School+-+Somerville+Secondary+College

Hello

I'm Valerie Potter, English Learning Area leader - and Literacy Coach in training! - at our newish (opened 2006) school on the Westernport side of the Mornington Peninsula.

We are a very small school at present - 400 students in Years 7 to 11. The joys of this are many : I know every student in our school and have taught most of them. I know all my colleagues very well. We have a wealth of very young, hardworking and enthusiastic teachers to build our school. The drawbacks are many too : we have little money for programs or time release. All of us undertake several responsibilities in addition to full time class room teaching. Our timetable is extraordinarily tight as most of us teach across at least four year levels. Time for encouragement, development, and affirmation of young colleagues is essential - but limited.

This is a year of enormous challenge for our teachers, and for me, as we introduce VCE for the first time. We have been a 7 to 10 school up to now. Senior school curriculum development is our focus as an English team, __but__ Literacy improvement is our focus as a school, particularly in writing.

Many of our students come from a background of limited opportunity. Our intake at Year 7 typically has 40 to 50% of students at least two years below the expected VELS level in reading; more than 60% are further below the expected level in writing. We have had the enormous benefit of money in 2010 from the National Partnerships fund. This allowed us to engage a Literacy Consultant/Coach who has stirred up the English team mightily! Our reading and writing results (from NAPLAN and on demand tests) have improved as a result of this coaching approach - coupled with an almighty overhaul of Year 7 and 8 teaching approaches. We also have the ongoing expert support of two part-time, very experienced Primary trained teachers, who work with us in the English and Mathematics programs at Years 7 and 8.



My learning on this course so far has been like driving home, years ago, with a near empty tank, on the Glenelg Highway at night. I used to do this often, on a Sunday night. There are many, many low lying areas, full of incredibly thick fog. It's very hard to see the road in these hollows. I rely on fierce focus on the small white lines and trust in the roadmakers! My old car seems to wrench out of them, bit by bit, as I approach yet another hill. Grinding (at times) up that steep gradient, I come out of the fog near the top of the hill, and..... there are usually cars ahead of me, who've passed me on the way. But, I keep thinking that, if there's just enough petrol and if the lights don't give out anytime soon, I'll make it home - at the top of a hill, as it happens, with the __best__ view of creek, scrub and wide, green paddocks you've ever seen!

So, each day at Bastow, I drive in the fog, hoping I make it up the next hill. Day 4 and 5 were affirming days, though. What remains with me as an impression is the immense, intellectual and emotional relief of Helen talking about her start with the kids who don't GET the openess of VELS. What she then did with them. These are the kids I teach too. Then I found a shape to coaching that might suit our school's structure and our ways of working together in the Team Coaching session. More relief and a building excitement.

What am I looking for? Same as everyone : something that fits me and my colleagues,and our kids. Something I can manage in this challenging year of yet more change at our school.



2011 timetable is done (finally) at this point in mid February! My proposal for team coaching at Year 7 is accepted. We'll be meeting three times in one week per fortnight, to plan, then rotate in teaching, then reflect and plan again. Only three teachers will do this - and I'm one of them. The timetable won't support me working with a team that I don't teach in. The other two teachers are enthusiastic about the possibilities of this team coaching model. (Honestly, I'd be hard put to find an English teacher who's NOT enthusiastic about improving the teaching and learning for kids at our school.) So - I'm worried, keen, excited. We start Tuesday 22 Feb. A small start to coaching at our school, but one that fits the realities of our workplace at the moment.

From Maureen: Hi Valerie - what an insightful analogy and thankyou so much for sharing where you are at the moment. Your way of beginning with team coaching illustrates one of the understandings that we hoped our learners would take from this program - that you need to read your context and people as part of designing an approach, that there are many different possible approaches to coaching and you need to create one that suits your context, the readiness of you and your colleagues, and the learning architecture that your school is able to establish at this time. You have managed to create a personalised coaching approach that is not too large in scale and that sounds like a reasonably safe and supportive group to work with as you embark on turning your ideas into action. I'll leave a question to ponder - How will you know if your Team Coaching approach is working - what sort of indicators can you monitor as you try new practices?


