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 Student Engagement Priority Skills for Coaching
The teacher:
- Teaches with a swift pace with a good mix of teacher talk and student action
- Has written response signals in place for the whole class and individuals
- Has verbal response signals in place for the whole class and individuals
- Has physical response signals in place for the whole class and individuals
- Does not rely on raised hands as an engagement tool
- Uses engagement tools to have all students do the work during whole group, partner and independent work time
- Walks around the room to monitor what is said, done and discussed during lessons
- Uses engagement techniques to practice the most important content and does not allow the techniques to overshadow the content of the lesson
- Explicitly teaches the difference between compliant engagement and true engagement through modeling
- Requires students to use complete sentences and academic language as they are engaging with the content and their classmates
- Uses engagement to correct content errors, require students to extend their responses and give high-quality academic feedback