LaShaun Lovett

ITEC 7460
Coaching Journal

October 10, 2019

Like most conversations among teachers, they are very informal and usually lead to teachers
sharing instructional information that helps other teachers. This year, my school has several new
teachers, many of them are out of their original content area and they need a lot of help adjusting
to their new content. Although our district requires that all new teachers have an assigned teacher
mentor to meet with regularly, most often these teachers get the best mentoring through informal
conversations that are not planned and do not feel like they are being sold something (Knight,
2018). This year we received three new teachers in the Social Studies department, one teacher is
out of content, one teacher is new to teaching and the other has several years of teacher
experience. Because I recall being in each of these individual’s positions at some point in my
teaching career, I have always approached new teachers as a helper sharing any and all resources
I might have access to or at least directing them to someone that can help.

Enrolling a teacher into the coaching process was extremely easy for me because I naturally
build relationships and make myself available for my colleagues, especially if they are adjusting
to a new environment. Through these informal conversations, I was able to get our brand new
teacher enrolled in this coaching process. Her teaching schedule is basically the same as mine
was my first year teaching high school so I could relate to being a bit overwhelmed teaching two
preps with little to no resources or formal guidance. Also, our school has so many resources
available to teachers but not a lot of opportunities for us to really learn how to use them through
meaningful Professional Development outside of new teacher orientation where we get a brief
glimpse at a fraction of the things we have access to. I believe the things that will help myself
and the teacher that I am coaching the most are being recent graduates from teacher certification
programs and being millennials who utilize technology regularly.

November 2, 2019

Post “Identify” Entry:

After a few formal and informal coaching sessions, Mrs. Jones has agreed to a set of specific
goals for her students and instruction in an effort to improve student participation and
understanding of content. Having taught American Government for the past two years, I had
previously shared resources with Mrs. Jones that she could build on to make them better suited
for her teaching style and her students. Working with a recent graduate that had just completed a
student teaching experience is a little different, especially since I went a different route to obtain
my teaching certificate. Mrs.Jones, although she is new to teaching, she has more hands-on
experience than most brand new teachers.

The first goal that Mrs. Jones set for herself was to encourage more verbal participation of her
students during what she refers to as Choral Response. Mrs. Jones says that we would like the
students to share what they know about the topics being discussed as she talked them through the
lesson. Having taught government the previous semester I mentioned that I initially struggled
getting my first block students to speak and participate in the conversation in the beginning.
Ultimately, these conversations and student participation just happened organically for my class
mainly due to my co- teacher who always had something to share that would spark student
interest then somehow connected to the lesson.

One engaging technology tool I recommended to help with discussion, content retention and
remediation are iCivics games. iCivics is a great internet based resource that has lessons, guided
reading, activities and digital games relevant to various processes in American Government that
can be utilized in class with students. This process is made much easier for us as our students are
1:1 with iPads and our school and district has an app store dedicated to housing teacher requested
apps for download. One recommendation Mrs. Jones would be to add one of the games at the
end of her lesson once or twice a week so that the kids are drawing on what they’ve learned by
playing games. This could be done at any point after the students have been taught the content to
help spark conversation.

November 6, 2019

Post “Learn” Entry

Finding the time to visit Mrs. Jones has been an issue due to our class schedules and my after
school commitments! Fortunately, I was able to observe a few of her lessons with her two
government classes. I am so thankful for understanding teachers! After this last session, I did a
little research into different tools and teaching strategies Mrs. Jones could use in her classroom to
meet her goal of improving verbal student participation. One of the things we both have talked
about in informal conversations is using the Flipped Classroom model with our US History
students since we have so much content to cover in such a short period of time. We both agreed
that in a perfect world, this would be a great idea however; many of our students face internet
connectivity challenges at home due to socio-economic status or the fact that they live in rural
areas and simply do not have access to the internet away from school. This is also an issue when
assigning homework, some projects or any remediation activities to be completed outside of
class/school.

Going through the different strategies available through Knight’s The Impact Cycle, I suggested
integrating Exit Tickets. Initially, I was hesitant about this suggestion because this is always the
go to strategy and I really wanted to suggest something more innovative, fun and engaging for
her students. I recommended utilizing Padlet where the students could post their responses to the
exit ticket questions either as an opener, closer or throughout the lesson and then the questions
could be revisited. This feature could also be utilized within a lesson using NearPod and adding
their collaboration feature where students could view the responses of their classmates in
realtime to spark more discussion and participation. We’ll see how this goes!

November 18. 2019

Post “Identify” Entry

This entire process has been interesting! Mrs. Jones actually made the Exit Ticket strategy a little
more interesting and helpful with student verbal participation. She decided to take the students'
responses from the padlet and share them anonymously with the class as they worked through
identifying and correcting potential errors in student responses/understanding.

I really hope this entire process was helpful for Mrs. Jones, she seems like she has a good
foundation in teaching and thinking of creative ways to reach her students. Initially, I was
worried about having enough time to talk with Mrs. Jones individually and without being
interrupted by the bell to transition. I did not want this process to turn into something that was
overly time consuming and inconvenient. For me, this process has been eye opening in that I do
not believe most teachers are getting the coaching that they actually need to best assist
themselves or their students. Going through each process and actually identifying and addressing
the specific needs of the individual teacher was the best part! Knowing that we were able to find
strategies to help her with something she actually needed and wanted help with was great! I think
that much of the “coaching” teachers receive today is misguided and is more of a check box for
the school or district rather than an instructional goal to better assist teachers with student
learning and classroom instruction in general. I think I may try to informally assist our out of
content teacher with classroom management because there are so many other areas where
teachers just need a little guidance!