What Coaching Taught Me About Teaching

“What the heck is a learning coach?”

That was, without a doubt, my first thought when I saw the job posting in the spring of 2022. The title sounded a little made up, and honestly, I wasn’t totally sure what the job even was. But I applied anyway.

Four years later, I can say it changed me completely.

As I prepare to head back into the classroom next year, I find myself carrying an overwhelming amount of gratitude for everything this role taught me, the people it brought into my life, and the ways it reshaped how I think about teaching and learning.

Here are a few things swirling around in my brain as I wrap up this journey and prepare to be back in the game. 

1. Students need a ridiculous amount of grace for their dead Chromebooks. Seriously. Those things barely hold a charge, there aren’t enough outlets, and there’s never enough time between classes to get them plugged in. I don’t think I’ve made it to lunch once this year without my own teacher Chromebook dying. I will never get frustrated with a student over a dead Chromebook again. That battle is real. 

For me? I am so ready to ditch them all together. More human interactions. More paper. More whiteboards. More books. More talking. More laughing. 

2. Routine, structure, and predictability are the secret sauce of classroom management. The teachers whose classrooms run like a well-oiled machine are not getting that kind of success by accident. Every single thing has a flow and a system behind it. How papers are handed out. How phones are managed. How students move into groups. How transitions happen. What group work sounds like. What students do when they finish early. The more I observed great teachers, the more I realized that strong classroom management is less about “controlling the behavior kids” and more about removing uncertainty for all kids. Behaviors escalate when students don’t know what to do, how to do it, or what’s expected of them. The best classrooms feel calm because the routines carry so much of the cognitive load for students.

3. Time spent anchoring students into your classroom and helping bring their minds and bodies to attention at the start of class is time well spent. School feels frantic, and I had forgotten that. Students are rushing from class to class, conversation to conversation, carrying stress, distractions, social drama, exhaustion, and a million other things with them. Honestly, even as a learning coach, moving from room to room all day felt overwhelming at times. And if I had to squeeze in a bathroom break between classes? Forget it. Walking into the next classroom and immediately being fully present was hard. 

That experience changed how I think about the start of class. Opening routines, bell work, transition time, and moments to mentally prepare to learn are not wasted time. They are essential. If students are not sitting down immediately ready to work, it doesn’t always mean they are unmotivated or disrespectful. Sometimes they just need help arriving in your space. The best teachers in our building don’t just expect students to show up ready. They help students prepare to learn. 

4. A few years ago, before I stepped into this role, a colleague once told me they were “an educator, not an entertainer.” I think it was meant to be a little passive aggressive because I have never exactly hidden my entertainer tendencies in the classroom. I like to have fun, ok? And to be fair, I understand the point they were trying to make. Teaching is obviously much deeper than putting on a show. But this job has changed my thinking on that phrase.

Some of the most admired, impactful teachers in our building absolutely are entertainers in their own way. Not because they are doing a constant dog-and-pony show or trying to be funny every second of the day, but because they are captivating. They are passionate. They still genuinely love what they teach, and students can feel it. Watching someone teach content they care deeply about is magnetic. You can’t help but pay attention to people who are fully alive in what they are teaching. Ya'll... passion is contagious. Watching Mrs. Rue talk about gerrymandering or Mr. Schisel go off about trophic pyramids is the definition of watching someone IN THEIR ELEMENT. When we lose our love of what we teach, we lose the room.

5. Grading is so spicy. Like, ghost pepper spicy. 

6. The best professional development exists within our own buildings. There is no training, no book, no external resource or researcher more powerful than the collective knowledge and experience already sitting in a staff. The expertise is already there and constantly being refined in real classrooms with real students every single dang day. I have never been more in awe and inspired than I feel at the end of four years with my staff. At the secondary level we can become so isolated in our hallways and buildings and departments, that we forget there is an entire staff with knowledge and wisdom to share. I love that our adopted structure for student centered coaching was never about me teaching teachers, but always about me asking questions and brainstorming alongside teachers to capitalize on the knowledge and experience that already existed. 

