Sharing Superpowers
How One Coach Empowers Many
By: Stephanie Lassalle, Kelley Prosser and Giovanna Santimauro
In a classroom at Livingston Collegiate Academy (LCA) in New Orleans, Director of Student Support, Dr. Jasmine Watts-Freeman, is sharing her superpowers. Seated next to her, Livingston teachers, Alexis Kelly-Darby and Julia Fonshell, are engaged in their weekly planning session for the English 1 courses they co-teach. Nose-deep in the student data dashboard, the team reflects on what’s working, what’s not, and what instructional strategies are needed in the upcoming lessons for their 9th grade students.
“Maybe we can use the scratch paper to have students take notes on the parts of the story as they’re working on their narrative reteach activity,” ponders one of the teachers.
“Yes, and we can have the students pause along the way to jot down their thoughts about the setting, characters, and major events,” adds the second.
Interjecting, Dr. Watts-Freeman pushes the teacher team to think more broadly.
“What are you hoping students are learning to do or create as they use the guiding graphic organizer, and how can you start to think about how to teach them to make the tools they need on their own so they can start to learn how to make their own tools without you?”
The question challenges the teacher team to consider how they can pull back, little by little, to build student skill and independence.
Dr. Watts-Freeman, a veteran special education teacher, leads the special education program for LCA and its 600 students, 120 of whom have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Through her experiences as a teacher, co-teacher and now as Director of Student Support at LCA, Dr. Watts-Freeman has built strong relationships with students, staff, and families.
The rapport she’s built is evident when talking with students. Jada, a graduating 12th grader from LCA, described how Dr. Watts-Freeman impacted her individual educational experience, saying she “really helped [me] break down a question even more, know how to answer it, have evidence and answer it in my own words.” Jada also spoke to the early connection and partnership Dr. Watts-Freeman established with her grandmother. She said, “She would let my grandma know, ‘I need you to do this or that,’ ‘this is what we’ll be doing next’ — my grandma was in the loop.”
Leveraging her areas of expertise, Dr. Watts-Freeman has been integral to the establishment and development of the co-teaching practice at LCA. Now, she joins this powerful co-teaching duo — and others in 9th, 10th and 11th grades — once weekly during their co-planning sessions, to serve as a thought partner and mentor as teams consider plans and strategies to serve their students.
In these meetings she prods co-teaching teams to think deeply about how they’re using resources and tools from their community, and how they are partnering with families and staff to communicate the needs of students. By joining the teacher partnerships, Dr. Watts-Freeman is building the skills and capacity of teachers to use their individual strengths and expertise to serve all students in their classrooms.
Dr. Watts-Freeman takes a warm-demander approach that is well-received. Her partnership empowers the teachers to make instructional decisions that offer students access to inclusive settings to meet their individual and collective needs. She often inspires them to take immediate action for their very next class period.
Not only does Dr. Watts-Freeman provide next steps for individual student support; she urges teachers to use available data to examine how they can maximize re-teaching time by working with students in small groups. That data is available thanks to Mastery Mondays, a weekly practice that assesses all students’ progress on core content standards. Teacher teams analyze this performance data as they adjust lessons for the upcoming week.
Back in the classroom, the co-teaching pair takes inspiration from Dr. Watts-Freeman’s questions and jumps into action planning. Excitedly, they start to generate ideas for the coming days and weeks to link their lesson planning to action steps.
“Yes, maybe next week for a Do Now students can draw their own graphic organizer on a blank piece of paper,” says Ms. Fonshell, “and then maybe they can use that graphic organizer to capture notes as they are getting ready for the upcoming state assessment,” Ms. Kelly-Darby excitedly adds.
After just 45 minutes, the teacher partnership has a set of clear next steps for whole group foundational instruction alongside targeted small group re-teaching of core skills that is driven by student data to ensure all learners in their classroom are making progress toward the standards.
A few hours later, as we enter the classroom for an observation, we discover the teachers have reconfigured the classroom to reteach small groups of learners: A U-shaped set of desks in one part of the room and another set of desks toward the front. The two teachers are teaching core skills to two alternative groups of students, maximizing their impact with the key learnings from their coach Dr. Watts-Freeman.
This story was co-authored with Marshall Street’s Network Improvement Community (NIC) team, including Stephanie Lassalle, Kelley Prosser, and Gio Santimauro. Learn more about Marshall Street’s work in Continuous Improvement at marshall.org.
Continuous Improvement is a set of principles and practices to help educators “get better at getting better.” Marshall’s Continuous Improvement team uses these tools to tackle intricate, systems-level problems in K-12 education. Currently, we support a multi-year Networked Improvement Community (NIC) to make dramatic gains for Black and Latinx students with disabilities experiencing poverty.
