MASTERCLASS COURSE HELD OVER 4 SESSIONS:
AUGUST 22, 2024 - SEPTEMBER 12, 2024
Coaching Culturally Responsive Instruction Beyond the Book Study
Building Your Skill and Toolbox to Help Teachers Move Student Learning
Instructional coaches have developed their capacity to coach using a variety of approaches, from Jim Knight’s Impact Cycle to Elena Aguilar’s Transformative Coaching model to Sweeny’s Student-Centered Coaching model. While all these approaches are powerful, they focus on the curriculum of coaching – questioning, dialogue, reflection, modeling, and socio-emotional support, not the techniques of culturally responsive pedagogy.
Many school districts are embracing culturally responsive education as a way to close their achievement gaps. Yet, this is instructional content many coaches don’t have from their teaching experience. Instructional coaches typically don’t get this body of knowledge from the traditional coach development training. If they do get training in culturally responsive teaching, it usually emphasizes relationship and belonging, not grounding in the science of learning and how to help teachers increase their capacity for instructional-decision-making in order to address DuFour’s third question: What will we do when students don’t learn the material or when they get confused?
Instead, we search for the magic engagement strategy to fix the situation, especially from a book like, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Unfortunately this approach breeds greater dependency in our most vulnerable students. Too often we don’t know how to help teachers stop over-scaffolding as compensation.
I talk about the unique role a coach plays in helping teachers and leaders focus on a key lever for equity: the students’ “learn how to learn” in the pursuit of liberatory education.
In this course, we focus on double loop learning – Building your skills so you can grow teachers’ ability to coach dependent learners to become more powerful learners.
