Guided Online Coaching: Teacher Development Through Peer Interaction

Presenters:

Gregory Child, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Michigan State University

Greg Child is an assistant professor of English as a second language (ESL) teacher education at Michigan State University’s College of Education. His work centers on educational equity for emergent multilingual learners through the development of pre- and in-service teachers’ mindsets and pedagogical practices. His work focuses primarily on field experiences and opportunities for teachers to negotiate culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogical practices. He also investigates digital technologies and how schools have worked toward digital equity as well as the social and emotional well-being of in-service teachers during times of high stress. Through his work, Greg seeks to empower teachers to engage with multilingual learners and provide them with high-quality, equitable educational experiences.

Kim Song, Professor of Department of Educator Preparation and Leadership of COE, University of Missouri – St. Louis

Kim Song has been working at UMSL since 2002. She has been teaching undergraduate and graduate TESOL courses. Thanks to the UM system eLearning grant, Kim developed all of the seven TESOL courses online and has taught the online TESOL courses since 2007. Applying theories from translanguaging, experiential teaching-by-doing (Dewey, 1916), evidence and performance-based teaching, racially, linguistically, and culturally responsive (RLCR) content teaching, her main research lines of inquiry examine: (1) community translanguaging for multilingual family literacy development, (2) evidence-based teaching and learning, 3) intersection of EL teaching and virtual coaching, 4) creativity in technology-mediated teaching for immigrant/refugee children in PK-12 contexts, and 5) equity in EL teaching and learning using translanguaging as a theory guide and a pedagogy.

Transcript:

Gregory Child:

… get into our presentation. We’re really excited to share with you today about guided online coaching and how GoReact is a fantastic tool to facilitate teacher development through peer interaction. I am Dr. Greg Child and I’m excited to be here with my colleague, Dr. Kim Song. We really like this model that we’re going to show you today. It opens doors that haven’t previously existed with many of our in-service teachers, and we’ll get into that in a little bit more detail. It’s super exciting and I just want to tell you everything right now, but before we get going, I have to follow the order of the slides or we’ll just say too much too quickly.

Kim Song:

Hello, I’m Kim Song and Greg and I have been colleagues at University of Missouri, Sam Lewis. We both are professors, I mean instructors and coaches for teachers of multilingual learners. In this presentation, English learners and immersion bilingual learners and multilingual learners will be used interchangeably, so please forgive us just interchanging using of these three terms. Okay, keywords you have to remember is GTG. First G is guided peer coaching. Second letter T, you have to remember translanguaging content curriculum unit template. We’re going to use TCOT. And the last G is GoReact. Hopefully you remember these three keywords and phrases.

Agenda includes proposed of the presentation, key setting in GoReact, three sections of translanguaging content curriculum unit template, and the three cycles of guided online coaching at GoReact then we’ll share our discussion. This presentation shares the effectiveness and utility of the virtual teacher professional development model through, again, guided online coaching, which consists of pre-conference, observation, and post-conference. TCOT translanguaging content curriculum unit template, which is the model for teaching, which includes also three cycles, pre-instruction, lesson delivery, and assess and reflect. And finally, the third proposed is how GoReact facilitates each of the three cycles of the guided coaching.

Gregory Child:

Before we get going too far into talking about the guided online coaching, we wanted to address a few key settings in GoReact if you would like to recreate something similar. The first that we want to talk about is stimulus. This needs to be a stimulus type assignment. And if you’re not familiar with this type of an assignment, it’s when there’s media presented to students or participants and they then get to engage with the media either watching or reading the media and then they’ll provide their reflection on it. For guided online coaching to work, we really need the materials to be participant created. We’re looking at lesson plans and teaching videos and student artifacts. And so those all need to be created by our participants for them to reflect on them.

So we really need to use a stimulus assignment type for this. The next thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that with the feedback, it needs to be open peer review. We know that there are a lot of options. There’s the private and closed peer review options, and there are fantastic times in which we would do that, but the goal with guided online coaching is to create a space where students can interact with each other, can interact with their peers to develop lesson plans and reflect upon what they’re doing in the classroom space. In order for this to happen, you need to make sure that your settings are on open peer review so that all comments are visible to all participants.

