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An Action Plan for Personal Growth

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Recently, a frustrated teacher sat with me and shared her overwhelming feelings of inadequacy. Her school district had recently adopted the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching for teacher evaluation, and she had just been at a training focused on how to implement it. She wondered aloud, “How am I going to focus on teaching my students to the best of my ability while simultaneously completing the work necessary for the new evaluation system?” Considering that this teacher had been in the classroom 15 years, I trusted that her feelings were based on real, valid concerns.

As this teacher’s school coach, it was my job to help her identify resources that could help her succeed on her evaluation as well as feel better about her job.  After asking several questions, I discovered what I so often find when talking with teachers: Here was a teacher that cared deeply for her students and wanted to do everything she could to help them achieve.  With that foundation, I tried to reassure her that she would succeed.

Together, we began working on an action plan to guide her, as she focused both on the evaluation model’s requirements and meeting the needs of her learners. First, we looked carefully at the Danielson framework to understand what it said and what it might mean to her personally. Then, we used the tool to answer some critical questions: What did she need to do to meet the evaluation requirements?  What areas did she feel were her strengths?  In what areas would she like to grow?  How does she currently document/prove student growth in her classroom?

As she began to answer these questions, I worked to connect her with resources that might help her.  I introduced her to the Success at the Core website, and together, we began to explore the site, looking for materials to help her with specific components of her action plan. She immediately responded to some specific Teacher Development strategies. For instance, she recognized that the Differentiating Instruction strategy could help her better meet the needs of all of her students. She also thought that the various assessment strategies would allow her to better utilize authentic assessments and data to drive her classroom instruction. All in all, she discovered several resources directly aligned to both her plan and to the evaluation requirements. She began to understand that taking the time to work through the strategies would enhance her own learning, give her ideas on evidence that she could gather, and offer her leadership team tools that would help all of them better meet the needs of the students.

Before we completed our coaching session, we took the time to attach dates to the steps in her action plan. And we agreed to periodic check-ins.

All in all, it was a successful meeting. A teacher entered my room frustrated and left feeling more empowered to direct her learning. Success!

NOTE: If you connect to Success at Core’s Get Started page and click on the “Teacher Standards/Educator Evaluation” link, you’ll see documents that align SaC resources to Danielson, Marzano, and the Center for Educational Leadership evaluation models.

 


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