coaching+scenarios

Please feel free to edit this page by typing your scenario directly on this page or email it to me and I'll do it! Remember to include your school population (high school/middle school, number of people involved-1 if single teacher more if department, pertinent information regarding what you've done to work with the party, how they have responded, what you want to accomplish with them in the future etc. and anything that you feel I've left out) Your school, your name are not critical, but if you want to provide them that is fine. Please don't use any teacher names and/or don't focus solely on resistant teachers, as we will discuss that separately in the training.


 * I teach in a high school with a math department that had an ah ha moment at this summer's training. They really want to incorporate literacy into their classroom, but have a hard time visualizing what that might look like. One particular teacher is very willing to do these strategies and has tried them when Roland has given her a math example of how to use the strategy, but she gets stuck in the planning phase when she tries to do this on her own. I as a coach get stuck on the math content when I am trying to help her.
 * My scenerio is with a hesitant teacher, Ms. . She said she had a lot of vocab and the kids just weren’t using the notebooks or were forgetting them all the time. She needed to know what to do, so I suggested she use a foldable for her classes. She loved the idea. So, for the chapter, she picked out the needed words, and I went in third period and explained what we were going to do and why. Then we both handed out paper, and I modeled how to do it. She wrote the words on the board and had the students look them up. They had to have the definition and an example. The example was going to be added as they covered the terms. I did this 5th period too. During 6th period (and first and second the next day) she took over teaching the entire thing, explaining why we were doing the foldable and showing them how to do it. It was pretty amazing.
 * I am trying to get as many resources as possible for my math teachers. I know that many of the strategies are hard to use in math, so I selected several that I thought would be very easy to use in a math class. Those were admit/exit, word wall, frayer, and vocabulary squares. I have purchased some math materials that have reading passages of fiction and non fiction stories and they are all related to math. These resources also have comprehension questions. My plan is to meet with the math department when I get the materials in, have them look over them, and make a plan of action as to how they can use these in their classes to hopefully have more reading in their content and maybe venture into the use of a new strategy. I also have purchased Scholastic Math magazine for the teachers and to date, only two have used them in their classrooms. Hopefully when I have this department meeting I can get the teachers excited about using other texts with their students.
 * Here is the situation at my school. I have 4 teachers in my Math Department. Two teachers are doing a great job. They are implementing on a regular basis and have really bought in to the content literacy. Then there are the other two teachers….I wish I could say the same for them. They are the complete opposite from my first two teachers. One implements for the sake of complying and the other just ignores the literacy all together. So I have 50% of the department doing a great job and 50% not. I am still trying to figure out how they work together as a department. I haven’t yet, but I want to attend a math department meeting to see how well they work together. Fortunately, one of the teachers who is doing a great job implementing is the department chair so I have an advantage there. I just have to figure out exactly how to approach the situation and the individual teachers involved.
 * I work with a middle school that has 7 regular education math teachers serving a population of approximately 550 students. Three of the math teachers are using the school wide strategies on a pretty consistent basis. Three of the remaining four teachers use them just often enough to say that they are in compliance. And you guessed it, the remaining teacher is resistant with a capital "R." Speaking to them as individuals leaves no doubt as to their mindset- they have taught math so long, they know all there is to know and more! Ironically, the teachers using the strategies consistently have engaged learning atmospheres in their classrooms, and the other teachers do a few examples at the beginning of class and students are instructed to work on examples from the textbook independently for the majority of the class period. Our district is currently working on Professional Learning Communities and elementary, middle, and high school math teachers have been asked to observe each other. They have grumbled about this incessantly and several confided to me that they felt this was a waste of their time. The teachers with "old school" practices see nothing wrong with their instructional practice and would be resistant to observe the other teachers using ThinkPairShare, choral and parallel readings from Math/Two Voices, or a modified Jigsaw group activity where students work out and rate the problems by degree of difficulty and write out their reasoning as a group (another Striving Readers suggestion brought to us by Roland!!!). I would love for the less enthusiastic teachers to try some of these things more than once or just for the sake of saying "I did it, now leave me alone, so I can get back to real teaching out of the textbook."