On a Friday afternoon at Vailsburg Elementary School, the bustle of the day's last lessons echoes from open classroom doors. Principal Yasmin Vargas's office door is open, too. Absorbed in conversation, she and 1st grade teacher Laura Fern stare intently at Laura's laptop screen.
"So you observed John's guided reading lesson yesterday?" Yasmin asks.
"That's right, and they were reading Stone Soup," replies Laura. She clicks open her observation tracker on her computer, which she uses to take notes when she visits the classrooms of teachers she's coaching.
"Hmm," Yasmin murmurs, scanning the document. Laura has recorded notes from her previous weekly observations, also noting the improvements she saw from week to week. "And here you say his next step for growth is to prompt students to go back to the text when they don't cite their evidence."
"Right. That was happening a lot; his students would make a statement about the text but not cite evidence, and he wouldn't prompt them."
Together, Laura and Yasmin proceed to plan Laura's upcoming feedback meeting with John. They design a role-play through which Laura will have John practice prompting a student. Laura will play the student to give John the opportunity to rehearse.
Yasmin and Laura don't stop there: They then role-play Laura giving feedback to John about this skill. Yasmin draws on a protocol of six steps coaches can take to deliver postobservation feedback (praise the teacher's growth, probe, identify the next action step, plan how to implement the action step in upcoming lessons, practice it, and follow up). Laura receives this kind of practice for guiding her peers often, role-playing everything from feedback sessions to data analysis meetings.
In the story Stone Soup, a stranger promises to make soup for everyone in a village using only a stone and eventually convinces everyone in town to contribute an ingredient to the stewpot. As I watched Laura and Yasmin rehearse the feedback Laura would give John later that week, it struck me that they, too, were making stone soup. They were harnessing the force of community—and teacher leadership—to accomplish what would otherwise be impossible.
How Can We Improve Instruction?
Yasmin's leadership model responds to a national crisis in teacher development. Today, hardly any U.S. teachers receive sufficient coaching. The typical new teacher in the United States is only observed about twice a year, and the typical veteran teacher, once every three years (Marzano, Frontier, & Livingston, 2011). Many districts have met this challenge with intense efforts to increase teacher observation, focusing on systematic formal observations, often with the help of intricate evaluations from experts (Danielson, 2002; Marzano et al., 2011). But these evaluations haven't always yielded clear or reliable results (Anderson, 2013). More important, they don't address the fundamental question, How can we improve instruction faster?
Yasmin's solution? Make your most experienced teachers peer coaches, narrow their focus, and give the coach and teacher time to practice. Yasmin creates structures that get teachers coaching teachers (Bambrick-Santoyo, 2012). The result is high-speed, high-quality teacher development that Yasmin couldn't possibly drive if she were Vailsburg's only instructional leader. Everyone contributes, and everyone thrives. Let's look at Yasmin's recipe for stone soup.
Add More Cooks
The biggest challenge principals face in helping teachers improve faster is having the time to work with them. Yasmin, like each of her principal peers at Uncommon Schools, locks in 15- to 20-minute observations and a standing check-in time with about 15 teachers a week to make biweekly feedback for as many as 30 teachers a reality. But she has more than 30 teachers in her school, all of whom could benefit from frequent help from a seasoned teacher.
Yasmin closes this gap by adding some of her strongest teachers to the mix. Relying on Laura and other teacher leaders ensures that all teachers get the coaching they need. To enable teacher leaders to fit coaching duties into a full teaching workload, Yasmin takes away one of the duties that leader would otherwise have performed, such as monitoring lunch. A rule of thumb for principals who tap classroom teachers to be coaches: If a teacher leader coaches more than two peers, reduce or adjust that teacher's course load.
Such actions are small, but their impact is large. When teacher leaders guide their colleagues regularly, principals can leapfrog over the slow march to improvement characteristic of traditional observation and feedback.
With this level of support, teachers in a school like Vailsburg get more feedback in one year than most teachers do in 20. Of course, that level of support only matters if you use the time well. Let's break down Laura's weekly peer coaching work in more detail.
Add One Ingredient at a Time
Keeping the focus narrow, teacher leaders pinpoint essential instructional or classroom management practices a teacher they are guiding should improve—for example, sharpening one's teacher radar through such action steps as deliberately scanning the room for student compliance or circulating the perimeter of the room purposefully to monitor work.
No one ever became a master teacher—or doctor or Olympic skier—overnight. We get better at what we do by perfecting one small element of our craft at a time, ideally with the aid of an expert who gives us the right bite-size feedback at the right time. Progress may sometimes feel excruciatingly slow—just as each single ingredient the stranger in Stone Soup collected initially looked too small to feed anyone. What all those little ingredients add up to, though, is lasting improvement.
Yasmin and Laura recognize this. When we joined their meeting earlier, they were choosing one ingredient: the single piece of feedback that would be most helpful to John for the upcoming week. Laura began that search when she observed John's lesson and filled out her observation tracker on the Wednesday before this Friday meeting. Noticing that John missed chances to send students back to the text to find evidence of their statements, Laura recorded this teacher practice as one small, measurable action step.