We rarely have enough time or space to truly learn from one another. We talk a lot about collaboration, but meaningful collaboration takes more than a quick meeting or a packed agenda that we frantically try to rush through once a week. It takes time to listen, time to watch each other teach, and time to think together about what actually works for students. What we really need, more than anything, is increased access to each other.

And finally... Public schools matter. This job reminds me of that over and over again. There is something incredibly powerful about all kinds of kids learning alongside one another every single day. Different backgrounds, beliefs, abilities, cultures, personalities, and life experiences all sharing the same space, learning how to exist in a community together. That matters big time.

And even if public school is not the path someone chooses for their own child, we should all still be invested in the success of public education because, eventually, all of our kids enter the same world together. Your homeschooled child will work alongside, work for, hire, supervise, vote next to, and be cared for by students who came through public schools. Public school students, private school students, and homeschool students will become nurses, mechanics, teachers, business owners, engineers, and elected officials. They will all shape the communities we live in. The future any of us want for our own children depends, in part, on the education and opportunities available to everyone else’s children too. 

Public education is not just about individual kids. It is about the kind of society we are building together and on a small scale I see a micro version of that society existing at my high school every day. It humbles you. It inspires you. And it changes you. I genuinely feel sad for people who never get the chance to see the beauty of that up close. I wish everyone could spend a week inside a public school and witness it for themselves. Because despite all its flaws and challenges, there is still something deeply hopeful about what happens inside these walls every day. 

I could not be more excited to step back into the classroom next year, bringing a renewed sense of purpose and passion to this profession. 

Everyone Loves Buried Treasure

I just love when this role as learning coach gives me a full circle moment. I am in a coaching cycle with the Precalculus teacher at my school, who was also my student teacher in 2020! Getting to work with her again and nerd out about precalculus together fills my bucket in a BIG way. She is full of excitement and energy and brings so much light and enthusiasm to the Pre-Calculus content. 

She reached out about the polar coordinate unit and wanted a thinking partner to find new and engaging ways to spice things up this unit.

For our first standard, students need to understand how to graph in the polar coordinate system and convert between polar and rectangular coordinates. Graphing the actual polar coordinate is just a fairly quick, 1-2 day topic so we thought we would kick off the unit with a little fun and play a pirate themed version of battleship. 

Students created their game board by placing a total of 32 treasures and traps on their blank polar coordinate plane:

Their game boards should look something like this:

Students didn't have to draw the symbols but just used colored pencils to color code where their treasures and traps were located. To practice writing the polar coordinates, students completed their "Captain's Chart".

Once the treasures and traps were placed and documented the game essentially functions like Battleship. Students partner up, guess a coordinate, and ask their parter if anything is positioned at that location. They keep track of their wins and loses along the way. 

We mixed things up partway through the game by announcing a new rule:

• Only guesses with negative r-values and/or negative θ-values may be used! Listen for directions!
• This means you must think carefully about your guesses and adjust your strategy!

This game could easily be adapted for the coordinate plan as well. The goal is to have students practice writing the coordinates from a point and then practicing finding that location after being given a set of coordinates. They are getting practice in both directions, working with a partner, and finding a little fun while getting in that repetitive practice that we know is so crucial in mathematics. 

I often think about what this would look like as a worksheet. Here's a point. Graph it. Here's a graph. What's the point? It's the same thing. But there's something about the fear of a Kraken that hooks students in and makes the monotonous act of graphing polar coordinates a little more engaging. 

Partner Round Up: A Revisit

I will never stop obsessing over how easy it is to take a "worksheet" and turn it into an interactive partner activity that is rich in practice and mathematical discourse. Truly, the magic of what I call "Partner Round Up" just never seems to dim in its ability to impact student learning and increase engagement. 

I've posted about this activity before at the junior high level but wanted to share an update in a high school setting. I had the opportunity to try this out with a new content during a coaching cycle with one of our College Algebra teachers. She was working on transformations of parent functions and wanting students to recognize that the patterns of transformations were consistent with many different parent functions. 

We created about 20 cards (with repetition) with parent functions like this:

And then another set of 20 cards with transformations represented in a few different ways:

Students pair up so that a person with a parent function card works with a person with a transformation card. I like to color code them, so we all know what's going on.

Students had a worksheet to keep track of everything where they were asked to graph the new function and write the correction equation after the transformation. 

