Friday, July 3, 2015

Reflection

My first year as an instructional coach came and went so quickly. I obviously stayed extremely busy and the learning curve was HUGE...moving from a classroom teacher to instructional coach as well as from the elementary school to the middle school made that curve even larger.

Two things I am most proud of at the end of this year:
1. The connections I made and relationships I was able to build with my teachers.
2. Surviving the new SBAC testing (part of my job is building test coordinator).

The great thing about having my first year under my belt is being able to plan what to improve and change next year. It's also nice to have the first year...what is that? how do I do that? you want that when?'s under my belt (well some of them, as we know in education things are always changing).

My number one goal for next year is to get into the classrooms more! Managing my schedule is something that got away from me this year. I'm on a lot of teams/committees and am in tons of meetings! So, I really need to plan being in classrooms, put it on my schedule, and keep to my schedule! One way of going about this is to keep a rotating schedule of visiting specific grade levels on certain days, then hopefully I won't feel like a ping pong ball. The difficult part of this is being available during teachers preps to talk with them as needed. I found this year my teachers were more likely to "pop" in and talk with me during that time of their day.

Which brings me to number two goal, make my visits meaningful. I plan on using some of the tools I have been reading about in a book titled: 17,000 Classroom Visits Can't Be Wrong. I want my visits to be data driven and be able to hand that data over to my teachers for them to use and if they want make a plan to possibly improve areas they feel are weak.

Finally, I am going to be able to have a model classroom! I get to decorate a classroom again!!! Whooohooo! I will be teaching summer school this year and I will use some of that time to begin setting it up. During the school year we will use the classroom for staff development, professional development, our district PLCs, and finally I will invite teachers in to co-teach or model lessons for them.

In closing, a shout out to my Secondary Coaching Team (middle school and high school), we were named Outstanding Teaching Team of the Year.




Finally my cutie is now a 1st grader, and made the newspaper!