Coaching Support: Guide teams to identify and articulate goals
Overview
Guide teachers and teams to identify and articulate team goals to keep everyone working toward a common vision.
Identify and articulate team goals
Goals drive our attention and support our learning and collaboration to be strategic. As you set up grade level or content area teams, begin with instructional goals.
Learning should be meaningful and strive for goals that all teachers care about.
What do the team members want to learn, work on, or what are areas they see growth in? Tie the work you are doing in your coaching to support teachers to meet their personal goals in the teacher evaluation system. Like students creating authentic products for assessment of their learning, how can the work of the instructional team stay relevant to their classrooms, be used to support their learning and growth in the teacher evaluation system, and be shared with other groups in the school?
When you find the team wandering in conversation or even gaining energy in a direction that you are unclear about, ask, "What’s our goal? How will what we are doing help us to achieve this goal?" With Universal Design for Learning, the Practices of Expert Learners (linked below) can help teams to design to support all learners.
If our goal is to support students to improve scores on open response science inquiry questions, we might identify practices of expert learners that would help students to develop these skills. By focusing on students accessing tools and resources and monitoring their own progress, we can impact their problem solving process and promote sensemaking skills. When a goal is clear, we can identify UDL Guidelines and best practices in inquiry science to leverage. The clear goal helps us to set the direction and support reflection of the team.
[This resource was adapted from Project COOL by CAST]