The real beauty is that after each partnership is done transforming their parent function, they switch cards and find a new partner. So, if a student just graphed a square root function, they would graph another square root function with new transformations and get to be the "expert" with that function. If a student just shifted a function down and applied a vertical stretch, they get to do that exact same thing with a new function. The back-to-back repetition without getting boring is... chef's kiss. Just perfection. 

There were a few partnerships that got a little wonky in the best way, especially with rational functions. Those conversations that start out with "is this one possible?" are gold and totally worth including just for the intentional cognitive struggle.

 

Our job as teachers? We facilitate. We walk around spot checking answers and answering questions. Every so often we may shout "We've got a parent function looking for a transformation partner!" to help the partnerships move along. But mostly we "ohhh" and "ahhh" and listen to students share connections with each other. We may provide a little "Oh, that's interesting! Now why is that?" and then walk along, allowing time and space for students to think and process.

It's just the best day. 

Graphing Telephone

 Do you remember the old game of telephone? Someone whispers something to the person next to them and the words get twisted and distorted as they travel from person to person around the circle. The last person shares the phrase they think they heard, and usually everyone shares a chuckle at how ridiculous it ended up. 

A colleague of mine I was working with in my current role as the school's learning coach had the brilliant idea of taking this concept and applying it to graphing functions. We worked together to plan it out and the result was a challenging, and somewhat hilarious, game of graphing telephone! 

For this version, students were grouped into groups of 5. Each person had a little booklet that contained the following pages, with their own unique start card.

Students graphed their function from page 1 on the graph on page 2. Then, once everyone in the circle was ready, they passed their booklet with the graph page showing to the next person in the circle. That student could only look at the graph and use it to write the equation on the next page. They passed it on, where the next person tried to graph it based on the equation. The goal was for the graph at the end to match the original equation. 

Five booklets were passed around the circle and I think the best group all day only had 3 booklets that matched from start to finish. The best and most powerful learning part of the day occurred in the conversations that happened after. Where did we go wrong? What happened? Was it "just" a negative?  How did our absolute value graph turn into a parabola? Such fantastic opportunities to do some error analysis in a really authentic way!

 

Here is an example of a booklet that made it all the way through correctly!

It's always a great day to get students practicing a new skill in a novel way! 

Which One Doesn't Belong? Never Gets Old!

The right answer should not be all we care about in math class. As teachers, when we only focus on being right vs being wrong, we send the message to students that being right is all that matters. The process, the thinking, the struggle, the journey to get there... all of that is majorly important in addition to finding the right answer. So we have to pause and reflect. Do our activities align with this idea? If students are going through an activity to practice or reinforce a skill, are we only having students find the answer and then move on? Where could we grow from here?

This is why the idea of Which One Doesn't Belong, and the thinking and justification skills that go along with it, is one of my favorite ways to get students looking at their work and their answers and talking about more than just the answer being right or not. I have posted about this before, so check this out first. 

In working with a team of Integrated High School Math II teachers this month, I designed an activity about factoring quadratic trinomials using the WWDB framework. 

Check out this first station: 

At first glance, you could start by saying that A doesn't belong because it's the only quadratic trinomial with a positive b value. That's true! And if a student said that to start, I would be thrilled that they are able to identify the different coefficients in a quadratic trinomial and recognize that the sign belongs to the b value and matters. Let's keep diving in....here are the factored forms... 

Next, you could say that C doesn't belong because the two factors are not identical like in A and B. If a student was using their new vocabulary from this unit, they might say that C is not a perfect square trinomial, which would just about make my heart burst with joy. 

You could also say that A doesn't belong because it doesn't have a factor of (x-3) like B and C do or that B doesn't belong because it doesn't have a factor of (x+1) like A and C do. 

Here's the thing, you can say any of them don't belong for any reason that mathematically makes sense.

I want students talking. I want them making a claim and backing it up with mathematical evidence while using academic vocabulary. This activity not only allows students to practice factoring, but explore and engage with quadratic trinomials in addition to finding a right answer. 

Here is a link to the entire slideshow. The trinomials get more interesting with more complex differences. Make a copy and edit as your heart desires!