Coaching isn't Just for Athletes

In schools all over Boston, change coaches and content coaches are offering principals and teachers the kind of professional development that research says is most effective: ongoing, in school, high quality, focused on instruction. Ms. Guiney provides the details. THE shapes on the students' papers look like puffy clouds with spindly legs, hardly the stuff of which strong foundations are built. But looks can be deceiving. Inside these airy structures, students in Helen O'Malley's fourth-grade class are placing their most precious words, the ones that will be the cornerstones of their writing adventures. The words My new neighborhood find their home inside one girl's cloud. From its protruding stick-like legs, this fourth-grader hangs other phrases to help connect her thoughts: the dance studio, where the new neighborhood is, the way it is different, the places there. Each of these is a notation designed to prompt images that will emerge in her writing. Soon she writes: moved a couple of weeks ago. I'm kind of lonely because I haven't made any new friends yet. I used to live in Dorchester and have a lot of friends there. Now I live in Roslindale. In Ms. O'Malley's room, now quieted by the industriousness of its occupants, Writers' Workshop is under way. Helen O'Malley, now in her ninth year of teaching, her first in the Boston Public Schools, welcomes whatever advice Charlotte Teplow, Everett School's content coach, can offer. With Teplow's weekly guidance and instructional modeling, Writers' Workshop has become the tool that is propelling O'Malley's students to write with enthusiasm and demonstrate steady, measurable progress. Initially I was sort of anxious because I was not quite sure what Charlotte's role was going to be in my classroom, O'Malley says. thought she was going to be there critiquing my lessons, saying to me, 'We do this, this, and this in Writers' Workshop.' And it hasn't been like that at all. It has just developed into a collegial relationship. Charlotte is there to reassure me, to guide me. She offers me suggestions, but she does so in a manner that enables me, half the time, to feel that I am coming up with these wonderful ideas. You are! Teplow responds. In schools all over Boston, external coaches like Charlotte Teplow - often former teachers with expertise in school reform (change coaches) or literacy or math (content coaches) - are offering principals and teachers the kind of professional development that research says is most effective: ongoing, in school, high quality, focused on instruction. The one-day-a-week consultants are doing everything from leading teachers through Writers' Workshop training to helping them analyze results of newly implemented formative assessments. Each coach's work is grounded in Boston's districtwide reform effort but customized to the specific learning needs of the students and the adults in each school. Superintendent Thomas Payzant's blueprint for standards-based, urban school reform aims to improve student performance by improving teaching, particularly for the estimated 30% of students who have routinely advanced in school without mastering the material. Boston's approach to whole-school improvement rests on two central strategies: 1) focus on instruction and on professional development to improve instruction; and 2) place an unwavering emphasis on helping teachers work together, make their work public, and end teacher isolation. In the process, teacher leadership emerges. Coaching and Teacher Leadership To support this kind of change, the Boston Public Schools created a new kind of professional development that integrates teachers' learning with teachers' practice, gives participants ongoing feedback, and makes these activities a whole-school, collegial endeavor. Crucial players are the coaches. They don't teach teachers. Instead, they do their work with teachers, helping them to imagine and create another reality, helping them to engage in regular, reflective discussions about instruction. …