaching conversation. They have touched based on both of these in the summer institute, but then we take that learning both into the virtual collaborative learning communities for practice. And again, we have the resources that we provide on the Padlet and in the newsletter. So our phases of a fireside chat are these, and this is how we help structure a conversation to show the difference between being a really great colleague on campus and then being a mentor who coaches.

So we have an initiation phase, which is why are we here? Maybe it’s based on the last meeting we had, maybe we have some data we’re going to look at, maybe we are connecting back to the support goal, but why are we here in this meeting? From that, when it’s prepped and planned and intentional, they move into the collaboration phase. So again, teaching mentors the difference and really supporting them in understanding it’s not their job to do the work for the novice teacher, but to get the novice teacher to become, to have efficacy, to have self-efficacy. I know I can do this, I know have the habits of mind. And so working through a collaborative phase, teaching mentors how to ask questions versus give answers. And really using adult learning theory here, having the novice teacher bring their experience, their thoughts to the table and then collaborating with them.

And then the last part of the phases of the fireside chat is the transformation phase, which says, okay, we’ve talked about it, but now what are you going to do? And this one often gets left out. I know when I was mentoring, I really work hard on this one because we would plan something and then just walk away, but the implementation is so important. When are we going to get back together again? Next time? What support do you need from me after we leave this meeting? When are you going to actually start implementing the plan? So that all happens, it keeps the meetings nice and tight and it also keeps them again away from that, I’m just your buddy versus I’m your mentor. So really supporting the mentor in their coaching habits. I should point out going back, this is also how we host our meetings with our mentors.

So I see my mentors anywhere from three to, well, three or four times a semester, and they will meet with me for at least 30 minutes. And this is the same phase phases that I follow with them. So I’m mentoring for them, but I’m also giving them an opportunity to talk about what is the goal that you’re working on, let’s collaborate on your mentor goal, what are your next steps on your mentor goal? What do you need to do? And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. The other way that we look for quality mentoring and really support the care of our mentors is by something we call mirror sessions. So this again happens with the novice teacher and the mentor, but it also happens with the mentor and the teche coach. So this is just a screenshot of one of the mentors working with the novice teacher.

She recorded a 10, 10 minute video of one of her fireside chats. She had a goal around mentoring about her questions, what kind of questions am I asking? What’s the depth that I’m asking from him? And so I scripted for her and then she and I got together and we then debriefed and were able to discuss how her fireside chat went as a mentor. Some of the questions I ended up asking her that I prepped for, where could you have pushed his thinking? Tell me more about the transformational phase of this fireside chat. It was compressed. It was like, oh, thanks, I’m so glad we did this. I’ll see you on Tuesday. So I just wanted to expand a little bit on that. And then what could you have asked him to get him to share how he will know if his students are progressing toward the completion of the goal? So just really getting her to think about her coaching, her coaching skills. And we’ve had great success with this and it does not need to be a 30 minute, right? It does not need to be 45 minutes, 10 or 15 minutes will give us enough to be able to have a coaching conversation with our mentors.

Okay, so quality mentoring. How do you currently check for quality mentoring? Or based on the two things that I’ve shown you, how might you, so for our fireside chats, you might not have that, but be thinking about how and when do you check in with your mentors and then what do you check in about? Is it a fly by in the hallways or do they get 20 minutes of your time to sit down and share with you what’s happening? And then once they do, what do you do with that information? And that would be the second part. So how do you provide modeling or feedback to them to ensure that quality mentoring is happening? Again, just give you a few seconds to think about that.

Great. Okay, and then this is the last part. Now the assessment and monitoring happens throughout, but I did just want to pull out some as it is critical element number seven and show you how the Texas Center for Educator Excellence looks at our program assessment and how we monitor for that. So as we’re working with our mentors, so we’re supporting them, we created a success indicator rating system that’s under coaching instruction and mentoring partnerships. And those came from the Texas from TEA, the Texas Education Agency. So we took their ideas and then we created our own indicator rating system. So the top one is looking at are you using a coaching cycle? What kind of feedback are you giving? How do you plan next steps in follow up? All of this gives me a place each time I’m meeting with my mentor to say, where do you feel not where do I think, where do you feel like you are on this continuum? Why do you believe that? And teachers rate themselves very harshly. Mentors do. And then how, if you believe that you’re under proficient, what would you need to do to be an accomplished or distinguished? So this kind of third point of contact versus my opinion or their opinion is really helpful in having mentoring conversations with mentors.

