Teacher Leader Coach

Professional Development is everywhere. Social media groups, conversations in the hallway between classes, PLC meetings, lunch and learns, books, podcasts, blogs, coursework, conferences, and more I’m sure. There is no shortage on people’s ideas on how to improve. Educational research is wonderful, and decisions about what and how to teach must be grounded in fact. The primary source research is often behind a paywall or difficult to directly apply. So we rely on secondary or further sources, who interpret what they want to from the research and might accurately reflect the true findings. This causes the full impact and possible professional development to be stilted or skewed. But once someone has read the wrong interpretation and the information spreads, it is believed to be true. Educators are also never short on thoughts and feelings about what works. These lively discussions are great, and nuggets of knowledge can be taken from them. But often what works for a teacher has been hon...

The word "coach" originated in mid-16th century Europe. A Hungarian town named Kocs was known for building the best horse-drawn wagons to carry people from place to place, and the vehicles became known by the city's name. A coach is a vehicle to transport people from where they are to where they want to be.  That meaning translated from a horse-drawn carriage to a motor coach still translates to the core mission of a human coach. A coach's mission is to get a person from one current ability, skill, competency, or level of understanding to the next. Coaches don't do the work, they just support the person to make it easier and more comfortable for their journey. What does this mean for coaches today? First, coaches need to know their client's destination (I use “client” as a general term for whom they are coaching, whether or not it is paid). Without this knowledge, a coach may use the completely wrong “vehicle” or take their client to the wrong waypoints.  For ...

News broke today that two major responsibilities of the Department of Education are being shifted to different government agencies, one of which just had 40% of its staff reduced. One primary responsibility was overseeing 1.777 trillion dollars of student debt from 46.3 million Americans. The other is special education and nutrition, which is being moved to Health and Human Services, which already oversees the CDC, FDA, NIH, and several other critical public health agencies. Overall, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) accounted for about 15% of education funding for public schools, and the other 85% has been state-funded.  Primary and Secondary American Public Schools must provide accommodations for students with special needs and food for all students, including meals for students with free or reduced lunch. One aspect of American public education that sets us apart from much of the world is we provide an appropriate education for all students and welcome those with special n...

A curriculum is what is taught, while a resource is what is used to teach. Too often, these words are used interchangeably. Worse still, too often, the resource becomes the reading and math curriculum. This happens at all grade levels, and when the resource is technology-based, it becomes even easier for teachers to simply follow its path. A multitude of issues arise when the resource is used in the curriculum. Resource writers are hired for their expertise in a topic, but they are not experts in the students' learning from their resources. Their pathway may not be the right one, but when the resource is followed as the curriculum, teachers will do section 1.1 on Monday, 1.2 on Tuesday, etc. This could work great, but what happens when students fall behind or learn quickly? What about students with gaps in their learning for any reason? I hear school district representatives from around the country talk about their new math or reading "curriculum" when they have adopted a...

Grit has been popularized by Angela Duckworth's work and holds merit. Those willing to work through pain, discomfort, or boredom will be more successful than those who do not. An anecdote I often use is from a presentation given to insurance salesmen during the 1940s (and the masculine form is used because, at that time, only men sold insurance). The presenter had researched levels of sales success and found it boiled down to those who were willing to do the work others knew they needed to do but didn't. The extra cold call, the additional paperwork, and the extra pre-work before a call to close the deal. Knowing that grit is a dividing trait between success and other alternatives is great awareness and can lead people to dig in. But some factors make having tenacity easier. In schools, these factors are sometimes called Academic Mindsets, and when they are part of the education process, they can lead to grittier students. The academic mindsets are: I belong in this community, ...

  Amdahl's Law specifically applies to the number of computer processors in a system and the time saved by having more processors working. The graph above shows the speedup based on processors for different problem-solving techniques. Specifically, the problem-solving algorithm compares how much of a process is done individually and how many steps can be combined.  The blue line that stops at a speedup limit of 2 shows where 50% of the steps are chunked and 50% are sequential. The number of processors does impact the speed, even marginally, up to 16. Beyond that, there is no speed difference between 16 and 65,536 processors.  The dashed green line at a speedup limit of 20 shows that more processors will increase the efficiency up to about 4096 processors, and then again, there is no appreciable difference no matter how many more processors are used. However, what can be seen is that this algorithm is 10 times more efficient than the 50% parallel algorithm. Increasing effe...

Students learn about algorithms in Computer Science to solve complex problems in reasonable times. Some issues are too complex even for the best algorithms to perfectly solve, and those are known as heuristics. The example commonly used is the traveling salesman. While a little outdated, and I have updated the example to be the logistics of UPS delivering packages, the story goes like this.  A traveling salesman arrives in a new town intending to get to each house in the most efficient path possible. They get a road map of all the homes they will visit and their hotel room and start mapping out paths. The math works out to show the following: Let's nerd out for a moment. Each number of possible paths is the mathematical factorial of the number of homes on the path. So 3 homes means 3*2*1 = 6 paths. 7 homes means 7*6*5*4*3*2*1 = 5040 homes. Just 10 homes, and we are at 10 factorial or 3,682,800 pathways! How can one possibly solve for the best route with that many choices? It is too...

As a Chicago Bears fan, I can grudgingly acknowledge that from a pure football standpoint, Aaron Rodgers was way better than anything the Bears have had at quarterback in my lifetime. In 2014, the Packers were off to an unexpectedly slow start. Having lost two of their first three games, including a bad 19-7 defeat to the Lions, the media and fans were in a panic, and he famously said, "R-E-L-A-X." Green Bay went on to win their next four (including a 38-17 blowout of my beloved Bears) and 11 of their last 13 (including a second worse blowout of Da Bears). They eventually lost overtime to the Seattle Seahawks in the NFC Championship game that season. Rodgers was confident in himself, his team, and their plan. He knew they were far from firing on all cylinders but had it in them to turn things around. The fans and pundits, as they do, were overreacting that the sky had fallen and this supposedly great team was doomed to failure. In this case, it turns out that Rodgers was righ...

A grade is a value a teacher subjectively places on a student's work. No matter how objective a teacher tries to be, there is subjectivity in the substance, style, and amount of questions asked, the point value of each question, the resources provided for students, and the grading rigor. A graded assignment is NOT an assessment, although those two words are often used synonymously.  Assessment comes from the Latin root word assidere, which means "to sit beside." Assessment is a form of education, and grading is a form of schooling. Schooling is the formal process of delivering information on a curriculum map, grading that work, deciding on the quality of that work (often skewed more by the quantity of work), and ultimately allowing a child or young adult to progress toward a diploma. Education is learning, which happens from the moment we are born. It happens in our classes, on the athletic fields or dramatic stages, on playgrounds, around dinner tables, and on internet v...

Self-help gurus tout the goal of balance in life. Work hard, play hard. The theory of balance has wisdom and is almost the goal that one could strive for if life were as simple as a seesaw. If, at any point, one does more than the other, then life is out of balance. And when balance is the goal, and one side happens to be the tiniest bit emphasized, then the goal isn't met, and feelings of guilt or shame commence. The effort to be balanced becomes its own axis of a three-dimensional teeter totter, causing it to spin and go up and down. Awareness of working too hard and losing sight of priorities such as family, friends, and health is important. Being aware of playing too hard with work underperformance and unhealthy choices is too. But finding a permanent 50-50 mix is impossible. Instead of a playground apparatus, life can be viewed as a symphony.  In a symphony, there are multiple sections of instruments, and each has a more important role at different times of the performance. Th...