Your role as a coach supports a robust effort for whole school transformation through the BDA cycle of coaching and the PIIC 4 quadrant framework. The PIIC instructional coaching model is a teacher professional development pathway aligned with the common core and designed to enhance teacher effectiveness and improve instruction. Your work is a structured, yet flexible, way to provide job-embedded professional learning everyday for every teacher and administrator.  You help teachers, administrators, and other school staff identify school-wide goals, refine their skills, enhance their knowledge base, understand and use data, implement innovative instructional strategies, and promote literacy learning across the curriculum.

Coaches establish a common language and communicate best practices with their ongoing support to teachers. This language helps generate a shared vision and then provides opportunities for colleagues to work together, facilitate their own learning, and demonstrate that sustained professional learning yields changes in student learning. Coaches offer ample opportunities for differentiated support to teachers resulting in a growth model that helps teachers reach the standards for effective professional practice. Unfortunately, not every coach is a full time coach able to devote each day to supporting others and helping them refine their instructional practices as well as improving their own instructional coaching skills.

In a part-time coaching position, several approaches may be the best way to engage teachers consistently and effectively. While advocates agree that the components of effective coaching are standard, the method of delivery where coaches and teachers meet together to talk about instructional practices is not.  Face to face is the optimum, the Cadillac of instructional coaching. Think about your own experiences... do you get more attention when you are the only beneficiary of a service or when you must share the service with others? I wouldn't want my dentist to work on my mouth and several others at the same time. On the other hand, perhaps the dentist can collaborate with other dentists about my oral care and come back to me after the consultation with others. How about something less invasive... my music lessons as a child were much more effective when my music teacher attended to my individual needs and encouraged me to participate in recitals that highlighted my skills. However, as a group participant, the group participation helped build my capacity as I watched and listened to my classmates perform.

One way a part time coach can practice is through a cohort approach. Perhaps the coach can start with grade level teachers or content specific teachers in elementary and/or high school and work with the group to establish study groups, book studies, lesson sharing, instructional learning visits, group planning/consultations, etc. The BDA cycle of coaching can be implemented quite well with shared planning in the "B" cycle and then one-on-one support in the "D" and "A" cycles. Ultimately, the "A" cycle becomes the "B" as the debriefing involves next steps and the planning for subsequent class time. After a defined period of time, the coach moves onto the next cohort and brings together each cohort periodically for a larger group professional learning opportunity, sharing the learning and collaborating on next steps for their cohorts.

Teams of teachers in middle schools working together to share instructional practice with the same group of students, create a unified approach to student learning. That is, each student and the team of teachers share a vision and work together to accomplish the goals. This approach personalizes the support for each student since the teachers share the same students and can strategize ways to differentiate the instructional practices and reinforce that learning is a shared experience.

If the team or cohort approach is not doable just yet, a coach may ask pairs of teachers to work together and meet regularly with each pair.  A pair of teachers from different content areas can help both understand literacy learning as it applies to the content and show how writing and reading to learn are critical in improving student outcomes.

With any approach, teacher professional learning through one-on-one and small group instructional coaching must be focused, ongoing, consistent, data driven, tied to practice, and supported by the school community. There must be ample opportunities for reflection and feedback, redesign and revision. It is not a cookie-cutter custom where one size fits all. 

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