How Do You Support Your Teaching Staff?
By: Omar Yanar
Part I- Coaching
There are several mechanisms, but I’ll share two main ingredients to support, motivate and engage teachers and staff: Coaching (Part I) & Recognition (Part II).
While I’ve found these strategies to be incredibly effective in the realm of education, I must highlight that these are imperatives for any organization (non-profit, for-profit, or otherwise) that leaders should implement if they want to have a highly engaged, highly productive, and happy workplace.
Coaching
I could spend weeks coaching leaders on how to organize, plan, implement and evaluate coaching strategies. In fact, it’s a strategy that the SouthStar Classroom is more than happy to provide in its consultancy work. This is just a snapshot.
If you were a teacher, as I was, how many times did an administrator come to your classroom during the year? I bet it was about once or twice. What did you walk away with? An evaluation sheet with a ton of checkmarks on what you were doing well, and maybe a comment or two on improvement from the 30 minutes that person was in the classroom. Sound about right? Did you feel that helped you grow and improve as a professional?
Coaching is time and labor-intensive, but the outcomes are staggering. The first step is to have a manageable rubric of strategies. Teachers should know outright what highly effective strategies they should be working on. They should read through it and self rate themselves and then come up with a list of the top 3–5 strategies that they need the most support with during the year. The rubric shouldn’t be taught through lecture but rather broken down into six weeks intervals with modeling, discussion, and clarification provided on all the rubric contents for every six weeks, every six weeks. Bite-size chunks are what I’m stressing.
A teacher should be assigned an administrator. We use Deans of Instruction, but that can be an academic coach, assistant principal, the principal themselves, etc. I would highly encourage coaches to have a team of only six, a maximum of eightteachers. For everyone laughing right now that they are responsible for 20 individuals, I would then urge you to look intensely at your organizational chart and figure out if you have the right personnel doing the necessary jobs. We’re here to teach. While having sixpeople in the office might be nice, you might need to reconsider that. Organizational strategies conducted through Stanford University’s Business School have unequivocally found that people do not have the capacity to manage more than six individuals effectively. One can skirt by with eight, but if it’s any proof of this concept, Navy Seal teams are four maximum for a reason (Scaling Up Excellence, Chapter 4).
The coach should sit down, individually, with each teacher and run down components of the rubric that they may not understand, provide guidance, chart out every six weeks and then devise the growth plan for each teacher so that the teacher is in charge of their own growth. This is called the pre-brief.
The next step is the actual observations. Observations are coaching sessions, not gotcha evaluation sessions. Let me repeat, not evaluation sessions. The coach should be able to come in and observe the areas of growth the teacher and the coach established during their pre-brief.
The next step is for the coach to figure out bite-sized actionable steps the teacher can do to improve as well as a few stand-out elements that the teacher is excelling in. Don’t sandwich the feedback either. Start with the exemplary practices, be very detailed in what they did and why it’s effective, and reinforce excellent practices, to begin with. New teachers are often blank slates and are unaware of what’s effective or not.
After the coach has planned and organized themselves after the observation, then it’s the debrief. Start the debrief by narrating the positive. What did the teacher do exceptionally well and how can they keep that momentum going. Then keep the improvement to two to three bullet points with clear actionable advice on how to improve. Don’t just tell them what to improve, provide clear step-by-step instructions on how to improve the practice. We go as far as actually modeling the instructional habit so they can see the how in real-time.
Once these steps are clearly laid out, discuss the deliverables for the next coaching session and have the teacher understand and incorporate the agreed-upon improvements into their next lesson and certainly the next time the coach is observing.
As stated the process is labor-intensive, especially when coaches are responsible for conducting six observations per semester. That’s right. Twelve observations per year. If you’re speculating why so many, you’ll find out quickly that coaching teachers on an entire rubric are difficult with only 12 observations.
Now, coaches, you’re not limited to 12. You can pop into a lesson the day after debrief specifically to see the teacher implement the feedback from the debrief immediately and provide a quick email recap of the “glows and grows” (what went well and what needs improvement). The El Paso Leadership Academy uses this practice and the results are tremendous. For a school with a 92% Free and Reduced lunch population, we are consistently ranked either #1 or #2 for academic gains for any public middle school in the entire state of Texas. It’s a big state, so we know the practices articulated here work.
In part two, I’ll go through some cool practices that will help you recognize the awesome work your staff does well beyond the “thank you” candy shoved into the teacher’s box during teacher appreciation week. Till then, this is your boy Omar saying, thank you for your hard work and continue to empower our community to manifest their own destiny.
