The Learning Treasure Chest

Steps to a Coaching Classroom: Newsletter 10

”I might not be able to pay teachers more money, or give them the public recognition they deserve for the amazing work that they do, but I can teach them about a coaching approach. And that will be my contribution to a better world.”, Martin Richards

Martin Richards is the founder of C4E, Coaching for Educators an organisation that offers professional coaching support to educators, at no charge.

In the previous article, I wrote about not helping your students too much. You can avoid stealing their learning by using the GROW Model and asking open-ended questions to set the goal, survey their current understanding, seek out ways to solve the problem and then decide on a strategy to reach the goal. Students who put in the right amount of struggle feel they have earned the learning.

In this article, we look at the questions you were afraid to ask, yet need to ask if you are going to develop as a teacher.

Focus on teaching or learning?

Since you are the responsible adult in the room, it is natural for people to focus on what you do during the lesson. You are an employee. Your employer wants you to teach as effectively as possible, often with large numbers of students in each class.

Yet, we know that the students play a significant role in transforming your teaching into their learning. We know students learn in different ways and have a range of pre-existing attitudes towards learning. There may well be several different native languages spoken by the students, and a range of cultural influences on their perceptions of the role of teacher and student.

Since we cannot expect you to teach in ten different ways at the same time, we need to have more active involvement in learning from the students, and that means they have to take more responsibility for their learning. But how can we make them do that?

What can we do to increase students' level of responsibility for their learning process?

The solution is simple. Ask them.

This article describes one way to get the information you need so you can develop your teaching, at the same time, send a message to your students about their responsibility for teaching and learning.

What are they learning from your lesson?

I was observing Max's lesson to give him some feedback. (Max was not his real name). I sat at the back of the room and waited for the students to arrive.

Max opened the door and let the students in. I quickly saw from the orderly way they walked into the room, that they were well-behaved students. They smiled at Max as they came into the classroom and went quietly to their places, and came quickly to attention when Max faced them to start his lesson.

"What is going on here?” I wondered "The students seem overly compliant."

During the lesson, most of the students followed the lesson in their textbooks as Max read the important texts aloud and added comments from his own experience. Max told his students, “I am confident you will pass the test – all you need to do is listen to me, follow along in the book, and remember what is said and discussed during the lessons.”

At the end of the lesson, the students filed out, some stopping to politely thank Max for the lesson and his encouragement about the test.

Max had done a good job of lecturing. He was clear in his delivery, he was entertaining and obviously knowledgeable about the subject. But I wondered how much the students had learned from his 40-minute lecture. I asked Max, “How sure are you that the students are learning from your lessons?” I was about to add, “on a scale from one to ten,” but noticed that Max already looked intrigued by the question, and held my tongue.

Max looked around the room for a long time and then admitted, “I don’t know; I really don’t know. It shows up first in the test results, I suppose.” Max suggested, “But, we could find out at the end of the lesson how much they had taken in, rather than waiting until the test day.”

I queried, “What strategies do you know for quickly testing the students’ learning from the day’s lesson?”

“I can give them exit slips. And I can tell them they are part of my own assessment as a teacher,” said Max with marked excitement. “I think they will enjoy that.”

A week later, during a coaching session, Max shared with me his observations of his own lesson.

I began, "So what happened with those exit slips?”

“I did it, as promised. At the end of the lesson, I asked them to answer five simple, factual questions that had been covered during the lecture.”

“And?”

“They got one or two right. They had learned next to nothing from my lecture. The results were less than if they had guessed.”

“Oh!?”

“I now have uncomfortable and undeniable evidence that my lectures are significantly less effective than I had previously thought.” Max groaned and added with watery eyes and a choked voice. “This is the best and the worst thing that has ever happened to me as a teacher. If I am going to live up to my self-image of being a great teacher, I will have to change what I believe about my lecturing and try something radically different!”

This is the best and the worst thing that has ever happened to me as a teacher.

Exit slips

One use of exit slips is to check how much knowledge has been transferred from lecturer to student. What else can they do for you? You can ask a range of questions depending on the effect you wish to achieve:

• Communication with you - What could the teacher do differently to help you better?
• Formative assessment - What is your current understanding of what we studied today?
• Student responsibility - How hard did you work today? What could you have done differently to learn better?
• Instructional strategies - How well did the group work support you in your learning?

There are benefits for the students too:

• Recalling recently-learned knowledge gives long-term memory benefits
• Students are encouraged to reflect on their part in the lesson, and take more responsibility for their actions.
• Reflection on their learning process helps students become better learners.

Summary

• Reflecting on your teaching is as important as reflecting on their learning
• Exit slips can tell you the answer to "Are they learning?"
• Exit slips can open up a safe line of communication between student and teacher
• Being courageous and asking questions shows vulnerability and true leadership.

NEXT

In the next article, we will look at the benefits of Formative Assessment, in reverse.