Leading From the Classroom

From the desk of Hope…

There is nothing more exciting to me than classroom innovation and teacher leadership.

ERG contracts with schools for multiple years with a job embedded coaching model. The beautiful thing about multiple year contracts is we get to see the rewards of the work from the previous year. It reminds me of one year when I looped with a third grade class up to fourth grade. Relationships were already established, processes and procedures were set and we picked up right were we left off – time was saved and new learning was occurring instantly and rapidly.

This past week I visited high school classrooms in which I had worked last year and much to my delight, I received some rewards. In 2011-2012 I worked with this particular high schools’ English language arts teachers and reading comprehension was the focus for the project.

The all around growth I observed with this department on my first visit was very invigorating!

Several Observations From My Visit:

• Last year, confidence was lacking with teaching reading, this year, confidence is soaring.
• Last year, we launched the project with beginning reading pedagogy, this year, the ELA department is making plans to teach the social studies and science teachers reading pedagogy and comprehension strategies appropriate for content literacy – amazing!
• Last year, ELA teachers were asking questions about basic lesson format, this year, teachers are asking larger conceptual questions — “Can you help me learn how to assess my students in reading so I can accurately match them with texts?”
• Last year, teachers were doing a lot of “the work” during lessons, this year, “the work” is being released over to the students and teachers are learning how to formatively assess what they are observing so they can plan their lesson according to student needs.

These are just a few of my observations and remember, it is only September and it was only my first visit for this year. I can’t imagine what this ELA department has in store for us!

Watching teachers develop their skills over time is incredibly gratifying!

ERG collects data to “prove” the ERG job embedded process works. In other words, we see with our eyes teachers are growing in their capacity of what we are teaching them and teachers tell us they know more at the end of the project on the topic we are working on compared to the launch of the project, but we have to “prove” our service with data.

To no surprise, we recently received our research report and there was a nice little graph on the last page that I love. The title of the graph says: Teachers who had previous experience with ERG methodology started with greater skills in the second year and improved more dramatically. Like I said, this reminds me of the year I looped with my students but now I am looping with teachers.

I have thought a lot about this finding from our research and I realize now that I was witnessing this finding during my high school visit just described in this blog.

I am so proud of these courageous high school teachers who could have decided they were going to do business as usual but instead decided to be life long learners and build their capacity in current reading comprehension. As a result, they are now supporting their students with best practices in reading as well as supporting their colleagues with current reading pedagogy. These teachers made the choice to embrace professional development offered to them and now they are truly “leading from the classroom”.

At ERG we believe in growing all learners whether it is, ERG coaches, teachers, administrators, parents or students. We also believe — we are smarter together.