Bonus: Watch the video of this episode on YouTube!

Show Notes

This conversation (with our panel of coaching experts from our Coaching Fundamentals series) was full of practical strategies and tips for tracking, documenting and sharing the value coaches add to any school. We talked about the different types of data we could be collecting and how we can use it to inform our practice as coaches. If you’re not tracking your impact as a coach yet, now is a great time to start!

How do you demonstrate your value as a coach?

Each school will be different, depending on how the school perceives the role, and the value they place on the role. Documenting steps towards achieving goals for the role: eg: professional development, or 1:1 relationships with teachers.

Data itself doesn’t prove your value as a coach, allows you to have thoughtful conversations on where you’re making an impact on student learning, teacher development and school culture. That whole thing holistically helps have those critical conversations. Allows you to demonstrate value over time. Also great for your next job when you’re interviewing.

Consider: What data is useful to you as an individual? To your school leaders? To your board of directors? To your future school?

Data becomes very useful when it shows gaps. How could student portfolios support this collection of data. Would demonstrate learning very effectively over time. What does your grade level/department portfolio of assessment and tasks look like over time?

Importance of collecting “the right data” : How do we determine what is the right data? How do we know what the right data is?

Some ideas:
Grade level samples of student work – so tempting to collect just the “best” examples, important to show a range of examples, including things that are missing (though those will be hard to include, because they’re missing).
Have students draw “what does this classroom look like?”.
So many different ways to collect data, don’t get stuck in only quantitative.

What do you value in your role? What defines your role? What are the goals for your roles? What would demonstrate this?

It’s about measuring the temperature of the climate that you’re in, and juxtaposing your impact on that context.

Never going to have the perfect set of data to collect. Just need to start, and then reflect on the process after a time frame, and see what could be improved. Collecting data to do our job better. Data we collect should be to help us do our job better, and to better understand what we’re doing.

How do you change the perception of your role within your school context? How do you take an active role in shaping that and helping your leaders understand?

Data can help you reposition your role – gives you specific numbers to work from when working with leadership.

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