And then when I started at Teche, I was a classroom teacher for 26 years up until November of 20, 23, 26 years language arts in middle school. And when I first started at tech, we did not have a coaching cycle. So we were asking them to use a coaching cycle. Coaching cycles are out there, but then we created our own. So this is our architecture of coaching and it starts at the bottom and goes up. So it’s not a top down but a bottom up. So we use this again to monitor the program, to support and coach our mentors, but then also for our mentors to have a place to go to say, with the novice teacher, where are we and where would we like to go? It’s not obviously set in stone here we have the helix that’s showing these things can go in and out, we’re weaving, but it does give them a real basis, again, that third point of contact.

So it’s not just what I think or what they think. This is a coaching cycle. If you use it, you tend to have higher rates of success. So we do have something that they use and we talk about here, which connects also to our mentor logs. And then lastly, I would say every VCLC that we have those virtual collaborative learning communities, we ask them for evaluations and then we use the evaluations. So I just wanted to show you, here are some of the challenges that over the last, I would say it was the last two months that kind of show up over and over. So if you’re working with mentors and you’re thinking about how do we prep, say for summer institute or for some kind of guidebook, these are the three things that show up over and over and over again. How do we write goals that aren’t too big, aren’t too small, right?

The Goldilocks type goals, what kind of help me with coaching conversations. I’m a teacher and I know how to talk to five-year-olds, but I’m really struggling with working with another adult and help me with time, help me with time. And so we do see that it’s really important for principals to carve out time for their novice teachers and mentors to be able to work together. And we do work very directly with principals on how that can happen and get really creative on ways to get teachers, mentors and novice teachers together. And then I did show you when we were looking earlier that each month we highlight a mentor and they share with us. So I just wanted to share some of their successes that they say. So describe how mentoring and being a coach can impact your novice teacher and their students. They’re saying we see growth especially in the most essential right classroom management organization, routines and procedures.

As a new teacher, it probably without a mentor, it probably took me three years of some really deep struggle to figure that out. And we’re helping our first and second year teachers come on board with some of the real basics that we need when they are mentored and when that mentor is supported. Also here it says, how has being a mentor impacted you? I love this one because it says that the novice teacher has new ideas and strategies as well. So there’s a reciprocal relationship here. And how exciting for a teacher like me who had 25 years, 26 in the classroom to have a novice teacher come in and teach me some new things that I can incorporate into my classroom. So there’s definitely that. And then these two, I really liked having an increase of the novice teacher’s confidence that self-efficacy, I can get through difficult things as we know we want to keep our novice and our mentors in the classroom.

But to know that a program when you’re focusing on mentoring really does, you do see it. You do see that happen. And then one more time, the mentor being able to say, because I worked with this novice teacher in such a way, I am also reflecting on my practices, who I am, why I do what I do. And for me, again, thinking about the concentric circles, it goes both directions. This reciprocal relationship. So thinking about how do you monitor, we use a rubric, rubric for compliance or thinking about monitoring our programs compliance, what tools or guides do you use to have discussions with mentors? And if you have a rubric, what would be on it? What’s important? And I think that comes in the description of your program and what you want. And then how are you checking? How are you getting feedback from your mentors and how do you use it? So I’ll just give you a couple of seconds on that one.

Thinking about monitoring. So here’s kind of the list that you guys will have access to of the things we went over today, how techy works to support our mentors through training and support, mentoring and monitoring our program. I’m really glad that I was here with you today. I hope you got just maybe even if you took one thing away that you might be bringing to your campuses or to your districts to try to really support the mentors who are doing such valuable, invaluable work for our campuses and our students. So thank you all very, very much for having me today.

Matthew Short:

Thank you so much Dana. And now we’ll turn it over to Stephanie to deliver her presentation as well.

