How to support instructional coaching

Why this matters

An instructional coach usually walks into a coaching conversation with notes from one observed lesson. What every student wrote across a whole unit sits in the teacher's gradebook, and reading it takes hours a coach who works with many teachers doesn't have. Without that evidence, the goal the coach and teacher set rests on one lesson, and the coach has to wait for the next observation to learn whether students improved.

What instructional coaching is, and how the coaching cycle works

In instructional coaching, a coach works alongside one teacher on a goal for that teacher's students. Jim Knight's Impact Cycle, from the Instructional Coaching Group, is one instructional coaching model, with three stages (Jim Knight, Instructional Coaching Group):

• Identify: the teacher gets a clear picture of current reality from video or observation data and sets a student-focused goal.
• Learn: the coach shares a checklist for a teaching strategy and models it.
• Improve: the teacher tries the strategy, the teacher or coach gathers data on student progress toward the goal, and they adjust until the goal is met.

Knight writes that the teacher decides what to implement in their classroom, and the coach is there to help the teacher reach their own goals. A 2018 meta-analysis of 60 studies with causal designs found that coaching improved teachers' instruction by 0.49 standard deviations and student achievement by 0.18 (Kraft, Blazar and Hogan, via ERIC).

1. Read student work before the first conversation. Bring two or three things students said or wrote, so the conversation starts from students rather than from a rating of the lesson.
2. Set one student-focused goal with the teacher. For example: students quote the text to back up a theme.
3. Agree on one strategy for the next lesson, then look at student work again. The next round of student work shows whether the goal moved.

Sparky shows the coach which students summarize instead of citing evidence

The school, students and staff are made up. Sparky's answers are its real answers about an example 8th grade English class that read "The Gift of the Magi" in three activities, shortened.

What Flint did for Ms. Ortiz

• Sparky read the class's work across all three activities and named one pattern to coach on: students retold the plot when the task asked for a theme backed by evidence.
• When Ms. Ortiz asked who summarized instead of citing evidence, Sparky named four students and quoted what Liam and Noah wrote, so she can show Mr. Hale his own students' words.
• Sparky suggested one sentence frame for Mr. Hale's next lesson and explained how it fits Noah's gap, so the coach and teacher have one strategy to try before they look at student work again.

A coach can't read every student's session by hand before each meeting, and Sparky reads all of them.

The class Outcomes tab shows where students stand on each standard

On the class's Outcomes tab, Where students stand splits every assessed student and standard into Met, Approaching and Not yet, then breaks it down standard by standard. Standards Outcomes below it shows individual students' work on a standard, grouped by how they got there, such as Needed support.

Try it with your school for free

Flint is free for up to 80 users, counting students, teachers and administrators. To prepare for a coaching conversation, open the teacher's class, click Analytics in the class sidebar, and click the speech-bubble button at the top left to Ask Sparky about your analytics. Class analytics need Can edit access to the class: school admins have it for every class in the school, and a teacher can add a coach to the class with Can edit, the same way co-teachers share a class. To see one activity, open it from the class: Activity analytics lists the class's Strengths, Areas of improvement and a Follow-up. The Outcomes tab fills in once the class has standards in its Curriculum tab and Sparky grades the work against a rubric.

For more on what school leaders see in Flint, read Flint for school leaders.