About the Book
The Interactive Classroom
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New Rochelle, NY 10804
T: 914-636-0888
E: astix@optonline.net
About Our Book
Here's a book that explains how proven coaching strategies can help you inspire students and boost their performance in any subject and grade level. Discover why a coaching environment creates more student motivation and higher engagement. Learn the strategies and techniques that winning coaches use to help groups and individuals work more productively, overcome difficulties, and achieve measurable goals. This book includes a wealth of cross-curricular project ideas suitable for grades 3-12 that have proven successful among ethnically and socio-economically diverse urban schools.
In Teachers as Classroom Coaches, we offer a new coaching methodology that helps teachers encourage students to "talk content" in a meaningful way. The procedures and strategies presented engage students in project-based learning, during which they are challenged to actively participate in the workshop model of inquiry. Most importantly, this book offers a means of increasing literacy by having students talk and write about content in preparation for a forum, debate, simulation, or presentation.
Section 1: Creating the Coaching Environment
Teachers as Classroom Coaches is presented in two major sections. In Section 1, we examine what it means to use coaching techniques in the classroom, how to coach students to maximize their performance, how to help students build confidence in taking risks, and how to develop a trusting environment where stress levels decrease as students gain the confidence to attain success. We also offer effective ways to group students so that they can work more productively together, most importantly by establishing mutual expectations and using contextual listening to create an egalitarian environment that encourages active research and a higher level of learning.
In Section 1, you will also find techniques for helping students with problem solving and for coaching students in the inquiry method of research, which helps students uncover details and multiple perspectives and compels them to make their own critical judgments. The techniques that are discussed facilitate learning, offer constant encouragement, and help students focus on what is gained by uncovering content. Specific, content-based questions promote extensive in-depth study and offer higher-level thinking while challenging basic assumptions and obsolete notions. Coaching combined with contextual listening skills encourages creative thinking, problem solving, and the lively exchange of ideas. The questioning methods used in coaching also help to reveal what prevents students from performing at a higher level, offering suggestions that help overcome the impediments and unreasonable obstacles to their learning.
Research has shown that students recall higher percentages of the information they study when they teach each other and are active in their own learning (Semb & Ellis, 1994). Their potential to reach the highest standards is raised when the teacher takes on the role of coach to prepare the class for simulations or project-based assignments. As explored in this book, coaching goes beyond being a simple technique; it is also a nurturing attitude that engenders students' best performances.
Students feel respected and important when they are involved in a flexible atmosphere that supports individual, small-group, and whole-group strategies and activities. Faced with a variety of learning formats, students will eagerly attend class because they know that something different is bound to happen. It is our goal to offer teachers a wide buffet of choice-that is, to allow them to match the content to the best teaching strategy that allows for a vibrant and dynamic learning environment.
Section 2: Coaching Strategies
In Section 2 of Teachers as Classroom Coaches, we offer detailed explanations of strategies to help students read, write, talk, and listen to meaningful content. Our favorite comment - and the most memorable - by a student who participated in one of our coaching programs was, "I have a friend who always cuts school, but he never cuts Social Studies. That's the one class he likes, where he has fun. He likes the activities, and he always says he comes away having learned something."
For the educator, the first goal is to create a realistic setting where students present before their peers and assess both themselves and others. Within this setting, the second goal is to infuse literacy across the content areas and "talk content." Educators must give students the tools and wherewithal to make the content come alive. The third goal is to use the strategies described in this book to help the students work together to prepare for and experience discussion, debate, and simulation.
The coaching methods outlined in Section 2 invite teachers to create a participatory environment for students. We encourage an activity- or project-based classroom where learning is hands-on and inquiry skills are an essential tool. Students are challenged to dig deeper into the content because they are required to use the information publicly and present their work to their peers rather than simply memorize the information for an exam.
Students are motivated by participating in interdisciplinary activities. Encouraging students to push beyond the boundaries of their own expectations by taking risks is intrinsic to our philosophy of coaching. Experience-centered lessons help students to reach their potential by emphasizing content, process, and production, and by having the students use as many modes of learning and assessment as necessary to engage their talents.
Relating content to students' own lives is also integral to our philosophy. Experience-based learning can help students build connections, think critically, and make decisions, because they now have a vested interest in the content. When students take on roles, whether as scientists, literary characters, historical figures, or famous artists, the content becomes richer because they apply their own emotions to making the characters come to life.
An equally important facet of our coaching philosophy is an emphasis on negotiating with students to determine reasonable expectations and criteria for assessment. It is important that students know exactly what is expected of them and how they need to perform. They should have a voice in their own learning, and a stake in their own assessment. As the assessment process becomes clearly defined and student goals are outlined and realized, cooperative groups will work more effectively with one another to solve problems.
