As many folks know, I am in the process of writing my fifth book! It’s about instructional coaching…tentatively titled “How to Coach Teachers to Teach (Almost) Anything” – – – I mean, it’s not like it’s going to be published by Yale or anything, right?
One of the things that I wanted to really drive home for coaches are the fundamental skills that teachers have to have in place. So, I broke those fundamental skills down into five categories:
- Classroom Management
- Behavior Management
- Engagement
- Lesson Planning (the most often un-coached skills that is the starting point of a successful lesson)
- Delivery of a Basic Lesson (like the very least the teacher has to do to deliver a successful lesson)
In this series of five blogs, one on each of the topics, I have broken down those skills for you, too!
If you’re a teacher, you can use these as a checklist for lesson planning
If you are a professional developer, you can use this is a checklist for a new teacher (or veteren teacher) training program
If you are a principal, you can use this to help you set your instructional goal and as a tool to determine where you staff might need strengthening.
If you are a coach, you will use these lists to prioritize the content that you will coach. If a teacher is struggling with any of these, then that struggling point is where your coaching should start. After all, if a fundamental is missing, then the teacher doesn’t have much of a chance of getting the fancier stuff well implemented.
Here are the Behavior Management Priority Skills for Coaching
The teacher:
- Teaches replacement behaviors for most common behavior problems
- Has the ability to quickly analyze the behavior and get to the root of whether it is a whole group, small group, time of day, type of content issue
- Has clear steps in place for students choosing to repeatedly break the classroom rules
- Has a procedure for removing students from the place of instruction without students removing themselves from learning the content
- Has a routine for de-escalating behaviors before they become intolerable
Allows students to recover once they have paid the “price” for misbehavior
Thanks Jill! I look forward to all your tips, ideas, suggestions, and jokes too!
Well…we have to laugh or WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT? 🙂