 * Team Coaching - many holdups due to other school wide prioritites, but we really start tomorrow! 4 April. We've had two meetings to discuss this model of coaching and what it will do for us as a group of teachers. We've talked about where we want to focus and established ways of speaking and responding to what we see in a classroom. So I volunteered, as I felt I had to in the format we must work with, to be the first host teacher. Some interesting issues have happened already - we had our second meeting using Skype, as one team member was at home with a sick littlie! Interruptions to the room happened because people wanted to see what we were doing - big screen face was an attraction. I need to work at letting colleagues know that a meeting is a meeting, whether by face or technology. An interesting session! I've also started to see the restrictions of coaching in the model where I have to be a member of the team. There is some conflict in the planning sessions between me as a classroom teacher, considering the needs and skills of my own class of students, and me as a coach, establishing the planned, reflective model of teaching. The 'power' in our team is unbalanced from the start. Any ideas will be helpful in how to separate this strange combination of member/lcoach that our timetable necessitates.


 * Team Coaching thoughts again - after two sessions, the issue of power imbalance isn't as detrimental as it first seemed to me. As a reflective team, my colleagues are in my classroom at present and looking at my students' learning. This has been a release of worry for them - they see my teaching 'warts and all' as Julie Kerr put it last week. It has meant that ideas for changing teaching focus have truly come from each member. Now I wonder how the intended model would work, with me as the coach of people who are part of my teaching team in English, but in a team I don't work with? Perhaps next year I'll get the chance to find out and notice, and adjust for the differences - a need to build greater trust and to model the respectful language and student actions focus we have started in this coaching.

**Digital resources:** // My uploads are assessment related as our school has used, but not used well for formative assessment, the computer tests available from DEECD. A strong school focus last year and this has been to use easily accessed data to // // improve teaching across the school. This is part of my task in our Annual Improvement Plan. I am always mindful that several colleagues teaching English in Secondary Schools have no background in literacy learning, or in an English University subject study, or even an English teaching method. Some of the documents I've shared with teaching teams in Year 7 and 8 are here: //

**A list of genre and reading skills in each level of the On Demand Linear Progress tests. I have linked these for our English teachers to the reading strategies** **they might focus on to move students on** **in comprehension:** [|Linear tests.xlsx]

//And with this task, and this interest, I read an extremely useful book which set out what good formative assessment could look like in a school:// **A recommendation for and summary of the book //Advancing Formative Assessment in Every Classroom, Brookhart and Moss. 2009://** [|Why read and use THIS book.docx]

**Reflection on where I am now:**

==== This busy kitchen represents where my thinking is at present, approaching Day 8. I know I’m still at the process stage of my thinking about and understanding of coaching in my own school – how __do__ I do this? So the many cooks in this kitchen are working together with real concentration. In our Team Coaching sessions at Year 7, we are really all doing the learning. There is no head chef in this kitchen scene. There are recipes to follow – and these take a great deal of thinking out at times. Everyone’s product will be a little different – but the ‘meal’ of literacy learning for our students is going to be nutritious. ==== ==== The picture also suggests to me the practice element of this learning for me and for my colleagues. Like these cooks, I’m increasingly confident now that the ‘cooking’ has begun at last. I’ve seen that the structure of Team Coaching suits our present pressures for time at school. I know that I will further my understanding of this model, and investigate other models over this year and next. I’m more confident than I was at the beginning that I do have resources to offer colleagues – there is a ‘pantry’ that is being stocked as I go with resources for audits, conversations, reflection, classroom ready assistance. ==== ==== And one last note – these cooks have a printed recipe; but I know that later they will add, change and remake it depending on who they are cooking for, and on what ingredients and utensils they have available. I think that’s why the metaphor seems appropriate for me now. Although we are at the very beginning of this reflective and action based way of working, we will make it part of what we all do and we will adapt all we do to the needs of the students and the restrictions of the school timetable, resources and teacher needs. ====