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When I Am A Good Instructional Coach
And when I’m not
I’m in the last semester of my role as an instructional coach for my department. It’s been part of my work life for the last three years. The High School science department was among the first departments to move to our current institutional coaching model. The thinking was something like this: If we want to have a department voice in thes model, it’s probably wise to get on board early. The first two years, there were two instructional coaches in the department (myself and a wonderful colleague). This year, and going forward, there will be three (currently myself and two other wonderful colleagues, soon to be three wonderful colleagues who are not me).
In retrospect, it’s a little surprising that I spent three years in the role. I wrote a bit over my time in the role. During my first year, there was a period of time where I almost hung it up, before finally deciding that my concerns were a function of my lack of experience more than anything else. I worked through that, and committed to getting better. Last year, I was mostly writing about how I was working on my 1:1 coaching skills. This year, I haven’t really written much about my work in the role. In part, there was still an open question for the first 6 weeks of the fall semester as to what I was going to do next year. My school handled it as well as I could ask for: They…
