AbraCadabra

Steps to a Coaching Classroom - Newsletter 13

Abracadabra means 'I create what I speak'. I take that to mean that teachers and coaches create the learning environment through the words they speak.

In the previous edition, The Wizardry of Making Mistakes, I shared a way of becoming more comfortable with getting things wrong. This is a strength when coaching or teaching, since it shows the students that it's normal, OK, and even fun, to not know what they are doing, or where they are going.

In this article, we look at learning from one's own mistakes and learning from others' mistakes. There are also coaching questions you can ask during lessons to explore students' responses and move their words into actions.

Using Sample Work, from other students

I was hoping to get some marking done during one of my so-called free periods. The twenty-or-so essays in front of me each had three or four pages. Phew! This was going to take me hours to get through, I planned to sit in the staff room and plough through this pile of texts before I went to teach the next lesson. However a colleague was sick, or called to a meeting, and I was 'asked' to cover his lesson. I took the pile of essays with me.

I had previously used a technique for essay-marking that cut down the time I spent correcting language errors - I stopped after the first page! However, I had used this technique a little too often and my students, some of their parents and admin, had requested that I mark their essays all the way through! So now I was committed to a lot of work, and I had a lesson to cover.

I started the cover lesson by talking through the absent teacher’s work that was set for the class. The students were to read a chapter in their books, then write about it, answering certain questions from the book. “Easy enough”, I thought. “Perhaps I will have time to get some essays marked.”

Of course, the students finished the set work well before the end of the lesson and were looking for something to do next. So, I invited the first students to look through some of the essays I was marking, and underline any language errors they found.

Suddenly I found myself in deep discussions about vocabulary and grammar about the essays that had been written by students who were two years older than the class I was covering. Other students rapidly finished their set work and joined the essay-checking activity which grew and grew to include the whole class. Now I was watching young students discuss the grammar of essays that had been written by their older school colleagues.

An idea formed in my mind. Could younger students benefit from looking at, and maybe marking, the work of older students?

Coaching Questions to ask during a Lesson

In a coaching conversation, the coach will ask a lot of open-ended questions. The purpose of those questions can be to solve a problem. A typical coaching structure is:

1. (Goal) Find and describe the goal that the student is trying to achieve, including subgoals and milestones.
2. (Reality) Identify obstacles that are getting in the way. These can be physical, emotional, thinking-patterns, beliefs...
3. (Opportunities) Find a strategy to get past the obstacles and closer to the goal. This helps in planning actions to take and assigning dates and resources.
4. (Willingness) Find the reason for achieving the goal, so that we can remind ourselves of why we are doing this (when it gets hard to follow the plan)

When solving problems in Mathematics and Science lessons, it may seem that we wish to get to the answer as quickly as possible. What is also true is that solving the problem is a way of learning how to solve the next problem.

Teach a man to fish

and you feed him for a day

Teach a man how to fish

and you feed him for a lifetime

The same is true in other school subjects. The lesson is not to solve, but to learn how to solve, by becoming aware of what is going on in your mind and body as you seek the solution. When students are aware of how their inner problem-solving drive functions, they will be able to solve other similar problems.

Exploring Responses

Coaches, and teachers can ask these open-ended questions to explore students' responses.

• What's your thinking behind your answer?
• What did you use to work that out?
• What might another answer be?
• What might a different answer be?
• What method did you use?
• How did you get to that answer?
• How did you come up with that connection?
• How did you arrive at that?
• If that was not the right answer, what else might be?

Moving from Words to Actions

• Please show us your working on the board
• Tell us how you got that answer
• Show us how you arrived at that answer
• Put your working on the board so we can all learn from it

Guess My Answer

Sometimes, if the lesson needs to be moved ahead, I simply have to admit that I want my students to guess the right answer, and say, “Hmm, I have a different specific answer in my head, who can guess what it is?”