February 2019
February 1, 2019 - 6 minutes readFebruary 2019 Coaching Tip of the Month
Instructional coaches and their IU mentors promote professional learning communities by facilitating ongoing staff development and reflective practice around formative assessments and offer specific, descriptive, non-judgmental feedback to teachers so they can adjust their teaching. Coaches receive training in, and demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of, all aspects of the PA initiatives: Future Ready Index, ESSA, Text Dependent Analysis, STEM, College and Career Readiness to name a few. To support literacy, some PIIC IU districts are participating in the TPIIC Promising Practices Literacy Series designed to promote the implementation of literacy across all content areas with instructional coaches leading for change. Instructional coaches and mentors work together to help teachers understand better how to use assessments of student learning to modify curriculum and instruction to meet student needs. As Dylan Wiliam said, “Pedagogy trumps curriculum.” PIIC mentors help coaches understand the difference between monitoring progress for administrative purposes and looking for evidence of real learning. The feedback they give teachers is to impact teaching and learning.
Coaches, in turn, help teachers use formative assessments to identify their students’ needs and examine student progress. This includes determining appropriate assessments for their students, collecting and analyzing classroom data that helps inform instructional decision-making, and accessing the appropriate materials and resources to address the students’ learning needs. Coaches facilitate professional learning communities where teachers and administrators focus on the essential strategies to improve schools. Those strategies include sharing a vision and mission about student learning, providing an evidentiary trail of active student learning, implementing a feedback loop for continuous improvement to close the gaps in learning, fostering a collaborative learning environment, and helping students recognize that learning is participatory.
Coaches working with their IU mentors regularly use a variety of formative assessment tools based in part on Dylan Wiliam’s work. Examples include but are not limited to: entrance tickets and “do nows”; learning logs; class basketball;think, pair, share; question strips; summarizing and paraphrasing; reflective learning/journal writing; 3-2-1 exittickets and a variety of other techniques that enhance student learning, help teachers identify the gaps in their students’ learning, and determine where they need to make appropriate adjustments.Each of these formative assessment tools is an important component of the PIIC mentoring and coaching toolkit. Teachers and students regularly engage in collective problem solving and provide constructive feedback in order to modify instruction and reduce the learning gaps. The mentoring and coaching strategy is rooted in providing skills that help teachers improve their capacity to intervene based on formative assessments in the classroom—before high stakes testing.
One of the core elements of PIIC is that instructional coaching transforms professional development into professional learning and focuses on helping teachers use and analyze formative and summative data to identify student needs, assess how changes in classroom instructional practices can meet student needs, and monitor student progress. With the multitude of initiatives, e.g., statewide, district-wide, school-wide, , instructional coaches and mentors work with teachers and administrators to establish instructional practices in literacy across all content areas so that students are reading and writing to learn in all content areas. It is widely known that assessment is basic to improving student outcomes. If teachers, with the assistance of coaches, become skilled consumers of the many kinds of formative data available to them, they will be able to use these data effectively to meet the instructional needs of their students. In fact, the Formative Assessment Process -Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium in 2014 stated that “Formative Assessment is a deliberate process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides actionable feedback used to adjust ongoing teaching and learning strategies to improve students’ attainment of curricular learning targets/goals.”
As more and more teachers regularly implement formative assessment strategies designed to help students expand their repertoire of skills, student engagement, learning, and achievement are impacted. Ultimately, this kind of change influences classrooms, instruction, practice, climate, and student growth. Dylan Wiliam also says, “The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students. The key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learners, and their peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. The only way we can do this is through assessment. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning” (Embedded Formative Assessment). Coaches and mentors need to ensure that teachers and other staff members know what effective formative assessment looks like and how to use the data they collect from those assessments.
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