And this one, we need to make sure that they are presenter selected materials as well. Because we want the students, or in this case our in-service teachers, we want our teachers to share their created materials, it’s important that we give them the option to do that. One of the reasons that we also included this here is when we were working with our in-service teachers, we wanted everything to be uniform. We wanted to use PDFs and MP3s, and we realized that there was some instruction required on creating those. So whatever format you choose to have your participants use, you may need to provide more instruction than intended or expected to create those materials.

The other thing we want to talk about is grading rubrics. We will show you the rubric that we use later on, but rubrics for us are super important. They’re important not because it’s a way to grade, and we wanted the rubric to serve as more than just, “Here are the points that you got in each category.” Rubrics for us are another avenue through which teachers can receive feedback. By this we mean that when we created rubrics, we use scale scores, but we also placed the text feedback option with each of our categories. That way when feedback was provided in the rubric, we required that there be some comments as well. And the reason we say we required this is because not only did the instructors complete the rubric, but we also had the teachers complete the rubrics on themselves and for their peers as well.

A few things we learned in making the rubric, GoReact is fantastic and there’s so many options there. And so when we started to play with the rubrics, we realized as we were building that there were more options and we actually found it easier to create our rubric in a Word doc and then export it into GoReact just because it allowed all of us to comment on it. Once we put the rubrics in GoReact, you could still edit it, but it was a little bit difficult for our team to everybody get in and revise the rubrics. But once they’re made, you can save that rubric to a library and you can call that rubric up whenever you need it. There are a few other options that we have used throughout the guided online coaching cycles. Some we used more than others. We want to call out specifically the marker set, which is absolutely fantastic.

We were able to select some categories that our participants would jump in and it acts as a stamp for the different items that were observed. And with the relatively recent update where you can now add texts or comments to your markers, it is a fantastic tool to use. The student rubric was very important for the guided online coaching cycles. It was the way that we had… When teachers provided feedback to each other, we also had them complete the rubric and the rubric served as a guide. So having that student rubric accessible was incredibly important. And then we have instructor attachments, which are exactly what they sound like, but then there’s the recorded instructions and the feedback instructions. And even though we had all of these assignment sheets out and ready to go, when we described what needed to happen, we made videos describing what needed to happen, we found that we needed to follow up with some recording instructions and some feedback instructions as well. So those are the settings that we wanted to talk about really quickly. Now we’ll jump into guided online coaching.

Kim Song:

I like to introduce three cycles of guided online coaching at GoReact. If you look at guided online coaching, I already introduced cycle one is pre-conference. Cycle two is observation. Cycle three is post-conference. This happened at GoReact. And then I put three cycles of TCOT translanguaging content curriculum unit template. I want you to see how they made their way to online coaching. So very first stage of the TCOT is preparation, which means pre-instruction. Second one is deliver the lesson you prepared, lesson delivery. The last one is review, assess, and reflect. So those are the three cycles we are going to ask our teachers to prepare.

Completing the TCOT includes a lot of effort, and after they completed the TCOT, they have to upload their TCOT to GoReact and the teacher creates the presentation based on the completed TCOT. For example, in pre-conference, they will talk with a coach in pretty much dialogic way not to tell the coachee what to do and how to do, and then they revise with a revised lesson plan. Then they are going to present the lesson or unit in the classroom setting. And they also attach their TCOT and any curriculum materials to GoReact when they make a presentation. Once the presentation is completed in this pre-conference GoReact, peer-guided coaches view and comment at the GoReact. That’s pretty much last cycle, post-conference.

Okay, here we go. TCOT, section one is pre-instruction. I don’t want to read the whole thing, but I kind of want to share with you how important it is for teachers to prepare their lesson to be successful. And Greg and I are both teacher educators who actually train the teachers of multilingual learners. So you’ll see a lot of language education pieces. So one thing you probably did not see in other lesson unit is demography. Since our P through 12 students are from overseas or refugees and immigrants, we really have to check their English language proficiency. If it is a dual-language program day, we also check the Spanish language proficiency, but that’s the focus of it. But not only their English language proficiency, we have to check their background knowledge. What about the parents? Do they live with the parents, where they were born, how long they have stayed in the United States? What are the languages they use at home, siblings, the language they use at school, in recess? What about their interests? What about their special needs? So special education needs.

