Reflecting on your Coaching Session

When I supervise student teachers and teacher assistants, I use cognitive coaching to frame my classroom visits. Students fill out a pre-observation action plan, using their goals for professional growth to identify a focus for the observation.

After the observation, we use a coaching reflecting conversation to reflect on the lesson and construct new learning. Students then reflect on the process by writing a blog post on the subject.

They are invited to use one of two formats for their written reflection:

Option 1: What, So What, Now What?

• What? What are some of your main takeaways?
• So what? Why are those important to you? 
• Now what? What are the implications? How? When? Who?

Option 2: Mirror the reflecting conversation framework.

• How did it go? (Were you successful? How do you know?)
• Why was it so? (What caused it to go that way?)
• How did you grow? (What have you learned? How will you apply this in the future?)
• How did this help you know? (Be meta-cognitive: Reflect on the process.)

Here are a few sample posts from a few of my students to show how this might look.

• From @rwhite21793, a post titled: Reflections on My Teaching!
• From @KelseyJohnsonGV, a post titled: First in-school Coaching Observation 
• From @DominicTaylor11, a post titled: Fun Classroom Management?
• From @KalieGVMath, a post titled: What? So What? Now What? (Round 2)

So, how do you go about reflecting on your teaching?  

Coaching Session - Who's Engaged?

I recently completed a couple of classroom observations with student teachers who had identified student engagement as one of their personal learning goals on the action plan for the observed lesson. We agreed I would collect data on student engagement at five-minute intervals using an annotated seating chart.

Here's the diagram from one of the classes. Letters "A" through "H" mark students who I judged were not on task at at least some point during the five minute time index of the survey.

What do you notice? What questions do you have?

Here's the diagram from another class at a different school. The seating arrangement shifted mid-lesson when students began to work in pairs; these pairings are indicated as bolded connections on the diagram. 

Again, letters "A" through "H" mark students who were not on task at that time index of the survey. You can see a chronicle of this lesson below the chart.

How Math Saved Bedtime

(This post was inspired by @Trianglemancsd's blog Talking Math with Kids.)

The bedtime routine at our house begins at 7:30. We have a chart showing the steps: take a vitamin, go potty, brush teeth, put PJs on, read three books, go to sleep. Lately, the middle three steps have evolved into a serious power struggle with my four year old. He whines, complains, drags his feet, says he's too tired... and the resulting cajoling amounts to leading a horse to water and finding that it stubbornly will not take a drink.

From https://www.babysleepsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/coverears.jpg

After a particularly frustrating night, I happened to notice the potty / brush his teeth / change into PJs sequence had taken 24 minutes. This gave me an idea. I went downstairs and found a piece of black construction paper and a white crayon. I quickly constructed the axes for a simple bar chart, extending the vertical scale up to an optimistic 25 minutes, and sketched the horizontal scale that would hold the days of the week.