Coaching at Nido: A New Role and a Perfect Fit

As my colleague said most eloquently this week during a coaching team meeting, “It just feels like you all have been taking such excellent care of a puppy and are now passing it onto us. I just do not want to kill it.” Oddly, this is exactly how I had been feeling, too. Tom and I are new to a well-respected and established coaching team. The team has been working together for years in the elementary school; now we are now expanding this successful model to the middle and high school divisions. Though Tom and I are ready to dive into the work, we have been developing norms, communication systems, and getting up to speed on C3, NGSS, Common Core, Shape, and ISTE Standards. We are, in general, “going slow to go quickly”. 

For the first time in a long time, I am in charge of my own schedule and my time. It is a schedule that changes daily. I live by my Google Calendar. At the end of the day, my brain hurts. I am often double-booked at some points during the day and free for a stretch where the people I need to talk to you are in meetings or teaching. This work requires long, thoughtful conversations about learning. I am reading a lot about protocols, power standards, and educational change not to theoretically keep up with the literature but because I need to concrete apply these ideas in my work.

We are a coaching team of five coaches that work with teachers to support teaching and learning in grades K-12. We use Diane Sweeney’s model of student-centered coaching as opposed to other models that focus on the coach-teacher relationship or on “fixing” teachers.  

Within this work, we wear different hats. This week you would have found me co-facilitating a seminar on classroom management and environment to teaching fellows, launching coaching cycles at a high school faculty meeting with the other members of the coaching team, co-teaching a 9th grade PE teacher to facilitate collaborative decision-making, designing learning activities tied to NGSS standards with the 11th grade Applied Science teacher, and meeting for the first time as the curriculum point person for the 9th grade Freshman Seminar course My job is much more about team building and shared systems than I had imagined. As a coach, I still have the kind of energy to be attentive with my own kids at the end of a long day that I used to feel I had drained by being a teacher and with kids all day.

We support teachers through optional coaching cycles. Teachers sign up for this work every 6-8 weeks. In these coaching cycles we look at a single, student-centered, standards-based, learning goal and support single teacher to meet that goal through a combination of intense co-planning and co-teaching. We have more teachers interested in these coaching cycles than we can offer our support. So, we also offer office hours where we serve as thought partners for teachers if they want someone to act as a sounding board in their planning, implementation, or assessment. We support the administration in curriculum initiatives. For example, on August 28th, we will support teachers on a half-day professional development in initiating their Stage I of Understanding by Design curriculum work

We mentor the school’s eight teaching fellows. We observe these novice teachers once a week. We meet with them regularly following these observations to plan, problem solve, and reflect. We lead required coaching seminars once a month on topics around teaching and learning.

We also support the curriculum writing process. This year there are 26 teams of high school teachers that have common planning blocks with other teachers that teach the same courses. I will help six of these teams to look at Stage 1 of UBD across the year. This means identifying desired outcomes, that is what skills and knowledge that students will have by the end of the year. We will write essential questions, apply standards, identify power standards, and align scope and sequence across grades. 

As a coaching team, we host conferences on-site. Here are two that our school will host in October and November. I will attend the one in October and help to facilitate sessions in November.

Like all of my colleagues in the high school, a part of my contract is to interact with students in meaningful ways, too. I am the co-sponsor for National Honor Society. We meet during flex twice a week and during lunch once a week to plan and execute service leadership on campus. I will be sure to reach out to my high school NHS sponsor, Mrs. Archibald, and I think she will be proud that I am continuing this work. 

I also co-facilitate an advisory with 9th graders. We meet once a week on Wednesdays for 45 minutes of advisory. Our 9th and 10th grade advisory groups use  the Wayfinder program. For the first time, advisory is very tight in terms of curriculum. I love this program. We were all trained on site by Wayfinder before school started. Our 9th grade team has an advisory point person who sends out the host of advisory activities for the week with linked resources. There is some choice, but we all use an opening, activities from Wayfinder, and a thoughtful closing. For the first time, I want much more advisory!  

I have never had a job that I feel so closely aligns with my skill set and interests. I hope that I feel at the end of the year the way that I am feeling now about my role, my team, and this school. For me, moving from one role and institution to another has served me well. I feel like I am drawing on a variety of skills and experiences in this current role, and that this role is the culmination of my previous teaching, school leadership, coaching, and curriculum writing experiences.

Max had to interview me and Rich this week for a homework assignment about whether the moves in our lives to other countries were pushes or pulls. I needed Max to clarify the distinction. Push factors, Max explained, drive people away from a particular location while pull factors draw them in. Push factors are associated with the area of origin and pull factors are associated with the destination. When I answered Max, I think I oversimplified the idea thinking that push factors are out of your control and are dire, while pull factors are about your choice and are tied to better opportunity. When I think of our own situation, I think that it was a combination. The cost of living and lack of employment options were push factors in our move, while the rich opportunities for professional growth and our kids’ learning were pull factors. Regardless of being pushed or pulled, Rich and I are happy where we have landed.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor Frankl