Graduate Coaching

Situation

As a graduate teacher, I was able to undertake the Department of Education Graduate Modules. During Graduate Module 1, I was made aware of the professional in-class coaching program.  

During my first semester of teaching, I identified that as a graduate teacher I had many areas where my practice could be improved – specifically classroom management, providing student feedback, lesson engagement and general teaching practice.

I wanted to have extra support to help guide my practice and to learn to effectively reflect on my lessons. Whilst I had many supportive staff members to help me at my school, no formal mentoring relationship was in place and so I thought coaching would be beneficial.

Action

Through the reflective practices established with the support of my coach, I made the following changes to my practice:

• To help manage challenging behaviour and to get to know students better I implemented seating plans in all of my classes.
• To assist with setting clear classroom behaviour norms, and in order to recognise students exhibiting the school’s Attitude, Behaviour and Effort values, I introduced a classroom reward program.
• To evaluate student learning and ensure engagement, I experimented with new instructional strategies such as exit tickets, forced analogies and student self evaluation surveys.
• To improve my classroom communication, I refined explanations and worked on explicit clear instructions for various activities.
• To improve student outcomes, I trialled a range of tools and resources such as Socrative, OneNote Class Notebook and Grok Learning.

Outcome

As a result of the professional in-class coaching program, I feel more confident in classroom management and have more tools and strategies available to use depending on the situation. I use a positive reward system to help create engagement in my lessons and I feel like I have a larger range of instructional strategies depending on the content of the teaching.

I have greater clarity around the level of understanding my students have on entry to my classroom and my expectations are more realistic of where they start at. This means I can then set high expectations and establish challenging learning goals suited to the needs of the students. I am better at checking for understanding and am more confident that my explanations are clear – at the same time I am able to adjust my explanations to help individual students work with their existing understanding.