Instructional Coaching

It's been an eventful few years since I last posted on this blog. I finished my position as a University Supervisor for pre-service teachers at Brigham Young  University. (My school district puts a three-year cap on that position.) I went back into the classroom for two years teaching first grade, and this school year I am an Instructional Coach focusing on Literacy for two elementary schools in my district.  To say the past few months have been a learning curve is a huge understatement!  What is an Instructional Coach? An Instructional Coach is someone who is a support to the teachers at the school. They can do any and all of the following things:  model, support, coach, collaborate, observe, plan, take data, work with small groups of students, work with whole classes of students, provide professional development, research, and find resources. And those are just the things I can think of off the top of my head. A typical day for me lately looks like the following:   8:00 - Pre-conferences with teachers about upcoming lessons 9:00 - Read with a small group of students 9:30 - Model Guided Reading 10:00 - Model Shared Reading 10:30 - Observe lessons from earlier pre-conferences 12:00 - Lunch 12:30 - Reading Diagnostics  1:30 - Model Informational Writing Lesson 2:00 - Work with small group of students on beginning sounds 2:30 - Benchmark new student 3:00 - Plan tomorrow's GR lessons 3:30 - Post-conference with teachers about lessons observed 4:00 - Head home I love the variety of my job and how I get to still work with students and all the teachers at my schools. One of the most important components of this job is to create relationships. If you don't have good relationships with your teachers, they won't want you coming into their classroom. So, as a new coach, building those relationships has been my main goal and focus.  I think I'll end this post right here. I'll continue talking about instructional coaching in my next few posts.