Cranbourne+Secondary+College

Welcome To Cranbourne Secondary College Wiki Page

We spent 2010 planning to introduce a school wide coaching program. Part of the planning and preparation had me joining the Literacy Coaching Program. We also did the following: We have 12 coaches and 24 staff members who volunteered to be coached in the first semester. We meet Every Monday for 1 1/2 hours after school in a Professional Learning Team to develop our classroom expertise in relation to the Model of Good Teaching. Some days we are all together, but most of the meeting time we break in into units of "coach" and coachee". I have lots of resources and when I learn to upload them on this page you can look at them.
 * Background**
 * Established a School Wide Model of Good Teaching, to which all staff agreed
 * Identified several "coaches" (largely Senior Teachers) and each of the Principal Class in the school.
 * Provided coaching PD for all coaches: a combination of activities and discussions led by Acting Principal, Me and our existing National Partnerships Maths Coach.
 * Engaged the services of a Regional National Partnership Coach to run several PD sessions for all of us.
 * Identified "Differentiated Learning" as a key plank in the Model of Good Teaching
 * Provided ACER PD sessions for coaches and intewrested staff and a general introductio to all staff on "Differentiated Curriculum" (delivered by Penny Willoughby).
 * The 2011 Coaching Program**

So now we approach the end of Term 1. I am looking at three levels: 1. My personal coaching experience. 2. My role in (co) leading the coaching program. 3. The link between our coaching program and the schools' Model of Good Teaching.

1. My personal coaching has reminded me that just as a teacher and class need to get the relationships right, so does the coach and "coachee". it is about support that teacher with his or her teaching issues in the context of the teaching goals established in the school. So there are multiple starting points even for a school like ours with a clear model of Good teaching. We have aimed at "Knowing Your Students" (element 1 in our Model) and collecting and analysing On Demand test data. This has dominated our discussions. We have aimed at "Clearly Communicating the Purpose of the Lesson" (element 2 of our Model)- and discussed this, identifed successful practices. Yet stil it is nor embedded into the coachee's daily practice. We have looked at some ways of "Differentiating Teaching" (element 3 in our Model) to better provide for the range of student skills that are evident from element 1. This is - obviously - the real challenge of teaching. We are trying ideas and reflecting on them. This is the value of the coaching model - we, on a weekly basis, force people to reflect on what we tried and if it worked and what we might do better next time. We are going to start looking at "Feedback and Assessment" (element 4 in our Model) at the start of Term 2. I will use the approach that Jill used to get us discuss some feedback Ideas from John Hattie.... we will visit Paris, Switzerland, Scotland and Italy and reflect on more effective ways of using feedback in the classroom.

2. I am working with another AP in John Jovic at our school. Together we have responsibility for Coaching, Model of Good Teaching and in strategically managing these aspects of our Annual Implementation Plan. We meet regularly and are very strategic in our disucssions. We look at what issues coaches and their teschers are having; we feed out tasks and guidelines to them to help them stay on track; we design discussion forums every few weekks as required.

3. This has been a strength of our coaching. The coaching has a focus which provides structure toi coaching conversations. It also helps us quickly identify the needs of PD teachers and the enables us to develop checklists to help keep ourselves and staff in general on track. We have also had to establish a simple observation protocol so we can monitor the adherence to the Model of good Teaching. This meant setting some tasks for the group not involved in coaching to keep them on track; so there "avoidance" of the Model was less likely to occur and through thid, undermine progress made through our coaching. This also has meant having some staff meetings specifically focussing on one simple aspect of the Model of good Teaching. Here are two examples of the content of these sessions. The key to it was making it simple. With regard to the "seeing is believing" document the simple point was to clearly communicare the intent or purpose of the lesson EACH time.

This is my reflective piece. It has a number of mebedded hyperlinks - but I'm not sure I can make these work on the wiki. I have endeavoured to combine the Reflection Task and the Digital Resource in the same document. I also have a DVD of interviews with people involved in our coaching program at school. This may need to wait until Day 8.
 * MAKING YOUR THINKING AND LEARNING VISIBLE**