Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Collaboration and Instructional Coaching


Over the past two years I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to collaborate with many fabulous educators and expand my PLN. As a teacher and coach, this has stretched my skills and influenced the way I teach in my classroom. My PLN now stretches from my school to the far ends of the globe. I have been able to do this through many different avenues such as conferences, collaborative meetings, social media like diigo, blogs and twitter, and face to face reflective conversations. I truly feel blessed with the people I have been able to work with and collaborate with, not only in the past couple of years, but throughout my whole teaching career.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege to collaborate with colleagues and present at the AISI Symposium. Our Division spans a good geographical distance so the coaching experience has allowed me to get to know other coaches around our division and share our experiences, hopefully to better our skills as coaches. As we discussed our roles in our schools, we realized that there were common key concepts that were in all of our schools:
- Alignment of goals - division, school, learning team, and individual
- Coach as a staff member
- Support of administration and division office
- Supporting learning for teachers
- Differentiated approach for supporting teachers

As we have developed our relationships and trust within our schools, these five concepts were vital to the success of coaching. Check out our presentation below about different ways we reached our staff.

2 comments:

  1. Building relationships, being ahead of the game and knowing what direction you want to go in all play an important part in the role of any instructional leader. Helping people grow in their practice has the reciprocal effect of helping you grow.....I'm thinking.

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  2. Yes, I completely agree. I feel my practice grows and develops as I support people where they would like to grow- I have been truly fortunate to learn and grow from many colleagues in my journey and support them along their journeys.

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