So those are the things we have to ask our teachers to include for every single multilingual learner. The other thing I kind of want to is the middle part in the middle, we want our teachers to prepare the key vocabulary or phrases and the context in the sentence and as well as a discourse context. So the reason why we want our teachers to write in in the pre-instruction, so when you prepare the lessons, there may be more than 30 vocabularies and you want your multilingual learners to memorize and understand and all that kind of stuff, but that’s not possible. So make sure you identify five to seven, I usually say that in the elementary level, and five to seven key vocabulary. Our multilingual learners must master to understand main idea.

So that’s how they do. The other thing I like to introduce is instead of writing just instructional objectives, we call content enhanced language objectives. It’s not only language content as well, because our goal is not just to improve English language proficiency, but expand their content concept competencies as well. So in here I also include what other things they have to include in their content enhanced language objectives we call CELO. So that’s another thing they have to write, and we are so serious about leading our teachers to write content enhanced language objectives. Then there are six different levels in English proficiency, but you’ll see only five there because when they reach level six, they’re not going to be called English language learners or other kind of name. So we want to have the support, differently differentiated support based on levels of proficiency. And these are the sections. I strongly believe the success of the instruction depends on how much, how accurately, how deeply teachers prepare before they teach.

Section two is the lesson delivery or presentation. I’m not going to read the whole thing, and I kind of want you to see what teaching’s supposed to be like in the language education. The very first one is probably teachers direct instruction, what teachers do first, and the second part is what learners do collaboratively. Cooperative learning is so important in language education or content language education. The last one is individual, so what we call independent study. They have to sit down and then each of the multilingual learner has to kind of produce the evidence. They achieve content enhanced language objectives. Last section is review, assess, and reflection. You have to review and make sure if the multilingual learners understand enough so they can actually demonstrate their understanding why producing the evidence based on the standards and content standards. And then reflections, teachers need to reflect and see how they have done and how they can do better. So these are the three cycles included in TCOT.

Gregory Child:

Right. And so once we have the TCOT complete, then we really jump into the three cycles of guided online coaching. The first cycle, the preparation piece is the pre-conference. And this is how the pre-conference looks when we completed a GoReact. This is a very busy slide. We’re going to break it down a little bit with everyone. We’ll start in the upper left. When we set up our GoReact and when we give instructions to our teacher candidates and our in-service teachers, we tell them that they need to attach a completed copy of their lesson plan as well. So we always have up here that little paper clip. That’s where they have to attach their completed lesson plan. We actually found that when teachers were sharing lesson plans here, that other teachers were downloading them and kind of looking at the activities and incorporating some of those activities into their own instruction as well.

Because we set the assignment up as a stimulus, the first media that is uploaded is that completed lesson plan. And so the completed TCOT is what we see here on the left. Once they upload that, they then record themselves talking about the lesson plan, and that’s what we have here on the right. And this is actually super exciting. We saw some really cool things here. When teachers were just giving us lesson plans, we interpret the lesson plan from the lens of a teacher instructor, and sometimes we see gaps and sometimes we don’t fully understand what they’re referring to.

But when the teachers, when they had an opportunity to talk about their lesson plan, there was so much that they said that wasn’t written. Our teachers, a lot of them had been teaching for many years and they had so much experience and there were things that they had planned that they didn’t include in that lesson plan, and so providing them an opportunity to sit down and say, “Okay, guys, this is my lesson plan. This is what I’m doing because of my EL demography. This is my content enhanced language objective,” they were able to go through and provide us with so much rationale for it. It was a lot of fun.

It took time to get there. The first time teachers put their lesson plans up here, there was a lot of, “This is my lesson plan and this is what we see here and this is what we see here,” and it was more of a narration. By the time we got to our last coaching cycle, it was, I don’t want to say show and tell, but it was kind of like, “This is what I’ve created and it’s going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” We also encouraged our teachers to ask questions. We told them that a lesson plan doesn’t have to be 100% complete when they do their pre-conference cycle. If they have a great activity, but they have a question, like, “How can I really assess this piece?”, then they should ask their peers because all of their peers are going to watch this and provide feedback as well.