Stephanie Blose:

Okay. Let me get my slides up for you. Welcome to the second part of our session. Session screen share. Okay, so the second part of the session is all about supporting all teachers. No matter In this second half, I’m going to be sharing three resources that I use to help guide my thinking as an instructional coach to decide how to support teachers, any and all teachers in my building. That would be, I’m going to show you a rubric and a matrix that I use. And then I’m also going to be sharing a framework for as a foundation that I use for building strong relationships with all teachers, no matter their mindset experiences, or openness to coaching. So first, let me tell you a little bit about myself.

My name is Stephanie Bloss. I am a mom, an instructional coach, and an educator and always a student. I am currently the instructional coach at Ray Early College Middle School. I have been blessed to be coaching teachers for the last 10 years with seven of those years at rec. Before I ventured into coaching, I was a kindergarten teacher and a first grade teacher, first in North Carolina and then here in Ohio with a combined total of about 10 years of early childhood teaching experience. I’m a proud mom and a family girl and a beach goer. So this is a picture of my family and a couple friends from our last visit to our happy place, my daughter Reese, who recently got her driving permit, and my son Andrew, who’s now in the National Honor Society. A couple of pictures from my team here. You see a couple of our students helping me across the tight rope and the team that I work with here at my middle school to help lead our teachers.

So you can see we like to have a lot of fun here. All right, so the information, let’s get right into it. The first resource I want to share with you is the skill versus will matrix. This is simply a two by two quadrant tool that allows leaders to identify the skill and will of its employees. Each quadrant gives leaders some insight into how best to engage employees in the work that needs to be done. We’re going to look at each of these quadrants separately. This first quadrant that we’re going to look at is the high will, high skill quadrant. The people that fall into this quadrant tend to have the skill and motivation to succeed. They handle responsibilities effectively. Typically, these are your teacher leaders, possibly mentors, teachers you can delegate tasks to or lean on for innovating new ideas. The next quadrant we’re going to look at is the high will low skill quadrant.

People that fall into this quadrant, typically our new teachers, they have low skill but are highly motivated to perform. Given the right supports, guidance and motivation and experiences, these teachers can quickly be moved into your high will skill quadrant. The next quadrant is the low will high skill quadrant. People in this quadrant, they have the skills to succeed. They have the experience and they’ve probably experienced some success in the past, but their motivation is lacking. Somewhere along the line, these teachers have whether through personal or professional setbacks of one sort or another, have lost their excitement and their motivation, and it’s really up to their leaders, their mentors and their team to help them find it again. And then this last quadrant, the low will, low skill quadrant. These are people that are lacking the skills and motivation to succeed. This is the group I personally worry about the most, and it’s the hardest to shift because they’re not only dealing with either personal or professional setbacks like the low will high skill group, but also they need very clear, explicit directives with close supervision and support in order to build the skills that they’re lacking so that they can feel that success.

So I share this with you because I use this to categorize my teachers. So how do I do that? So I do that by collecting a plethora of data through a combination of many, many different strategies. At the beginning of the year, I spent quite a bit of time collecting information to understand where my teachers are each year. Some strategies I use are something called Ghost Walks, listening tours, team meetings, PD participation, just observing how that goes, debriefing with my administration and leadership on the staff needs, and then data reviews, extensive data reviews. So after taking roughly a month to collect and analyze the information, I aligned the collected information and analysis with the descriptors of each of these quadrants and just for my own purposes, place my teachers within their perspective quadrants. So something that I want to be very clear about is it’s important to recognize that any teacher may fall into any one of these quadrants at any given point in their career.

I myself have fallen into every single one of these categories within my last 20 years of being in education, and that’s just due to life experiences, unexpected things come up. And if it wasn’t for my personal literacy coaches, school and district leadership members and my own self-awareness, I may never have shifted out of these low will or low skill quadrants. And that’s really why I believe recognizing where my teachers fall is so very, very important. All right, so that’s the first resource I use. The next resource I use is the coaching spectrum. So in HER 2019 book coaching redefined a guide to leading meaningful instructional growth. Sherry St. Clair shares a rubric that allows coaches to place teachers within a coaching spectrum. This rubric uses guiding statements to help coaches know what type of coaching a teacher might be ready for. This spectrum ranges from instructive to self-directed.

