The Impact Cycle

Coaching and mentoring teachers is extremely important for growing teacher capacity and increasing teacher retention. There is a lot of research that strongly supports new teachers having a mentor or coach. Student achievement is much higher in classrooms where teachers are supported by a coach or mentor. Below is a graphic with facts about mentoring/coaching.

The impact cycle is an amazing progression to follow when mentoring. Knight (2017) gives us a model with 3 steps including identify, learn, and improve. The first step is always to identify strategies, goals, or the current reality to find a starting place. Just pick one area to focus on at a time. It is best to keep things simple and focus on the most important strategies first and then begin to add more and more over time. Lia (2016) suggests, “Don’t provide a long list of things the teacher needs to change, but rather focus on one – maybe two – specific changes that are possible in her classroom and provide resources and tips on how to accomplish this.” This will help keep teachers from becoming overwhelmed and stressed out. Chunking these goals and strategies allows new teachers the opportunity to improve a little at a time.When coaching other teachers, it is extremely important to provide teachers with strategies that they can put into practice in their classrooms immediately. This has been helpful for the teacher that I am coaching this year. She is brand new, and has a lot to learn but focusing on individual goals at a time keeps her from being overwhelmed.

The next part of the cycle is to learn. Checklists and modeling are great ways to help teachers learn. Knight (2017) explains that “Checklists make it easier for coaches to clearly describe teaching practices” (p.106). These checklists would be similar to a rubric for good teaching practices. Rubrics are commonly used with students to help provide clear expectations for assignments. Checklists can work similarly to help create clear expectations for teachers as well. It can help give a detailed picture of what should be seen in the teachers classroom on a daily basis. When a new teacher understands what they are doing well and what they could do better, growth and improvement begins to take place and that teacher's capacity will begin to expand.

The last part of the impact cycle is improve. This involves giving feedback, direction, and actions for improvement. According to Lia (2016), “The challenge with teacher feedback has to do with who is giving it, how it is given, when it is given, and how the information is used” (para. 3). We want to make sure that feedback is given at a time and in a way that will be most impactful and well received. This will also be the reflection piece and will drive how to move forward in the cycle. Do you identify a new way to reach the same goal or identify a new goal or strategy to work on.

The impact cycle can be use to help coach teachers on using technology-based instructional strategies. To begin, the coach and teacher would need to decide together what technology-based strategies need to be implemented; whether that is using student engagement apps like Kahoot or using Flipgrid for student presentations. Whatever the strategy or tool may be, the next step would be for the teacher to learn more about it either from their coach or through professional development opportunities. Finally, the next step would be to improve by reflecting on how the tool or strategy worked. This would also involve feedback for the coach.

References

Knight, J. (2017). The Impact Cycle: What Instructional Coaches Should Do to Foster Powerful Improvements in Teaching (1st ed.). Corwin.

Lia, M. (2016). Using An Observation Coaching Checklist to Provide Feedback to Teachers. Journal of Catholic Education, 20 (1). http://dx.doi.org/10.15365/joce.2001152016