So they started to ask each other questions. If they had an activity and they were unsure, like, “I kind of think this is going to work, but I need some suggestions just to tighten it up,” they started to interact and engage all about lesson preparation. So this was really fun to watch as they kind of grew together and they started to support each other better. Everything we have here on this right half, this is the peer interaction that we saw. Now, I know that a lot of us are familiar with GoReact, but just really quickly, what we invited teachers to do, we invited them to provide audio and video feedback to each other. Most of them provided text, which is fine. And at first, the text that we got was, “Oh, I really like this,” but we didn’t get a lot of detail as to why they like it.

As we engaged more and as we worked more with our teachers, they started to get very specific, and then we started to see… There were questions. We had an in-service teacher, not the one giving the presentation, who she says, “I struggle with my EBL’s ability to answer in their home language as well.” Like, they’re starting to relate with each other on things that they struggled with. But we started to see these conversations grow. We also have a rubric that we used for this section. This rubric is very simple. Because they’ve done so much work in the TCOT already, this rubric served more as a memory queue. We were teaching in-service teachers at the time, and they were very busy and they would read the assignment description, but things would get lost between the assignment description and completed assignment, and so we found if we put things in a rubric, those things weren’t lost so much.

So for example, we have provide feedback. As soon as that entered the rubric, the feedback started. Now, we know that some of it started because it was in the rubric and there were points, and so some of it started as, “Okay, I’ve met my required pieces.” But as we continued with more and more conference cycles, we saw way more than just the two pieces of feedback, and some teachers were excited, like, “Oh yeah, love this. Let’s talk about it.” And so we saw them, again, begin to grow and work with each other. We do have a little video clip here that we’d like to share. This is an elementary teacher. She’s completed her pre-conference cycle, and we’re going to watch just a minute or so of it.

Speaker 3:

… a resource for writing because it’s a laminated word map that they’re going to use. Going to flip back. Multimedia, there’s going to be an early finisher iPad game on Boom Cards. Boom Cards is a website that has lots… There’s paid or free activities in all different areas, but I found a great sight word game that has a lot of the similar power words that we use. Interactive and collaborative supports would be the word map that we’re going to use for our writing, and then we’re playing a collaborative matching memory card game together. Sorry, I have to flip back through these. Native language supports would be the cards in Spanish, and then racially, linguistically, culturally responsive supports. Linguistically, the texts that we’re going to read, it’s called All Sorts of Pets that they can… Sorry. It has the high frequency words in it, so it’s linguistically supportive in that. I would consider it a culturally responsive text for my ABLs because they can share about their experiences with animals or their family’s experience with pets and animals.

Gregory Child:

Okay, we’re going to pause it there. There were a couple things here that we wanted to point out. First, when she’s talking about Boom Cards, that was not something that all of her peers were familiar with. So she’s sharing this idea of how she’s going to incorporate Boom Cards into her instruction, but some of her peers followed up with, “Ooh, I need to find out what this is. I need to use this a little bit more.” Another thing that we see here that we really liked was when we look at a lesson plan and they tell us the materials and they say, “Okay, this is the piece that is culturally sustaining,” sometimes as teacher educators, we kind of have to, not guess, but kind of fill in some gaps. What makes it culturally sustaining? Here with the video, she tells us why. She tells us that her students have had experiences with animals and she’s making that connection.

So there’s some things that we don’t have to do when the teachers get to tell us about their lesson plans. There’s also one more thing that we saw, and I’m going to go up two slides to help illustrate this. When we did our pre-conference cycles and we had teachers upload their lesson plans as PDFs, one of the things that we struggled with was… So you can see the lesson plan here on the left, and you can zoom in on it, you can switch pages, you can move it around. There’s a lot of manipulation that you get to do with the lesson plan, which is fantastic. The one struggle we ran into is our teacher candidates… Or our in-service teachers, excuse me.

When our in-service teachers were talking about their lesson plan, sometimes they would say, “Oh, and right here. Oh, and you can see this piece.” But that lesson plan, as a viewer, I need to be able to move the lesson plan to the page where the presenter is on. So we did have to tell our teachers on our second go around, “Please make sure that you tell us where you are in the lesson plan.” And once they did, it was fantastic. So they would tell us, “Hey, on page two, you can see in my demography table this, that, or the other.” And so that made it easier for us to follow along. But we really loved to see how our teachers began to work with each other as they developed these lesson plans.

