KENNESAW STATE UNIVERSITY | COACHING JOURNAL

Coaching Journal

Brittnay Schuster

PL & Technology Innovation (ITEC7460)

Kennesaw State University M. Ed

Instructional Technology, Spring 2018

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Context

For confidentiality purposes I will refer to the colleague that I coached simply as “Steve”

throughout this narrative.

Steve is a ninth-grade language arts teacher at Mountain View High School in

Lawrenceville, Georgia. He has been teaching for between four and nine years and he teaches all

levels including Gifted. Steve falls pretty close to the middle when it comes to the diffusion of

technology. Based on his agreeance to participate and the results of the Adopter Survey and LoTi

Questionnaire, I believe that he is part of the early majority category. According to Les Robinson

(2009). “Early majorities are pragmatists, comfortable with moderately progressive ideas, but

won’t act without solid proof of benefits. They are followers who are influenced by mainstream

fashions and wary of fads. They want to hear ‘industry standard’ and ‘endorsed by normal,

respectable folks.’” Using this information allowed me be a better coach for Steve because I was

able to better understand his frame of mind when it came to technology integration. I chose to

work with Steve because he is on the same content team that I am on and he has been curious

about using more technology for a while but has not “taken the plunge” yet. This seemed like a

perfect opportunity to tap into that curiosity and help him to integrate technology.

Session One

January 16th 2018 7:20AM-8:16AM

Strategies

Having worked with Steve for a few years, I knew that using a partnership approach was

going to be the best strategy to use. However, I started with the co-active coaching so that I could
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establish a level of trust that was not previously established on our team. In doing this, I learned

a lot about Steve as a person. The most important thing I learned during this first session was that

he had just gotten into a car accident recently and as a result he was commuting with another

team member who tends to leave work right at 2:50 everyday. Knowing this information helped

me to make sure I was working with him at an appropriate time and it helped me to know that he

might need a little time to get acclimated to our coaching relationship since he just went through

that experience.

My main objective for this session was to establish our relationship and our goals for the

coaching. According to Jim Knight (2007) in his ​Instructional Coaching​ “Co-active coaching

brings coach and client together to work on the agenda that has been set by the client. However,

the coach often has to work hard to help clients see just what it is that they want” (p. 10).

Therefore, beginning this relationship through establishing what it is that he wanted out of the

experience, we were able to define a specific plan of action to accomplish those goals. Jim

Knight (2007) also expresses the importance of building relationships by stating, “When this

principle is applied to instructional coaching, it means that collaborating teachers are recognized

as equal partners and, consequently, no one’s view is more important or valuable than anyone

else’s” (p. 24). It was very important for me to do this during our first meeting because Steve is

older than me and has more teaching experience, I wanted to make sure that he felt like we were

partners. After some discussion both about the coaching experience and getting to know each

other, Steve determined that he wanted to learn more about incorporating technology in general.

He mentioned that he would like to try some of the things that I do in my classroom. Some of the

things that he mentioned that he wanted to try was implementing differentiation through student
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choice via our learning management system. I used the information I gathered during this session

to plan the other sessions in the future.

Skill and Affective Changes

After our first meeting, Steve began to open up more and more each day. He became

comfortable sharing his ideas and asking questions regardless of how small or large the idea or

question was. Our rooms are not geographically close enough to talk in between classes. Since

Steve and I have the same planning period it made it very easy for us to work together both

formally and informally. The first change that Steve made was that he moved his reading

assessments for ​To Kill a Mockingbird​ to eCLASS. He liked that he was able to provide scores

for students immediately upon completion. Furthermore, this helped him to determine what he

needed to review with his students the next day. By collecting this data he was able to provide

enrichment and/or extension activities for his students based on the results of the assessment.

Understanding this methodology is the first step towards properly implementing differentiated

instructional strategies.

Reflection on Challenges and Solution

The coaching situation for this particular colleague of mine actually works out really

well. We are far enough apart that there is autonomy over his choices but we are close enough

that if he needs me to feel more comfortable trying something he can easily find me.

Additionally, since we have the same planning period, scheduling our sessions is relatively

simple. However, I have to be sure that I do not simply provide him with the materials to

accomplish his task. There is great value in providing teachers with guidance rather than doing it

for them. I realized at first that what I was offering was for him to simply copy what I had
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already created and using it for his class. This was not helpful for anyone because all he learned

during that time was how to copy material from one page to another. After I made an adjustment

to ensure that he was learning, he seemed very excited at his accomplishment in creating the

assessment himself. I used what I learned from his reaction to help me plan the rest of the

sessions.

Session Two

Tuesday, February 6th 2018 7:20AM- 8:16AM

Strategies

During this session I gave Steve what I referred to as a “​touchstone tracker​.” This

instrument was designed to allow teachers to track their usage data for each touchstone element

(Appendix A). These “touchstones” were created by a local group of teachers, myself included,

and are essentially “technology standards” that students should master before leaving a particular

grade level. The touchstones included are for the high school level. The tracker was designed to

be used with as a “pilot” for teachers to use over six week period to see how many and how often

they address each technology standard with their students. Our intention is to take the data from

this tracker and conduct interviews at the end of the six weeks to determine what teachers were

able to use, what they liked, what they did not like, how easy or difficult it was for them to

implement each thing.

