Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

4 tips for making your coaching experience impactful

Professional development is changing. There are numerous new models: blended learning, personalized learning, culturally responsive teaching, and more. There is new technology: learning management systems, apps, websites, and more.

As we ask teachers to adopt these new models and tools it is essential that we provide ongoing and continuous support through instructional coaching. For teachers who are working with an instructional coach, here are four tips to ensure that your experience has a positive impact on you and your students.

1. Work with a master teacher
Coaching works best when the coach and teacher view their relationship as a thought partnership and see themselves as accountability partners. Amazing things can happen when you pair two thoughtful educators who are willing to do hard work and are energized by their goals. Working with a coach who has extensive experience in the classroom will ensure that you learn new strategies that you might not have been exposed to before. Your challenges, worries, and fears are likely something that your coach will have also experienced. While your coach is not meant to be an expert, working with an educator who has been there and done that will ensure that you learn something new and feel supported as you make shifts in your practice.…Read More

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How peer video coaching is completely changing how our teachers teach

Peer-to-peer video comments are changing how one district’s teachers think about their practice

A new era of professional development is sweeping into districts across the country, and just in time. For many districts, the days of after-school PowerPoint-driven lectures not differentiated by content, expertise, grade-level or delivery, not to mention daylong workshops on an obsolete topic, have recently given way to face-to-face coaching programs and professional learning communities. And in St. Vrain Valley School District, where we serve 32,000 students in seven towns northwest of Denver, we’ve gone one step further.

We’ve augmented our professional development program with an online video coaching platform for classroom observation through one-on-one coaching and collaborative study teams. As one of nine exemplar districts designated by the U.S. Department of Education to be “Future Ready,” the integration of video coaching is an extension of our pledge to empower educators through personalized learning. But our decision also created some cognitive dissonance as we migrated to video coaching.

Hard questions lead to the right answer…Read More