Hi Robin! Welcome to the Big Four Community! Let me know if you have any questions as you navigate through the site!

Hi Robin...I work as a high ability teacher in our school corporation first and we do coaching 2-3 days per week K-8. We attended the Coaching Institute and have taken the forms that we learned in the workshops and made them our own. Basically, when starting, you need to talk with your principals and administrators about setting up a working relationship. Bottom line is you don't want to be perceived by teachers and administrators as the one who is going to report wrong-doings back to principals and administrators. I always tell my principals that we are here to help as a resource and when a teacher needs resources, we should be one of the choices. If principals tell teachers that they have options like reading a book on whatever issue they have, researching on the internet, attending workshops, OR we have Robin as a resource to help you work through whatever issues you are having; 9 times out of 10, teachers would rather work with someone as a partnership then have to read a book or research. We are research in action. Keep in mind that you are always going to have those teachers that don't want help and think they know it all. In that situation, the order for help should come top down. We also have developed a lot of resources for tool boxes that we present in in-services for hands-on application and we then meet one-on-one with those teachers that are interested after the in-service either on their prep times or we schedule 1/2 day in-services with principals to facilitate whatever strategy they feel is lacking. I hope this information helps and if you need anything further, please feel free to call our office in Crown Point, 219-663-1507 x 248. Good luck!

Hi, Robin. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to reply. I can't access the ning from my school computer, for some reason. I have several things I developed, but it's almost all trial and error or surving the net. I'm the only Instructional Coach in this part of the state, and I've gotten very little guidance from the DOE. I collect F&P reading level, mClass Reading 3D, mClass Home, and Acuity data as well as data from other software packages we use . . . SuccessMaker (from Pearson) and Math Facts in a Flash (from Renaissance Learning). I code everything red, yellow, or green, like DIBELS, which helps when looking for trends/triangulation of data. I haven't done as much observation as I'd like. I do meet with grade level teams weekly, though.