Moving the Needle on Remote Instruction

“I was thinking ‘this isn’t happening at our school because of a lack of trying; it’s just, nobody really knows what to do.’ ”

The Pointed Problem: Continuous Improvement of Remote Teaching

Ashley Johnson couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She knew remote teaching in her school wasn’t where it needed to be. Teachers were doing their best to cover the content, but students just weren’t engaged. The question was: What should teachers be doing differently?

Johnson, like school leaders and teachers around the world during the Covid-19 era, faced a similar question: what does highly effective remote teaching and learning look like and how do we coach our teams to build these skills now?

The Innovation: Pivot Our Coaching Cycles to a Virtual World

Within the first weeks of school, Johnson updated her tried-and-true method for instructional improvement — weekly coaching cycles — for the virtual world. Working with her Instructional Leadership Team (ILT), she conducted virtual observations to identify any trending successes and instructional gaps that, if closed, would lead to improved student engagement and provide teachers with short, timely training and feedback to build skill.

Her thinking: By continually prioritizing, coaching to, and assessing teacher mastery of a few high-leverage instructional strategies, she could steadily improve the quality of remote teaching.

The Story: Launching a Virtual Coaching Cycle

Setting the Goalpost

Student engagement had in fact been a focus for Johnson well before the pandemic. But what high-level engagement looks like in an online setting wasn’t initially clear. To get clarity she brought together her team of five instructional leaders to review criteria and video of effective remote instruction as a group.

Explains Johnson: “We just needed to go watch classes and see what’s happening, and then really ask ourselves ‘is this meeting the vision? And then if it’s not, what would the strongest teachers we know do at the same moment?’”

Through a “sparring process,” the group honed a set of teacher action steps — for reading and math — that would become the focus of that week’s PD and 1:1 coaching. These action steps were things that teachers could put into practice immediately (see examples below.).

Putting Lots of Eyes on Practice

Central to Johnson’s coaching cycle is how she efficiently gathers observation data on every teacher in the school, every week. In what she calls “Zoom throughs,” each member of her ILT (including her) observes the virtual instruction of two teachers for 10 minutes, timed for when it would be most likely to see that week’s action steps take place.

For each teacher, coaches note successes (“glows”) and areas for improvement (“grows”).

This data becomes the basis of the key weekly meeting in the cycle, where the ILT reviews each teacher’s progress and identifies common threads across the school. Those common threads inform the action steps and PD (called “practice clinics”) for the week ahead.

Real-time Feedback and Call Outs

Johnson says the real change in practice takes place as a result of 1:1 coaching. “The PD is the launching point,” she says. “The follow-up is what actually helps with mastery.” To make sure that happens, her ILT comes out of their weekly meeting with the schedule for next round of observations.

To accelerate the pace of improvement, they aim to provide feedback to teachers as close to real time as possible. This may include stage directions chatted to teachers in private mode, or texts sent immediately after the lesson. One such brief reminder: “unmute kids in smaller groups to ensure they’re responding.”

Coaches pay just as much as attention to what’s going well. As reinforcement, Johnson calls out the “glows” of specific teachers in weekly staff communications. She tells her ITL: “for your teachers who are really crushing it, they should know, and you should be getting video examples and pushing that out.”

From Teacher Moves to Student Understanding

After tackling student engagement, Johnson is shifting the focus of her coaching cycle to monitoring student understanding. Again, she’s working with her ILT on what that looks like in a virtual environment. “Because I can’t see their work on paper, listening to kids explain their thinking is really important to me.”

In the context of remote learning, Johnson views her coaching cycle as important more than a tool for moving the school forward. It’s also professional development for her ILT. It means that each week, coaches are examining virtual instruction together and practicing writing action steps to improve it.

It felt like a win-win to be able to find a protocol that I thought was efficient and effective, but also grew the school and the coaches at the school.