Teacher leaders are often creating professional development [PD] sessions for the staff that they lead. These PD sessions historically have been meetings that are lengthy, rarely applicable, and have a “sit and get” mentality. This is an ineffective way to equip teachers with instructional best practices and knowledge of current pedagogy. Teachers need opportunities to…

Expert teaching should be accessible to students on a daily basis, but it should also be available for teachers.   They need to see great teaching in action and hone their craft. It is one thing to learn instructional pedagogy and another to see it implemented live in front of students. Live teaching demonstrations allow teachers…

There is an art to conducting a classroom observation that fairly depicts a teacher’s performance in the classroom. Nothing is more frustrating for a teacher than having an outsider watch you teach for a small snippet of time, come to a conclusion about your instructional proficiency and then put that rating score in your permanent…

If instructional coaches want to be successful in impacting teacher proficiency and student achievement in the classroom, they have to prepare. Just like teachers write lesson plans by studying and researching content, instructional coaches study too. They take notice of the habits of those they mentor. They research teaching best practices to model and develop…

A coaching cycle puts a framework in place to ensure teachers are improving in the classroom so that students can too. If you are new to the role of an instructional coach or want more clarity on what you could be doing to better help teachers, this blog post will outline how to successfully set up…

Being an upper elementary teacher for a decade, I realized that no matter how hard the math concepts became for students to grasp, they seemed to still struggle with the foundational math skills of addition and subtraction, what I refer to as ‘simple math.’ Why? I can’t be quite sure, but I can make an…

The use of parent-teacher conferences is a great communication tool for educators and guardians to unite as a team for a child’s best interest. The intent of the parent-teacher conference is for the teacher to share with the legal guardian what is occurring on a student’s daily learning journey. This might include talking in depth…

One of my biggest struggles in my early years of teaching was the lack of help and direction from experts in the field (veteran teachers, administrators, etc.). I attended all necessary training for new teachers, followed all protocol, and even asked questions whenever I could to whomever would listen. But, I still had major growing…

As first semester in our classrooms are coming to a close, it is important to REFLECT on where students began and where they hope to go. Much of that reflection is based in academic benchmarks to ensure students meet the requirements for their grade level, but the most important work we can do as educators…