What Interventions Should a Coach Share?

Today I was asked about the kinds of interventions that coaches should share with teachers. I thought I'd explain how we understand this on the Pathways to Success project.

Hierarchy of Instructional Practices:

Coaches in the Pathways to Success project identify appropriate interventions by understanding teachers’ needs as a hierarchy, something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s famous theory suggests that people are motivated by unsatisfied needs and that lower needs such as physiological, safety and love needs have to be satisfied before higher needs like esteem and self actualization can be addressed.

I make a similar claim for the professional needs of teachers in the classroom. A teacher who has not developed systems for managing student behavior in the classroom probably needs to learn how to keep his or her class under control before learning about teaching concepts, and that teacher is also probably most interested in learning about classroom management. By considering a teacher’s needs, Instructional Coaches can provide focused professional development that is highly relevant to the teacher. Our belief is that every level of the hierarchy has to be met before the next level can be addressed.

Level One: Classroom Management. Students can not learn if they are not on task. Teachers need to be able to keep the classroom a safe, productive learning community for all students. Coaches can teach teachers how to clarify and reinforce behavior expectations through interventions such as Randy Sprick’s CHAMPs program. Also teachers can learn how to establish the essential elements of a learning community through interventions such as Sue Vernon’s Talking Together program researched at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning.

Level Two: Clear Understanding of Content and Targets. Once teachers’ classrooms are under control, teachers’ need to be sure they are teaching the right content, and that they have a deep, correct understanding of the content. For that reason, coaches need to know how to access state standards for courses, and how to help teachers translate those standards into lesson plans. Coaches can use interventions such as Keith Lenz’s Course and Unit Organizers, researched at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning, or Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design to help teachers to unpack standards and clearly explain them as learning outcomes for students.

Level Three: Instructional Basics. Over the past 25 years researchers at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning have identified and validated instructional basics that teachers can use to help students’ learn effectively. Our research suggests that instruction is improved when teachers (a) provide an advance organizer, (b) use simple content enhancements to make content more memorable, © model thinking processes, (d) provide students with numerous opportunities for guided and independent practice, (e) provide constructive feedback, and (f) structure activities so that students can generalize their learning to other settings.

Level Four: Assessment Literacy. Teachers also need to know if their students are learning content, and they need to involve their students in the whole business of assessing learning. Students can become very motivated when they know how well they’re doing, when they’re getting frequent constructive feedback on their progress, and when they know what they still have to do to improve. Richard Stiggin’s work on Assessment for Learning provides excellent suggestions on how coaches can help their teachers become assessment literate.

Level Five: Instructional Proficiency. Once teachers have their classrooms under control, are clear on their content and content targets, use instructional basics fluently, and are assessment literate, they then can begin to explore any number of ways to demonstrate instructional proficiency. Coaches, at this point, can teach teachers about some additional Content Enhancement Routines, researched at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning, Discovery Learning, Socratic Dialogue, Story telling, Partnership Education any number of cooperative learning approaches, and so forth.

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