Last week we officially launched our district’s new instructional coaching team with a back to school professional development day. It was an incredible day of collaboration and learning. With intentional planning, we were able to help launch a new approach to teacher support in our district. Although we’ve just started with this team, we’ve been headed this way for years.
For over 10 years our district has had Digital Integration Specialists (DIS) who supported teachers with instructional technology and instructional planning. In the fall of 2013 when our district went one-to-one with digital devices in high schools, having coaches who could support this transition was an integral part of the plan. We added DISs in middle schools the following year (fall 2014). We also have had DISs in elementary schools before we had any at the secondary level (one elementary DIS supporting three schools).
I was one of our high school Digital Integration Specialists from 2013-2021. In the fall of 2021 I moved to my current role as the district Instructional Technology Specialist. For the last three years, I’ve worked closely with our district Coordinator of Instructional Technology, Carol Lunsford, to lead and support our team of 14 Digital Integration Specialists. I love this work!
In addition to working to support digital teaching and learning, we have also made sure to ground our team’s work in strong instructional practices. We have leaned into John Hattie’s research of effective instructional strategies including a strong foundation in Weston Kieschnick’s Bold School and ATLAS. We’ve also studied blended learning and Universal Design for Learning using a variety of resources from Catlin Tucker, Katie Novak and others. All of our Digital Integration Specialists also go through Cognitive Coaching training during their first year on our team.
New Year, New Team
Last spring our team learned that for the 24-25 school year we would officially transition from a digital focus to a broader instructional focus and rename our positions “Instructional Coaches.” We also got to welcome our district’s three Academic Interventionists to this coaching team.
For our first official PD with this new team, Carol and I knew we wanted to focus on building relationships and understand this new role. We wanted to build on the extensive experience this team of 17 coaches already has and help prepare them for what coaching could look like in their buildings this year.
We intentionally chose to focus on a concept our Superintendent, Dr Akil Ross, had shared with our administrators at our back to school “Nuts and Bolts” the week before – “I am because We are.” Dr Ross shared that our district-wide theme for this year will be “Growing Together” and that we are more powerful when we work together to face whatever challenges come our way.
For our PD day, after some relationship building activities and creating our team’s Social Contract (Capturing Kids’ Hearts) we moved into the focused “Coaching Corner” PD portion of the day. Our grounding (transitional) phrase was “By working together with heart and purpose we can become the best coaches,” and we connected everything to that statement.
The coaches used Affinity Mapping to help gather and organize our collective knowledge about coaching using the prompts: What is an academic coach (Instructional Coach/ Academic Interventionist)? What makes a successful academic coach? They independently brainstormed, then collectively reviewed the ideas to gain insights into the themes/areas of coaching. I appreciate the wealth of experience our coaches brought to this activity and their understanding of the many pieces involved in being a successful coach.
We then moved into a modified jigsaw using the first section of Moves for Launching a New Year of Student-Centered Coaching by Diane R. Sweeney, Leanna S. Harris, and Julie Steele. We used this book two years ago, but felt like it was important to revisit because of its laser focus on the start of school and because we have many new members on our team. Each group created a visual that we would be able to display in our teacher training center and revisit as needed.
The next part of our “Coaching Corner” came from a session I attended at ISTE in June. While at ISTE I attended a variety of sessions related to instructional coaching hoping to gather ideas for this new team. One was called “Pitch Perfect Coaching: Mastering the Elevator Speech to Rock Their Role” presented by fellow ISTE Certified Educator Jennifer Graham (@jlg523) from North Carolina. I contacted Jennifer after ISTE to ask if she’d be willing to let us adapt her presentation. I love how educators are willing to share what they do to help others! Using that modified presentation, our team walked through the steps of creating “concise and engaging” speeches they could use with teachers, administrators and others as they head back to school.
The rest of our day included updates from district content coordinators and specialists (math, ELA, science and social studies), grade level collaboration, developing coaching schedules and resources as well as covering our own “Nuts & Bolts” of back to school items.
The whole PD day was filled with positive sharing and excitement about what our new team will be able to do to support teachers in our schools.
I can’t wait to see how our #D5Coach team exemplifies “Growing Together” this year!
Reflections of an Instructional Coach 