Meeting my Professional Learning Needs through Community

Learning Communities

      Learning Communities help me stay sharp as a coach by connecting with fellow educators, exploring new tech, and diving into the latest teaching methods. It is so important as a new coach to be supported by other coaches, and I love it when I can support others as well. 

       In Prince William County, our coaching community is vibrant, caring, and active. While I have an assigned mentor and an assigned coach, I have also developed relationships with many other coaches both within and outside of the county that have been so important to my own development as a coach and my ability to meet the needs of my teachers. Our regular training sessions and meetings are incredibly useful, both in the presented content and the time we spend together problem solving and game planning. I remember going to one of our Apple Learning sessions early and spending the first 15-20 minutes with the other ITCs trading helpful tidbits. I was having some issues with Book Creator. I knew it had the capability to have many participants working together in one book, but when I tried this with some of my staff members it flopped! The other ITCs helped walk me through how to set it up correctly for this interactive feature. I was then able to share this activity with my staff members! At the same meeting, I was able to show them how I had set up my flagging and categorizing system in my email to keep track of tasks as they came in. This helped them to manage their workflow to better serve their educators! 

Goal Planning

     Using a Goal Planner to start off formal coaching cycles helps me to set goals with fellow educators, celebrate our wins, and continuously grow together as a learning community. We use the planner as our “North Star” for our coaching cycles because it helps us get focused and stay focused on the results we want. I find that when we first talk about a goal, especially with new educators, it can be a bit ambiguous. By listening carefully to the teacher and asking some guiding questions, it helps us to hone in on the true needs of both the teacher and the students in his or her classroom. 

     For example, when I first asked one of my educators about her goal, she said she would like to get better at using Canvas. After going through the Goal Planning process, we determined that her true goal was to have students working more independently using blended learning and flipped classroom models. We start each of our weekly coaching sessions by reviewing this goal. If we are in a planning phase, we use it to help identify what our next steps should be to move forward. During the Act phase, we try new strategies based on this plan. During the Reflect phase, we use it to gauge our progress. In our coaching cycles, the Goal Planner helps us focus on desired outcomes. By actively listening to educators and asking the right questions, we uncover their true needs and drive progress together.

Learning Communities Supporting Goals

     Leveraging learning communities, I guide and develop personal goals with teachers, ensuring alignment with the school and district focus. Through this process, I connect Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Depth and Complexity (DC) strategies to specific challenges facing my educators. When needed I assist teachers with technology tools for implementing these strategies, while also offering support as they experiment and adapt their instruction. It can be hard for us to get out of our comfort zone, so I try to ensure that my teachers feel like they have a safe space to take risks! 

     I was working with one of my educators to incorporate more blended learning into her language arts stations. I observed her students working in stations and reviewed her lesson plans for this time with her. I knew there were some excellent tools for what she wanted to do that I was personally less familiar with. I reached out to my mentor, who met with me on Teams to go over the strengths and weaknesses of each of the tools I was looking into, as well as suggesting a tool I hadn’t thought of. My mentor helped me determine which tools would be used best for which types of activities. I was then able to return to the educator with several options for strategies and tools that enabled her to make her classroom more engaging, more interactive, and more differentiated. As a coach, I am engaged in learning communities, aligning personal goals of teachers with our school and district focuses, and connecting the strategies and tools needed to address specific challenges faced by educators.