New Learnings

I have now successfully completed my first full week of instructional coaching, and it is amazing to see already how much I have grown as an educator in such a short span of time. This growth can be attributed to the fact that I now have more time to collaborate and learn from others in the West Des Moines Community School District.

I am going to let the readers in on the dirty, little secret of being an instructional coach: we are not know-it-alls with infinite amounts of knowledge and creativity. Most (okay, maybe all) of our ideas are actually stolen from others. And many of these ideas come directly from our colleagues.

Here is a very small snippet of my new learnings and where I obtained them:

1) Although there are no national standards for social studies, there is a national framework for enhancing the rigor of K-12 civics, economics, geography, and history based on the ELA Common Core (http://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/c3/C3-Framework-for-Social-Studies.pdf). I learned about this from our curriculum director.

2) In the Common Core, there are standards for mathematical practice that all math teachers should seek to develop in their students, such as, "make sense of problems and persevere in solving them" (http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Practice/). I gained this bit of knowledge from a math teacher here at Stilwell.

3) A teacher can calculate his/her semester grades by total points from both quarters, in addition to averaging 1st and 2nd (or 3rd and 4th) quarter grades. Another teacher in the building taught me this one.

4) There is a program already installed on our desktops that allows us to draw on images from the document cameras, as well as record videos without using an SD card. One of the district's professional development curriculum facilitators showed me this program, which is called Ladibug.

Collaborating with my colleagues has allowed me the opportunity to learn these new skills, which I can pass on to others. I appreciate the interactions I have had with my co-workers this past week and am looking forward to future, collaborative learning experiences.