A teacher that falls into instructive typically has an opposite perception of their ability compared with their leadership or their coach. They have minimal reflection in their practice and they’re very really not interested in growing. Teachers that fall into the illustrative range on the coaching spectrum have a perception that is somewhat aligned to their coach. This is on their ability, and so it’s somewhat aligned with their coach and leadership team. They understand the importance of reflection, but they rarely take the time to do it, and they do see a need for growth, but they’re just not sure how to get there. Teachers that fall into the guided discovery range of the coaching spectrum, these are people that have a perception that is mostly aligned. Their ability of their perception is mostly aligned to their coach and their leadership team. These people routinely on their practices and craft, but they struggle to apply that reflection to their daily practice.

And then they are also very eager. They’re more eager to be proactive in propelling their own growth. All right, and finally, there are teachers that fall within the self-directed range of the spectrum. These are people that are highly aligned with their perception of their abilities, highly aligned with the leadership in their building. They routinely reflect and apply that reflection to their practice, and they’re very proactively growing on their own. So some things to know about this coaching spectrum, it’s important to note that teachers that fall in the high will, high skill quadrant are often teachers that are living in the guided discovery or self-directed range of the coaching spectrum. It’s also quite worthy to note and recognize that this spectrum is not black and white. There’s no hard and fast lines. You’re not going to be instructive, and that’s just where you are. There is a hybrid, and quite often teachers are falling in a hybrid of instructive or illustrative or illustrative and guided discovery, and that’s just because we’re working with people. We’re humans and we move back and forth between where our headspace is. Then one other thing I wanted to share about the spectrum is as a coach, being highly aware of where my teachers fall within the skill will matrix along with this coaching spectrum, really allows me to select and guide teachers to the strategies that best align to their current situation and Headspace so that they can grow as much as possible and have the strongest impact on the students that are sitting in front of them.

The third thing I wanted to share, okay, so I’ve been coaching for about 10 years, and about halfway through that time, I had the privilege of finding this book Look Both Ways by Jason Reynolds. If you’ve never read this book, I highly recommend it. In this book, Reynolds gives his readers a day in the life of 10 different students or groups of students as they’re walking home from school on one particular day. Now, each chapter gives its readers an in-depth perspective in the lives of these students as well as the impact that their situations have on their skills, their growth, their motivation, and their daily behaviors and actions. The reason I bring this up is because this book gives me a super clear literal reminder of two of the most important core values that I follow as an instructional coach. First and foremost, my teachers are people first.

Everything I do, I keep that in the back of my mind. And second, I may have an agenda of where I think my teacher needs to go or what needs to come next, but when it comes down to it, coaching is not about me, it’s about them. It’s their journey, not mine. So these core values and the idea of being purposefully aware of my teacher’s current situations led me to develop and live by a framework for building coaching relationships. The infographic that you see here is a visual of the foundations for my personal relationships framework, and I’m just going to take a moment to walk you through this very complex process. So you see the number one, the first thing that I do in every single interaction that I have with a teacher, and that’s interaction, not coaching, cycle or strategy. It’s every single interaction because I want them to know that I see them as people, but the first thing I do is I stop what I’m doing and I listen.

If I don’t stop and listen, then I’m no longer making our relationship about them. It’s really about me and my agenda, and that’s not going to get us very far very fast. So it’s essential that I put down what I’m doing. I stop and I pay attention to what their needs are. Sometimes this is extremely difficult because I’m busy too and I have a job to do, but my job won’t happen if I don’t take the time to listen to my people. So from there, I tend to make some decisions on my responses. Do I want to shower my teachers with love, compassion, or grace? Those are typically the three decisions I make after stopping and listening to my people. And I also may be choosing more than one of these depending on the information that the teacher has shared with me, the situation that teacher is in, what I know about their headspace.

The other thing I wanted you to notice is the words reflect and perspective that are encircling this framework or this way of thinking about relationships. So this is very important. I tend to think of this as step one A in the way I interact with my people. Because before I even begin listening, the information that I’ve gathered with the coaching spectrum and the will skill matrix, I’m taking all that information that I know about my people and I’m reflecting on what I know about them and stepping in trying to step in their perspective and reflect on what they’re telling me their needs are as I’m listening to them and reflect from their space. So before I even listen, I’m just continuously stepping in and out of that teacher’s perspective and then reflecting on whatever is presented to me from their perspective, from their headspace. I do this because coaching is, again, it’s about them, not about me.