I thought Steve would be a great candidate to collect data from because he was already

participating in the coaching experience with me. When I asked him if he would be interested in

providing this data, he enthusiastically said yes. I used our second session to review with Steve

the things that he was already doing in his classroom. Doing this allowed us to narrow down
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what to focus on based on the things that he was least comfortable with. When doing this, we

were able to narrow down the skills to the “Digital Communications” category. This actually

worked out perfectly because Steve was wanting to create a project in which students had to

collaborate on a digital non-slides-based presentation. We talked about some ideas he had for the

project and I showed him some of the digital projects that were created by students in my class

last semester. Just having this discussion made him more enthusiastic about trying new things.

Skill and Affective Changes

Steve’s enthusiasm for innovation was a new development during this meeting. He felt

important because he was asked to participate in the pilot and he felt good about the project he

was creating. I could tell that he was a little nervous about taking the plunge to move away from

slides-based presentations but ultimately he seemed interested so being able to show him the

work of some of my students eased his hesitation. Our students are very similar demographically

so it was very easy to “sell” Steve on the idea that his students could and would be successful.

Also, I told him that I would be happy to share my instructional videos that I provided my

students so that he didn’t feel like he had to create everything from scratch.

Reflection on Challenges and Solution

Although this session kind of ventured away from our original plan to focus on

differentiation, I think that it worked out for the best in the end. Allow this experience to

organically take the direction of learning more about digital collaboration with be tremendously

helpful for Steve and the content that is he learning can ultimate be applied to differentiation as

well. Since the focus developed out of Steve’s choosing, it made the time we spent together
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much more impactful than if I were to have selected a course of action for him. I think this was

pivotal moment for Steve’s progress towards technology integration.

Session Three

Friday, March 2nd 11:15AM- 12:10PM

Strategies

After Steve’s students conducted their research and completed their projects, he had them

present their projects to the class. He invited to me to come see some of the presentations on

March 2nd as I was already going to be out of my classroom for other observations that day.

Before I went to see the presentation, he shared some of the work with me that his students did as

their final products. For this project many students created websites to show their research. Some

of them were very well done and some of them were just a modification of a slides-based

presentation. Jim Knight (2007) refers to this strategy as “Observing and Providing Feedback.”

One of the most important things to note with this strategy is that observation for the sake of

observation is not productive, in fact, Knight states, “[...] coaches must also be purposeful about

watching for other behaviors. Coaches need to focus their attention on all that the teachers do

well. Observers can slip into the habit of seeing the weakness more than the strengths, but

coaches will be less effective if they fall into that pattern” (p. 30). I knew that I was going into

the situation to look for technology integration and I knew that I wanted to find strength to bring

back to our follow-up for this experience. Being able to provide my observations both of his

technology integration and of his student’s technology integration was very powerful. He

expressed later that felt appreciated and that “someone is paying attention to the ‘good stuff’”

that is going on within the school.

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Skill and Affective Changes

After the presentations I was able to meet with Steve at the end of that day so that the

observation experience would be fresh on my mind. He was first and foremost very appreciative

that I gave up my time to come watch his student’s presentations. Additionally, he was very open

and eager to hear what I thought about the presentations. He seemed to be pretty happy overall so

I encouraged him to share his thoughts with me first. One of the things that I really wanted to

know was how he felt the implementation went. He expressed that he was pleasantly surprised

by the quality of work that his students produced and he was absolutely interested in doing more

projects with the same level of technology integration. I feel like this project really helped to

solidify his desire to implement more (and better) uses of technology both for himself and for his

students.

Reflection on Challenges and Solution

One challenge that I noted as I was watching some of the presentations is that when I am

encouraging teachers to “step out of the box” with the way they assin projects, I need to make it

clear what that looks like. To a teacher who has not implemented any technology integration, the

idea of their students creating websites seems like a tremendous accomplishment. However, as a

teacher who has seen student websites used in a variety of different ways--if a student creates a

website where they just included information in the same way they would on a slides-based

presentation, they haven’t really stepped out of the box very far. However, I had never thought to

clarify what to look for in a quality website.

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References

Robinson, L. (2009). A Summary of Diffusion of Innovations. Retrieved March 12, 2018, from

https://twut.nd.edu/PDF/Summary_Diffusion_Theory.pdf
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High School Technology Touchstones

Students in 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades should be able to:

1) eCLASS Course Pages

● Use all aspects of course pages efficiently

○ Dropbox

○ Discussion

○ Classroom Assessment

2) Research

● Achieve advanced research and citation skills: choosing the best resource for the task

3) Digital Citizenship

● Gain ownership of digital citizenship and the extended impact of digital footprint

● Understand Digital Citizenship- Digital Footprint & Reputation (thinking of college and

jobs)

4) General Technology Navigation

● Understand basic troubleshooting for hardware and software

● Use advanced features within tech tools

● Become general tech experts

● Leave high school beyond basic level of all expectations/tools listed above

5) Digital Communication

Presentation
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● Use advanced presentation skills: choosing the best medium for the task

● Use effective email and social media etiquette (formal and informal)

● Engage in civil discourse

Collaboration

● Use online collaboration tools (such as Google, sharing docs/slides and

commenting)