The next cycle or cycle two is the observation at GoReact. The observation cycle, when we use GoReact, we combine our observation and post-conference cycles together. To complete the observation cycle, the in-service teachers, they go and they look at the feedback they’ve been provided from their peers. They need to then revise their lesson plans based on those pieces of feedback they’ve been given. One of the things that we learned was our in-service teachers who have provided feedback to their peers, they wanted to see what changes were made to the lesson plan. They wanted to see if their feedback was taken up, and so one of the things that we started asking our teachers to do is highlight the pieces that you edit and revise, so then when everybody comes back through, we can kind of quickly see, what did you change? So they revise their lesson plan and then they need to teach it in their classrooms.

This was kind of more complicated than we had thought it would be. A lot of teachers, we told teachers, “Use your cell phone, turn your laptop around, put it on a Zoom meeting and record it. Make it super simple.” Dr. Sean needs to tell him it doesn’t need to be a Steven Spielberg HD production. It needs to be, we want to see your teaching. That said, we had a lot of teachers still struggle. They were able to get their videos recorded on their phone. Sometimes the students held the phone, which was kind of fun to watch. But we had a couple teachers who, they had a digital camcorder and they set it up and they recorded these huge video… When I say huge, the file size was astronomical, and it was very difficult to pair it down to make it so we could put it into GoReact, but we had some great teaching videos come out of it when all is said and done.

To complete the observation cycle, the teaching video is uploaded into GoReact, and then the teacher watches their video and they reflect on it while watching. This was something that was a little bit awkward for some of our teachers to begin with, but again, the more that we did it, the more comfortable they became with watching themselves teach and the more open their reflections became. We do want to talk about the post-observation conference here as well. When we talk about the post-observation conference, this has to do a lot with peers. After the teacher has reflected on their video, peers are then invited to come and watch. And they do. And while they’re watching the teaching videos, they also provide feedback to each other. They ask each other questions, they build each other up. Some of our teachers were very critical of their own practices, and so it was nice when their peers would come up and say, “Hey, no, no, no, no, no, this was great because all of this other stuff happened from what you did. It’s awesome. Don’t be so hard.”

So it was good to see some of that. This is also when we have teachers complete rubrics for their peers. And then the last thing that would happen, after peers have commented on each other’s videos, that’s when the coaches or as teacher educators, that’s when we would step in and provide feedback as well. We noticed if we provided feedback too soon, then whatever we said was the last thing that was said on the video and people wouldn’t come back and provide more feedback. So we’ve talked a lot about the observation in post-conference. We want to show you what it looks like and then we’ll show you a video clip. There are two ways that this was completed, and this is the way that we had asked our teachers to complete it. Up here, again, with the attachments, we asked teachers to upload their revised lesson plan, but we also wanted them to provide student artifacts that they needed to address in their teaching video.

So here we have the lesson plan and artifacts. We have our teachers that they would watch themselves teach. This is where we have our rubric, and then there’s, again, the peer comments. Very similar to the way that we did our pre-conference. The second option, which was a little bit unexpected, this was something that some of the teachers did kind of on their own, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of uploading their teaching video and then recording themselves watching the video, they would upload their lesson plan and then put their teaching video next to it. The reason this was kind of interesting was we got to follow along in the lesson plan while we were watching the video, which was, it was kind of interesting, kind of fun, and then their reflections were put over here as text. Both options worked well. Most of our teachers did option one, but the few who did option two, they did it very well, well enough that we didn’t feel like we needed to stop them and have them go back and redo it.

This last slide, there was just one more thing that we wanted to show you before we talk about the example, and that was a few things that our teachers didn’t realize. They would turn the videos on, and I don’t know if they were doing other things at the same time, but they didn’t realize that the comments pop up here at the bottom. And then because a lot of the feedback that we as instructors provided was audio and/or video, if they didn’t have the autoplay comments turned on, then the audio and video comments would almost get skipped over. So there were a few things that we did have to remind our teachers when it came time to viewing their post-conference GoReacts. And this is our rubric. And Dr. Song, I’ll throw it to you on that one.