And if I’m reflecting from my agenda, my perspective, my experiences, then the mindset shifts and so does the focus. So before, during, and after every single interaction I have with my teachers, I am continuously and purposefully stepping in and out of their perspective, listening and then reflecting on new information that I’ve been given and choosing my steps based on that teacher as a person, their progress, their needs, and their current headspace. So those are my three resources that I apologize for the bell. Those are the three resources that I really lean on extensively in building relationships and supporting the people that I work with in my building. The next thing I want to do is walk you through this process with a couple of teacher profiles. So it’s important to know that every single teacher is going to have a different teacher profile because we’re humans and we’ve experienced different things.

Our day might be similar, our experiences might be similar, but we’re all in different places. So I have a couple to share with you and I’m going to just walk you through them now. So teacher A, this is typically a high will low skill teacher, but she’s inconsistently high will, and she also falls into the instructive range on the coaching spectrum. And this is just simply due to a new teacher placement and some other information here. She’s got minimal experience and those inconsistencies in her high will quadrant are stemming from the mix of her belief in students’ abilities that student’s can’t is typically something that is heard. This person is very progressive, which is a good thing, and her need to prove herself is very, very strong. But this unique combination paired with the little experience that she has is really causing her to push back on district directives and try her own things without mastery of foundations such as class structures management.

And she tends to avoid intense explicit coaching and support, which is what an instructive teacher tends to need, so that we can build those skills. In short, she really wants to do her own thing in her own way to prove herself. So because of these observations with each interaction that I have with this teacher, I am highly, highly focused on her perspective. I really take great care in listening while she is interacting with me so that way I’m not missing something or making her feel unimportant or unseen. She needs to feel some success along with receiving highly explicit directives. And while her profile with that high will low skill and instructive ranges, while that profile suggests that she needs more intense specific strategies such as co-planning and co-teaching, she, this teacher expressly avoids any support where she feels like her ability is undermined. So because of this aversion to the more intensive coaching, I have really focused her strategies of support on those whole group strategies that everyone receives so that she really is feeling a little bit of grace and a little bit of love and support without being too overwhelming. And then these strategies, here are the next steps. She has received some one-on-one PD already and some support with assessments, but these highlighted strategies are really the next steps, and because of her aversion to that intensive one-on-one support, these are going to be the next steps to propel her forward, and they’re really going to be focused on that team setting until she feels safe in, excuse me, a more intense coaching setting.

Hopefully that shift happens, but something that it’s important to recognize is that and to point out is that this is a teacher that’s spent in our building for about a year and a half and the progress that we’ve made to even be able to be part of those PDs and give that support with assessments and positive feedback, that’s very strong progress for this person with the profile that she has, and it’s going to take time, but she’s really progressing in a positive direction, and it is just going to continue to take time to build that trust and shift those beliefs, which is why I’m always really, really focused on her perspective and paying close attention to the information that she’s giving me.

All right, so teacher B. Teacher B is a teacher that is low will high skill, and based on the coaching rubric really is a hybrid between the guided discovery and self-directed. But because this teacher has received support in the past, quite a bit of support and has experienced some success in some subgroups of kids, this teacher really doesn’t think that support is necessary, has kind of really fallen back on the support that he is willing to accept, and that’s because he is been teaching the same grade and curriculum for several years. So this is a teacher that I’m probably sure everybody that’s here has worked with. You can think of somebody in your life that kind of falls into this range. And as I’m thinking about where this teacher is in that will skill matrix and the strategies that might support his growth in that hybrid of discovery and self-directed learning, I’m taking all of that information and the success that I’ve seen him have and listening and really paying attention to the body language provided so that I can see, okay, where do I give him some compassion? Where do I need to give him some grace and how can I push him to take a closer look at those other subgroups of students that have not been experiencing the success that others have in his space moving forward, some of the shoulder coaching and co-planning and discussion and co-planning with pedagogy, knowing what’s coming next year. Those are going to be some strategies that really push this teacher forward.