Laura's approach is typical of this kind of peer coaching. She doesn't go into John's classroom to make a list of everything he could do better or construct a multiple-month plan for making John a more skilled teacher. She's interested in what one action he can take each week to make his students more successful. The right action will be small enough for John to accomplish in one week, visible enough that Laura will be able to see whether he's implemented it the next time she observes him, and relevant to Laura and Yasmin's broader professional development goals for John.
Narrowing the focus is incredibly powerful, as every seasoned coach knows. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of traditional observations that try to observe for everything. Such comprehensive observations are helpful if you need to make a summative judgment, but they don't drive a teacher's development at the same speed. What makes bite-size feedback effective is that the leader can follow up the next week and affirm that John has mastered this skill. If he hasn't, Laura will know she needs to narrow down the action step further, making sure that it's something that John can accomplish and she can observe.
John might not become an expert overnight, but with bite-size feedback, he can become good at one more teaching skill every week. Over the course of a year, he'll experience incredible growth.
The implications are profound. Not only will Laura be able to congratulate John on mastering a specific aspect of teacher talk, but John will also receive the implicit message that improving his teacher talk matters enough for someone to follow up—a combined message of support and accountability.
Add Occasions to Practice
Of course, there's more to making soup than simply having the recipe. For some cooks, creating a new dish could mean spending years perfecting the fine arts of sautéing, stirring, and simmering. But for someone who really wants to break into the culinary world, it means an apprenticeship with a master chef who'll put them to work doing all of that—and doing it right. Practice is at the heart of all high-quality coaching. Coaching teachers is no different—and neither is coaching teacher leaders.
Practice is what gets teachers like John to mastery—and what prepares coaches like Laura to lead them there. Yasmin knew when she recruited Laura for peer coaching that Laura had potential to be a great leader. But strong leadership skills don't automatically follow from strong teaching skills. Yasmin brought out Laura's confidence and leadership by giving her rich opportunities to practice every component of the coaching process.
A school's principal needn't do all the coaching of instructional leaders by herself, of course. Yasmin's teacher leaders get the opportunity multiple times during the year to join other teacher leaders for districtwide support for their instructional leadership. At these workshops, each teacher leader shows a small group of peers a video clip of him- or herself giving feedback to a teacher who's being coached—praising the teacher's progress, tactfully identifying a new action step, and practicing a new strategy.
After watching the clip, fellow teacher leaders give the teacher leader in question feedback on what they observed about the session and suggest ways he or she might more effectively talk with a struggling teacher. The leader then redoes the feedback meeting, practicing what he or she has just heard to make a habit out of it.
Effective instructional leadership teams regularly give one another such "feedback on feedback," evaluating one another's skills at guiding others. In schools in which the school leadership team meets regularly, team members can use these meetings to hone their skills by
- Exchanging feedback on the quality of teacher leaders' observation notes, data analysis, and feedback.
- Practicing or role-playing the meetings peer coaches will have with teachers.
- Planning—and practicing—professional development sessions teacher leaders will be giving their peers.
Serve Immediately
Considering the similarities between Yasmin's coaching process and Laura's, it should come as no surprise that when Laura met with John to give him feedback about his teacher talk, it looked a lot like Laura's meeting with Yasmin on that hectic Friday. The two educators found a quiet space, pulled up their materials, and settled in to work. Let's listen in on their dialogue:
Laura: Last week, we set a goal for you to model for students making inferences about characters, through think-alouds. You met that goal well. How did it feel?John: It felt great. I could see how the students were more prepared to apply this skill after watching my model. It helped me clarify my instruction.Laura: To build on this, I want to focus today on what's happening during classroom conversation. I noticed that, despite your modeling, in this last class students often talked about what was happening in the story—like why they thought the stranger was pretending he could make a soup—without citing any words or incidents from the text. What's been the challenge for students citing the text in classroom conversations?John: Even though I modeled going back to show in the text where they saw something they brought up in discussion, they aren't doing so in class. I think there are a few key challenges: Students aren't in the habit of having their book open during classroom conversations, and I haven't been demanding that level of participation.Laura: I think that's right. I have a video clip here of a teacher implementing this action step. Let's watch it together and determine what actions she took to get her students to use evidence. [After watching the short clip] What was different about the way she led her discussion?John: Well, first the questions she asked were much more focused than mine. There was no way to answer them correctly without citing the text. You saw students getting out the text because there was no other way. Then she kept prompting students to show where in the story they saw something they referred to in discussion.Laura: Absolutely. I also noticed signage in the classroom reminding students to go back to the text. Let's plan out your upcoming lesson to make these things happen in your class.
You can guess what happened next. Laura and John created a list of text-dependent questions for his upcoming reading class and role-played prompting students to use evidence. The stone soup that was John's teaching just became richer. John's students would feel the result of Laura's guidance immediately.
The Right Recipe
Schools ask teachers to do so much beyond the classroom, everything from planning schoolwide events to facilitating committees. But the most powerful ability teacher leaders have—and the most overlooked—is to help other teachers grow. When principals recruit their strongest teachers to share in this work, they lock in growth for every person in a school: teacher leaders, teachers, and, most important, students. Multiple cooks don't spoil the broth—as long as they're using the right recipe.
