This afternoon our district's curriculum team and Instructional Coaches gathered at our district office for our monthly Instructional Leadership Team meeting. Since this is the final meeting of the school year, we began by celebrating the accomplishments we've made as first year Instructional Coaches. A few highlights on my list included:

• Learning the curriculum of grade levels and subjects that I was not familiar with
• Facilitating professional development sessions at the building and district level
• Collaborating/Co-Teaching/Modeling Lessons in every classroom
• Coaching Cycles
• Supporting all teachers in my building
• Mentoring first year teachers
• Leveraging our building's social media accounts to increase community/parent outreach
• Connecting with fellow Instructional Coaches in the district, state, and online
• Implementing STEM and PBL in Kindergarten
• Growing as a learner, leader, and educator

Once we finished our list, we had to choose our top three to share out. It was difficult to narrow down my list, but it was neat to share successes. Too often I focus on what's left to work on, so it was great to focus on the positive impact I've had in my first year as an Instructional Coach. 

There's still lots to do, and I have a list of hopes and ideas for next year, but for now, I'm happy to look back at the impact I've had and know that I've not wavered from my goal of positively impacting teaching and learning in my building.

Full disclosure: I've had this post sitting in my drafts for over a month, not feeling ready to hit "publish." After seeing a call for #educoach topics earlier this evening, and typing this topic there, I decided to go ahead and hit post.


I'll admit it, I'm always on the lookout for new ideas, activities, and resources to use in my own teaching and learning. While that has worked wonders for the past six years, in my new position it's starting to seem like a barrier.  I never keep these "ah ha" moments to myself, I'm always tweeting, emailing, and sharing with colleagues. Now that I'm four months into my new Instructional Coaching position, I feel like I am having a hard time shaking the title of "resource finder" that I inadvertently gave myself.  It's not that I don't want teachers to come to me, it's that I want to go deeper and work alongside teachers to locate these resources based on goals they set. In other words, I want to begin transitioning from the enrollment phase toward coaching cycles. I recognize this will not be an easy change, and am hoping my PLN will have ideas and suggestions as to how I can begin to move away from being viewed as someone to go to when you're putting together your weekly lesson plans and need an activity to teach _________ (insert any elementary level topic).

So, what suggestions do you have? 
Have you experienced the same barrier? If so, what did you do?  

As I begin my new position as an Instructional Coach this week, I wanted a way for staff to visualize what my new role and responsibilities entail. You see, I'm moving from a Title I position where I co-taught math and ELA every day for the past three years. Co-teaching and collaboration was, and still is, one of my favorite parts of my job, but my new position requires a shift in thinking as I'll no longer be teaching students and instead focusing on teachers. This shift has to happen not only on my part, but also my colleagues, all of whom have seen my work as a teacher, and now are experiencing my change from teacher to coach. Over the summer I searched for Instructional Coaching resources, and found several menus that were in line what I hoped to convey to our staff. In the end, I found two that I really liked, took parts of those, and added some of my own information as well. Ultimately, I am pleased with the menu, and look forward to sharing it with staff over the next few days.

One of my main goals this summer was to develop a website I can use in my new position as an Instructional Coach. I still plan to use this website for my lesson resources, blog, and presentations, and hope to tweak the organization of it later this year. The MVPLC website was to be a place for my building staff and district colleagues to locate curriculum information, Instructional Coaching resources, as well as our professional development topics and documents. MVPLC is a fluid website, and will be added to throughout the year. I look forward to sharing this website with staff later this week.