All right, so I have one more teacher, teacher C. This educator is low will, low skill, but she has strong management structures in place. This the low skill placement is due to subject knowledge understanding, and that’s because this teacher was teaching a much lower grade level for many, many years and is now teaching a much higher different content than she’s used to. So there’s a learning curve and she has at least the foundations to really push herself forward. But this teacher, because of this, the low scale placement is, I’m sorry. So she knows that she has experience, so she believes she’s not in need of coaching even though this placement is different for her, and she’s also new to our building. Last year she was due to our building, even after 20 years of teaching, there’s still a learning curve. So by listening to this teacher, it’s really evident that her ego is bruised, and why wouldn’t it be?

She has so many years of success in the space where she was at. Because of all of this information, she’s really falling into the illustrative and guided discovery, but she thinks that she’s ready to just be self-directed. And this is, like I said, it’s due to that new content and new curriculum. So the situation that she’s in, it has her defenses up, which is also making it difficult for her to build team relationships. She’s also coming from a place where students perform lower, which is holding her back from challenging the students that she has now. So based on this information, really the goal was to really build a relationship with this person, and that’s been a difficult road. I initially spent quite a bit of time listening and learning about this teacher, both as a teacher and a person, and that’s how I recognize this teacher has a high need for love, compassion, and grace, and I attempt to be a buffer supporting conversations between her and her team.

She gets a lot of positive feedback to help support her and to give her that little bit of love and grace. I purposely share information about myself and listen to her stories, not only to help her feel included, but to feel loved and to help understand her perspective. So that’s why you see those positive ghost Walks, learning Walks, team building, those are all some different strategies that we’re using with this teacher so that she can be more open to receiving feedback in a positive way. And that’s really a shift that we’ve been able to make with this person over the last couple years. There’s been a huge difference in how she’s learning to interact with the people in this space, and that really comes from listening to her, recognizing what her needs are and reflecting on where she’s coming from.

So this is just a quick why I know using these three resources works. I ask for feedback from my teachers pretty regularly, so this is their most recent rate of my effectiveness as their instructional coach. You can see here that there are teachers in my building that are falling within. Each one of these will skill matrix boxes and no matter where they are, so one is ineffective, five is highly effective. You can see the majority is saying, Hey, the strategy, the practices that I use are really highly effective. Some other feedback I wanted to share with you, you’ll see here, you can see some of the quotes from my teacher feedback, how did I build our coaching relationship? What I like about this feedback is my people that I work with, they don’t know those resources that I use to help figure out how to work with them.

But building that coaching relationship, there’s a theme here that really outlines that framework that I try to follow. You can see I’m listening. I’m personal. I provide both personal and professional support. Snacks are always helpful, but authenticity, feedback, easy discussions, and being able to trust you always. So those are without even knowing the framework and the strategies that I use, my people are really expressing what those are in their own way. Some things that I think are important to notice and remember, this work is something that takes years and perseverance, and most importantly, if you don’t remember to see your teachers that you’re working with and coaching as people, you have to remember to see them as people first. And if you do, it is so, so worth it.

Just in case anybody was wondering, these are some typical coaching strategies that I lean on once I have all of the information collected and know how I need to build that relationship with those teachers. Level one, you can see that column are the least intense coaching practices. Level three are the most intense coaching practices. These are just a few that I lean on some depending on the teacher works better with others listening tours and daily check-ins. Those are strategies that I use with everybody. If you don’t know what a listening tour is, it’s really just a one-on-one conversation with predetermined questions to help guide your work. And you can read more about that in the coaching redefined book. And then daily check-ins one’s really important. I try to do that every day and it helps me to be visible in the building and in the classrooms, and it also helps me to instantly provide answers or support or needs in the moment in the day, so my people just know that I’m available because of those. And last thing I wanted to leave you with is my last piece of feedback, and this is really my why. This is something that one of my teachers shared, and it really outlines the reason I lean on the relationship framework that I do. So that’s what my why and why I continue to advocate for this important work. Thank you very much for stepping into this session.

Matthew Short:

Excellent. Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you, Dana, so much for your presentation today. I think this was a great reminder of just the importance and value that mentors offer to teachers out in the field and how important it is to have this kind of structure, rigorous process to make sure that they feel supported, but also to the larger point that teachers are still people, we’re individuals. We have our own needs and kind of things that we need to get us moving forward in that journey. And I think this was a great reminder that every person’s journey is unique, so we appreciate you reminding us of those kind of facets that you’re encountering on a day-to-day basis.