Collective Reflection After Coaching Partnerships

Did teachers at your school just finish a cycle of coaching with EdConnective, other coaches, or with you? Plan a reflective meeting to allow teachers to share what they learned, both to help establish their new skills as new habits, and also to continuing the learning by sharing new skills with each other.

Here’s how:

Invite 2 - 8 teachers to meet together at a shared available time.  For 2 teachers, the meeting should take about 30 minutes, and for up to 8 teachers it will take about 1 hour (see times listed in the agenda below). Give teachers these questions to reflect on ahead of time (it helps if they come with a written response):

Questions for teachers before the collective reflection meeting:

1. What was your percent growth in student outcomes?  How has student outcome data impacted your instruction?

2. What teacher action had the greatest impact on your students? What was the impact on your students? What are the criteria for doing it well? What would be a good example (or model) of this?

3. What are your goals for continued growth? Using the Skyrocket rubric (or other framework), what teacher action to you plan to work on next? What supports do you need from our school community to make this happen?

Give teachers at least 48 hours to respond to these questions before the meeting. If you have more than 8 teachers who participated in a coaching cycle, split them into smaller groups or separate meetings.

Carefully plan and prepare for the meeting, using the agenda below as a template.  Make sure to keep track of time during the meeting.

Agenda for collective reflection meeting:

1. Impact of coaching on students - [10 minutes] Go around the room and ask each teacher to a) share their percent growth in student outcomes, and b) answer: “How has student outcome data impacted your instruction?”

2. Sharing and practicing teacher actions - [5 minutes/teacher: 10 - 40 minutes] Then ask each teacher to share what teacher action changed their instruction the most from the coaching partnership.  They should do this by:

   1. Stating why they chose this teacher action (What was the impact on students when you used this strategy?)

   2. Give the criteria for doing the strategy well

   3. Give a model of what it looks like

   4. Have the teacher their their left practice 1 - 3 times with them, depending on the skill

3. Goal for continued growth - [10 minutes] Ask each teacher to share one next step that they would like to work on. Use the Skyrocket rubric or other framework with specific teacher actions to support this process.  Ask them to name if there is a way that the principal or fellow teachers could help in the continued growth (such as checking in a week later, or coming in to observe a certain strategy)

School leaders: After the meeting, consider how you can continue to support teachers in their instructional growth based on what they shared in the meeting. Establish at least one concrete way you can support each teacher who participated in coaching, whether it’s sharing a resource or stopping in for a non-evaluative observation to provide feedback on a single skill.  The growth in quality of teachers’ instruction has a great impact on student outcomes at your school. It also helps contribute towards teachers’ feelings of success at what they do, which in turn can impact your teacher retention.