Last month, we featured beginning-of-year instructional coaching practices to kickstart student achievement. We know, though, that strong classroom management is a necessary but insufficient ingredient for student learning. So once classroom foundations are set, how do you shift to coaching with student learning at the forefront? We propose that you Monitor the Learning.
The Monitor the Learning framework for instructional coaching operates around the student work analysis cycle. As an instructional coach, you:
- Observe a priority lesson to gain insight into the teaching and learning that took place.
- Independently analyze the student work from the lesson’s priority task, comparing it to a rigorous exemplar.
- Meet with the teacher to coach them through their own analysis of the work.
- Co-plan the reteach around the trending gap.
- Co-monitor and, where necessary, co-teach the reteach to grow the teacher and ensure learning happens.
…and repeat the cycle!
The premise is simple: great coaching should drive student learning. By centering student work in the coaching cycle, we guarantee that it does.
Creating the Conditions
As we collectively approach the 25-26 school year’s one month mark, it’s time to begin the shift from beginning of year instructional coaching to Monitoring the Learning, and there are key steps to create the conditions for success in this work.
For one, school leaders need to determine which work is the highest priority for analysis. Depending on your school structures, levels of curricular and assessment alignment, and coaching aptitude, there are two approaches: keeping your cycles predictable and systematized, or keeping them flexible.
For schools in which curriculum and assessment are aligned and shared, or where you have a newer coaching team, it may make sense to select a weekly or bi-weekly assignment for each content or grade span for student work analysis. For example, all elementary classrooms could analyze the weekly round up math quiz, or all middle and high school science teachers could rotate through analyzing each section of a lab report over the course of 4-6 weeks. This lowers the pressure on working memory (no one has to remember to select a new assignment for analysis or evaluate what is highest priority!), and allows school leaders to more readily gauge trends and support their coaching teams.
For schools where there is more curriculum and assessment autonomy, or where coaches and teachers are masters of their craft, school leaders may opt to have coaching teams select their priority assignments. In this case, we recommend that at the start of a new unit, teachers and their coaches do a unit lookahead in which they identify the highest priority assignments every 1-2 weeks of the unit.
After identifying what to analyze, school leaders should determine if and how they want their coaching teams to track each analysis cycle. We recommend a system that allows for easy visibility into the state of analysis in each classroom, but that isn’t so cumbersome that it inadvertently disincentivizes input – something like this Google sheets tracker.
Finally, create a professional learning plan to grow your teachers and coaches in their ability to analyze student work effectively before embarking on the Monitor the Learning cycle. A few non-negotiable elements of effective analysis: crafting a high quality exemplar first, and determining a specific trending error (“students are struggling with addition” won’t lead to an effective reteach in the way that “students are struggling to line up their numbers by place value, leading to incorrect addition” will). Enlist content experts, department leads, or veteran coaches in this work where helpful.
With these foundations in place, you’re ready to begin! And if you’d like to learn more or dig into specific elements of the framework, including how to support teachers in work analysis or coach them in the classroom, we hope you’ll join us at the Florida Charter School Conference and School Choice Summit in October. FCI will be leading a pre-session on Monitor the Learning during registration on Tuesday, as well as hosting a session during the conference itself and we’d love to see you there. Keep an eye out for upcoming communications from FCI and the conference planning team for more information.