Get Better Faster

A 90-Day Plan for Coaching New Teachers

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119279013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungsverwaltung

Effective and practical coaching strategies for new educators plus valuable online coaching tools

Many teachers are only observed one or two times per year on average—and, even among those who are observed, scarcely any are given feedback as to how they could improve. The bottom line is clear: teachers do not need to be evaluated so much as they need to be developed and coached.

In Get Better Faster: A 90-Day Plan for Coaching New Teachers, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo shares instructive tools of how school leaders can effectively guide new teachers to success. Over the course of the book, he breaks down the most critical actions leaders and teachers must take to achieve exemplary results. Designed for coaches as well as beginning teachers, Get Better Faster is an integral coaching tool for any school leader eager to help their teachers succeed.

Get Better Faster focuses on what's practical and actionable which makes the book's approach to coaching so effective. By practicing the concrete actions and micro-skills listed in Get Better Faster, teachers will markedly improve their ability to lead a class, producing a steady chain reaction of future teaching success.

Though focused heavily on the first 90 days of teacher development, it's possible to implement this work at any time. Junior and experienced teachers alike can benefit from the guidance of Get Better Faster while at the same time closing existing instructional gaps.

Featuring valuable and practical online training tools available at http://www.wiley.com/go/getbetterfaster, Get Better Faster provides agendas, presentation slides, a coach's guide, handouts, planning templates, and 35 video clips of real teachers at work to help other educators apply the lessons learned in their own classrooms. Get Better Faster will teach you:

• The core principles of coaching: Go Granular; Plan, Practice, Follow Up, Repeat; Make Feedback More Frequent
• Top action steps to launch a teacher's development in an easy-to-read scope and sequence guide

It also walks you through the four phases of skill building:

• Phase 1 (Pre-Teaching): Dress Rehearsal
• Phase 2: Instant Immersion
• Phase 3: Getting into Gear
• Phase 4: The Power of Discourse

Perfect for new educators and those who supervise them, Get Better Faster will also earn a place in the libraries of veteran teachers and school administrators seeking a one-stop coaching resource.

Phase 1
(Pre-Teaching): Dress Rehearsal

A few weeks before school started in his first year, Noel Borges was as unprepared for his first day of teaching as many new teachers. He’d graduated from a good university, observed great teachers in action, and studied the most up-to-date literature on great education strategies. Yet despite all of this preparation, an upcoming Monday in September would be the very first time Noel had stood in front of a classroom full of middle school students and taught completely on his own.

As leaders, how can we see someone like Noel through this dramatic transition from learning to teach to actually teaching? How can we make sure Noel will earn his students’ respect? Command their attention? Use that focus to teach them their first sixth-grade history lesson?

Noel’s principal, Serena Savarirayan, takes these questions to heart. Her solution? Give the first day of school the Broadway treatment. In the weeks before school begins, Serena will get Noel and his fellow teachers ready by rehearsing the school day as if it were a hotly anticipated new play: piece by piece, over and over, in the same amount of time and space as each teacher will have to do it when the show opens.

Teaching and the performing arts share a critical similarity: both depend on responsive performance. They require professionals to do their most important work live, while simultaneously and appropriately modifying it based on the reactions of those watching. To deliver an excellent responsive performance—the kind that deserves a standing ovation—you need to master two sets of actions: the variations you’ll make depending on audience response, and the planned constants you’ll do no matter what. Variations are challenging to prepare for, and because you can never anticipate all of them in advance, knowing they could appear at any time can make even highly experienced performers freeze up before the curtain rises (or the school doors open). But if you’ve rehearsed the constants so many times that you can get through them as automatically as you brew your morning coffee, you’ll have what you need to gather your forces, emerge from backstage, and give your audience what they came for no matter what. Your muscle memory will see you through your stage fright, and the show will go on.

On the first day of school, that’s exactly what we need from every teacher. Yet unlike an actor, singer, or dancer, a new teacher is all too likely to arrive at the head of a classroom without ever having physically rehearsed for the first day of school. Like Noel, these teachers have likely been exposed to the general demands of leading a classroom, but have not been prepared for the specific demands of leading their own. As Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Francesca M. Forzani put it in “Building a Common Core for Learning to Teach,” it’s common practice in the United States to focus more on hiring “better” teachers up front than on training teachers as they dive into their work. This practice, Ball and Forzani explain, is a “gamble,” betting each teacher’s actual success in the classroom on qualifications that don’t necessarily make him or her a “better” teacher.¹

Serena refuses to gamble. Her summer rehearsal sessions lock in her teachers’ success precisely because they require all teachers to perfect the precise teaching actions they’ll need in the classroom, and to do so before, not after, they need them. That’s why Phase 1 of the Get Better Faster Scope and Sequence takes place in the days before students arrive for the first day of school. Teachers need to master these skills before they even meet their students, because the skills are the starter kit for a successful school year.

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Core Idea

A new teacher in the first days of school will freeze up.

Relentless rehearsing will break the ice.

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So what does a dress rehearsal for teaching look like? Let’s see how Serena does it. In clip 9, Serena has asked Noel to practice his first greeting to his students when they gather outside his classroom.

Watch clip 9: Routines and Procedures—Plan and Practice (Key Leadership Moves: Leading PD, Practice)

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Stop and Jot

What actions does Serena take to lead an effective dress rehearsal with Noel?

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Serena leaves nothing to chance: she models an effective entry routine and then gives Noel the opportuni...