Kim Song:

Yeah, this is the post-conference one, but when you look at the right-hand side column, there’s total point, but each of the bullet has the point. So what it says is those teachers, in-service teachers, graduate students, they’re going to receive this rubric, pre-conference and post-conference rubrics before they prepare the lesson. So we don’t really surprise them. They can also participate in terms of editing and changing the content if they have a great rationale. So we actually construct these rubrics together and then they have points. However, at the end when we use the rubrics, we use this one and give the point. So not only the content, their manner, their timeliness in terms of submitting their rubrics to the GoReact. So this is a great tool not only to assess their teaching, but to their self-reflection, self-assessment, and all of those things. So I kind of want to show you the rubrics we are using for the coaching.

Gregory Child:

Yeah, and we had students provide rationale. You couldn’t just give a point without saying why the point was provided.

Kim Song:

Oh, definitely. Definitely.

Gregory Child:

Yeah. And so let’s look at this next video. This is a teacher who has just completed her post-conference.

Speaker 4:

Okay, so these motions that I’m doing, it’s capital letter and [inaudible 00:32:09], TPR. So during our dictado, we talk about our dictado paragraph and we make sure that I emphasize, we start our sentence with a capital letter and we end it with a period. And sometimes we even do the sound. So for example, if we’re talking about, “The big red car just drove past my house,” so it’d be like, “The red big car just drove past my house.” And we would make that sound to know that there’s a period and you need to stop. Very good. Okay. Now, how can I start answering this question? [foreign language 00:32:53]. How can I start? [foreign language 00:32:58].

Gregory Child:

Okay, I’ll stop it there. I could watch this whole video because what’s super fun… And I wish we had time that we could show you her first teaching video at GoReact and her second post-conference at GoReact, because the very first time she completed a GoReact cycle, she narrates what she sees here. “Here, I did this. Here, the students did that. Here, I did this. Here, the students did that.” And we didn’t get a lot more than the narration. But when we got closer, the more that we did, and we got closer to the end of our program, she started to talk about the things that we couldn’t see. At one point in time, she talks about why everybody has to have a blanket. Her room is too cold, they need a blanket. Then she talks about why they do the dictado. She talks about why they use Spanish and why they use English and why they choose what they choose. We get much deeper and more information about her teaching than that narration that she started with.

So we have a few challenges that we want to address. The first is the video size limits. We know that the size limits has changed, but it was two gigabytes for a long time. And as we mentioned, we have a few teachers who struggled to keep their videos smaller. We had a lot of late night Zoom meetings and text chains and stuff to try and help teachers to reduce the video size without taking the video quality out. The other challenge, another challenge I should say that we ran into was when teachers were observing themselves teach, they wouldn’t always pause the video to provide the reflection. And if they don’t pause the video, then they end up talking over their video and it’s a voice over a voice, and it makes it really hard to hear what is she saying as a teacher versus what is she saying as a reflective individual on the teaching. That we did resolve, we just had to remind our students, “Hey, pause the video before you talk.”

GoReact is fantastic at reminding people to wear headphones when they’re reflecting. We found that we also needed to remind students that, otherwise the video would record the audio from the video, and we had this echo. And it made it super hard to hear, especially when we wanted to hear what the students were saying. It just made it really difficult to hear. The other issue that we ran into, and this is not something so much with GoReact as much as the importance of acknowledging the technological capabilities of the regions where we are working. One of our school districts, that whole region was known to have very poor internet connections and internet quality just all around. And so whenever they would upload videos, it would take a lot longer than it should. And again, we had some late night phone calls, late night emails and Zoom meetings, like, “I’m still trying to upload, I’m still trying to upload. Please, it’s not late. I started to upload. Please.” Things that we had to work through. And we did. But those were some of the challenges that we kind of didn’t expect.

Kim Song:

Okay, we have three minutes, discussions and conclusions. GoReact creates opportunity for mutual collaboration, meaning the in-service teachers may not have that opportunities if it was not GoReact, which means they are so busy they can’t really find the time to visit other classrooms and share their ideas. But GoReact, they can do it during their planning time, lunchtime, after school. And once they get motivated, then they don’t really care. So that was a wonderful thing I have observed. As teachers became more comfortable with each other, they offered more detailed feedback and very specific one. So it is amazing. So it’s almost like mimicking each other, compare each other. “I want to provide the more suggestions.”

