This week we learned the importance of a collaborative partnership with your building principal, examples questions to drive end-of-year reflection, the many benefits of mentorship, and more!

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Leadership From the Bottom Up

Alison Giska reflects on the importance of a collaborative partnership with your building principal to ensure coaching success.

"Highlight future plans and what you will accomplish next time you meet. I let the principal know how excited I was to reach our goals together as well. Before leaving, I made this very clear: 'I love the direction we are going, and I would love to get more specific when we meet next month!' Relationships are everything . Leading a school is high-stress, demanding work."

Helping Teachers Reflect on Their Practice

Chrissy Beltran provides some example questions to facilitate end-of-year reflection meetings with teachers.

"The end of the school year is a good time to reflect on teaching practices, but we should really do this throughout the year, as an ongoing practice. After a lesson, day, or unit are good times to stop and think: is this working? But we've got to start somewhere! In order to encourage reflection, one thing you can do is to meet with teachers at the end of the school year to help them think back to their year and make some plans for the next year."

Killing Two Birds with One Stone

Andrew Stringer explains why there needs to be a clear separation between the evaluation and coaching process to move coaching forward.

"As a coach, the teachers always lead the process and determined their goals, process and evaluation. . . . I think the confusion comes when we try to kill two birds with one stone; where we blur the lines between accountability and responsibility; when performance development plans are created because we have to and not because we want to; when we blend some form of autonomy with a mandated process."

The Importance of Being a Mentor and Having a Mentor

Rachelle Dene Poth encourages everyone to seek mentorship to promote both professional and personal growth.

"At times it might be someone assigned to us, a friend or a member of our PLN. Sometimes we don't even realize that we are in a "mentorship," we are just supporting one another on our teaching journeys. Veteran teachers need to seek out mentors as well, and that might mean connecting with a teacher who is new to your building or to the profession. How can we expect our students to interact and understand different perspectives, and to be accepting if we ourselves do not do the same thing and go beyond that? It starts with us."

ICs Working with Whole School PD

Steve Barkley shares the value of a building-wide culture of coaching—one where admins and teacher leaders also coach—to meet staff needs.

"The coach offers to co-teach with volunteering department heads for experimentation with the planning of questions and then observing students' reactions. These co-teaching plans will provide models that can be shared with staff as their study and implementation progresses. . . . The instructional coach supporting administrators and teacher leaders to coach the staff is very important. The instructional coach cannot meet whole staff needs on her own."

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