Steve Barkley and PLS 3rd Learning are offering instructional coaching professional development modules through the Academy for Educators. Each module is fully facilitated by an expert online instructor who provides frequent and meaningful feedback to participants. The instructional coaching professional development modules are framed around Steve’s work as an education consultant. Participants will have access […]

In an Education Week blog, Peter DeWitt states that while “Instructional coaches can help teachers improve their instructional practices in any subject at any time,”  they are  a bit more removed from students and therefore can find it more difficult to know the impact of their work. He identifies the need for all educators today […]

I recently worked for two days with 175 instructional coaches in a large Texas district. It was a return following earlier training I had done for them. As part of the preparation I requested questions that folks wanted to pose from their coaching experiences. Here are some of them with my responses: Balancing time with […]

As this school year comes to a conclusion many school leadership teams will be working on a school improvement plan for the coming year. These improvement plans should serve as a starting point for identifying a principal’s and instructional coach’s goals that will support the plan. Student achievement needs to be the starting point for […]

I received the following request from an instructional coach anxious to support teacher growth while maintaining the defined instructional coach’s perceived and defined role. “I am struggling with the fact that we do not have the morning PD times anymore where we were able to use that time to talk about building initiatives and continue […]

 I recently was a guest participant on a Twitter chat with #educoach where the topic was exploring instructional coaches’ work with Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).The facilitators offered a series of questions to spark the sharing. Here are the questions, some of the tweets I shared and my reflections on the responses. The entire chat is […]