So from a larger research project we published in 2023, we noted that while in-service teachers participated in guided online coaching using GoReact for their professional development, they began to implement more racially, linguistically, and culturally sustaining practices. But you have to know one more thing. As a middle westerner, our teachers are… I think almost 80% or even 90% of our teachers are monolinguals who teach multilingual learners and working with multilingual families. So this is an amazing tool. They can kind of give opportunity to open up their mind and learn from each other. Of course, learn from students and families as well. Thank you very much.

Gregory Child:

Yes, we’re excited. If you have any questions, I think we have a few minutes for questions. And if we don’t get to answer your questions, there’s our contact information there. We’d like to continue the conversation however we can.

Matthew Short:

Excellent. Thank you, Dr. Child and Dr. Song. So I do have one question in the Q&A from Elizabeth Keenan. She is asking, “How much time in your estimation do you think it took for a teacher to complete the steps of the cycle?” She specifies, “Not including the teaching of the actual lesson, how much time was there between a teacher uploading a draft of their lesson plan, getting feedback and revising it, and then implementing it with their students?” So whichever part of that question you want to start with and tackle, feel free to do so.

Kim Song:

Can I start, Greg?

Gregory Child:

Yes, yes.

Kim Song:

What we do is, this is a course, one course, practicum course at the end of their teacher courses, and this is a teacher practicum course. So one cycle takes about two weeks, two to three weeks. So three cases, they have to create three cases of guided online coaching cycles using GoReact. So two weeks, we kind of give them the schedules, when is the pre-conference, when observation, and when is the post-conference? So teachers are preparing their TCOT. Completing TCOT takes probably lots of time in the very first cycle. However, when they get used to it, they do it much, much faster. So it’s two-week things.

And then once they get motivated and they only need to provide two feedbacks, and some of teachers do 10 feedbacks, “Can I go to another group and watch their teaching and stuff?” So that’s the last cycles we had. So I’m not sure if that is the answer to your question, but I’m not… I don’t know how many hours, but from my configuration, the lesson TCOT probably it takes at least to two hours in the first cycle. Well, once you have the first cycle, then probably you can complete within an hour.

Gregory Child:

Yeah, and so when we started that very first coaching cycle, we gave almost four weeks with the TCOT. One of the things with the TCOT, the way it’s designed is it incorporates pieces of all the courses that the students had already taken. And so it’s really a culmination of everything that they have done. So that first time, like Dr. Song said, that first time filling it out, it just takes a little bit of time, a couple hours, more or less, but all of the pieces they have already done in different courses. When we got to our last coaching cycle, we told them that we would never make you do it in less than two weeks, and our teachers came back and said, “Oh, but we want to do it in less than two weeks. Let’s go faster. Let’s do more. We like this interaction. Let’s go faster so that we can get more in the time that we have left.” So at first it was slow, but once they kind of got the momentum of it, it picked up and it started to go much quicker.

Kim Song:

Yeah, yeah. Based on their feedback, so we have to give the surveys because this is the part of our grant as well, so we have to evaluate our grant activities. And they were just being so honest, they were very frustrated with the TCOT because in preparation sections, we want very specific information about the multilingual learners. But however, when they graduate, they completed the whole project and they said TCOT is the one who saved their lives. So we’re very happy. But almost at the end of our grant, we met GoReact. So I feel very lucky to have Greg as my partner, and then Greg agreed, and I think Greg spent so much time to make it happen. So I kind of want to appreciate Greg’s efforts and your enthusiasm toward GoReact.

Gregory Child:

It was definitely a team effort. It took us all to figure out how to make it work, but when it works, the teachers really do like it.

Matthew Short:

Thank you both so much for answering that question that we had there. And I think with that, we have kind of reached our time here. So just want to also reiterate thank again, Dr. Child and Dr. Song for their presentation here today. Sharing that experience and that value that teaching candidates are seeing with their peer interactions and being able to support, bolster confidence, help keep everybody feeling engaged in that process and gaining from that exchange of feedback and critique on each other’s work.