1.4: Diffusion of Innovations and Change:
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Artifact
Coaching Journal Reflection The Coaching Journal details my interactions with a Special Education math co-teacher nicknamed Bob. His struggles to help any of his students pass the very traditional lecture-dominant course made him a willing partner, and his personal enjoyment of technology made him a likely candidate for technology adoption. The artifact summarizes and reflects on each of the five face-to-face sessions and daily digital communication during our partnership journey. Prior to identifying Bob as a coaching candidate, I researched the XYZ High School: School Strategic Plan 2014-2015 (2014) to determine areas of critical need. Math subgroups were the only groups mentioned directly as an area of critical need, so I continued my research by interviewing Bob, a math co-teacher dedicated to the needs of the special education subgroup in particular, about the challenges he and his students face. He revealed to me the sad reality that none of his students could keep up with the lecture-oriented classroom in which engagement and student practice were not a priority. My initial reaction was to follow the guidelines in Instructional Coaching: A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction (Knight, 2007) and help him change the lecture-oriented class into a flipped model classroom. I created and shared with him a presentation that demonstrated the flipped model in action in a math classroom (Irving, 2015), but Bob was unable to implement this strategy because he was not the lead teacher and thus did not write the lesson plans. Realizing we needed to take a smaller step if we were to get anywhere, I recommended the use of Google Forms as a formative assessment tool. This strategy’s time commitment being much reduced, he was able to create a Google Forms quiz and implement it the following Friday. The Google Forms quiz provided Bob immediate insight into how many students and which students needed to review which concepts before re-taking a test they all bombed the week before. During the coaching experience, I learned that my tendency to overreach and desire to gut and rebuild the entire structure can be too much for teachers to handle. I came to the conclusion that incremental change that takes hold is superior to massive change that meets strong resistance, flounders, and dies before it can accomplish anything. To improve this coaching experience, I would focus on incremental pedagogical change along with the incremental data collection change. Too much too soon is ineffective. The coaching experience did have an outcome of which I am quite proud, however. The Google Forms idea took hold. Bob, using the Google Forms results immediately in class to identify which skills needed remediation before the exam re-take, reported that his special education students performed much better after the Google Forms assessment data-based review session. He and I developed the idea into a technology workshop, which I presented to several teachers a few weeks after his successful implementation and decision to sustain the strategy’s usage. The impact on faculty development can be assessed through surveys this year, and the impact on student learning is assessed every time the strategy is used. References Irving, S. (2015). Flipping math class: The how and the why. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com /presentation/d/1_ZyABi_y19RJ3G_2Hi_VAD2xVuwL6BJyS9iwQnpd1RU/edit?usp=sharing. Knight, J. (2007). Instructional Coaching: A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. XYZ High School: School Strategic Plan 2014-2015. (2014). Some City, GA: Some County Schools. |