Welcome back! We started June by learning 11 apps to promote home-to-school connections, a few remote coaching and teaching strategies that your peers plan to continue using when they return to in-person learning, and more. Enjoy!

Ready to join over 2,750 of your coaching peers who receive fresh coaching content every Wednesday via our Weekly Coaching Roundup? Sign up below! 😀

Tools for Promoting Home-to-School Connections

Rachelle Dene Poth highlights five ways you can close the home-to-school gap and build relationships with your student's families.

" The key to building the family-to-school partnership is making that initial connection. Having consistent, effective, and reliable digital tools to build on this connection helps us continue to collaborate with families and grow together. These solid, supportive relationships between school and home promote student achievement and enhance the sense of belonging within our community."

Increasing Teacher Inputs

Steve Barkley covers five autonomy-supportive behaviors that ICs should keep in mind when trying to motivate teachers.

" Autonomy-supportive means that an instructor or coach takes the student's or athlete's perspective, acknowledges their feelings, and provides information and opportunities for choice while minimizing the use of pressures or demands. As teachers and teachers' coaches, we are autonomy-supportive when we encourage choice, independent problem-solving, and participation in decision-making."

Finish Up the Year Strong!

Pam Hubler shares her tips for closing out the school year while prepping for summer learning.

"We all need something to look forward to right now! I like to create a personal and professional summer bucket list and add to as things pop into my head while dreaming about those no alarm days of summer! I'm a PD geek, so I also like to make a list of trainings or certifications I'd like to participate in to make the next year better"

Instructional Coaching Practices to Carry Forward

Courtney Groskin and Violet Christensen highlight a few of their favorite remote coaching tactics they plan to use when returning to in-person learning.

"The biggest tool that has nothing to do with technology, blended learning, or other programs is the good-old power of a team. . . . No matter the model, these teams came together to answer the question, 'What do students need from us right now?' We found more answers as a team than we ever could have individually."

Lessons from Coaching Teachers

Emma Siesfeld provides five of her guiding principles (plus real-life examples!) for remote and in-person coaching.

"It's important that we emphasize that not everything will work for students, but even failures give us good data. . . . We can normalize failure by emphasizing what teachers learned and how it will shape future instruction, rather than emphasizing what went wrong."

Pandemic Practices

Katie Durkin reflects on three student-focused teaching systems that she picked up during the pandemic and intends to use moving forward.

"Starting the year in hybrid teaching, with half my students on Zoom and half in the classroom, meant I needed to find a model of teaching that would give me time to work directly with all the students – whatever their location – while also teaching the curriculum. . . . So, I added secret messages to every video I did. These secret messages were a way for me to see which students had watched the videos."

Have some interesting instructional leadership news?
Share it with TeachBoost and we'll highlight it here!