Techie by Nature

          Before we began our coaching cycle, the cooperating teacher and I sat down and discussed what he wanted to improve in his instruction. Although he is very knowledgeable in his subject area (English), he mentioned that he is struggling with teaching English to ELL and special education students. While completing my first observation for this teacher, I made sure to not only observe the lesson itself, but also how the students reacted to the lesson well. I tried to think of ways to accommodate and reach these students without having to rewrite the lesson.  Although I have not had the opportunity to teach English to high school students, I do have experience of teaching ELL students an English based subject, United States history from the 1800s to 2008. I believe that my experience was a little more difficult because I had to consider that not only do my students not have the academic vocabulary to comprehend the lessons, but they also did not have the background knowledge as

  I have never considered myself an individual that has enough knowledge to “coach” another teacher or professional. I am aware that I have a lot of knowledge, experience, and skills to offer, but have never been confident enough to say, “let me help you with that.”   I have, however, been a soccer coach for some time, and felt that I did have enough experience and knowledge to help guide and direct players in the game. This is what I think of when I consider coaching. I have had to shift my thinking to consider the classroom as the “field”, students as the “players” and the teacher as the “coach”, therefore I am coaching the coach.  I feel that this is a better and more accurate representation of what an instructional or technology coach is asked to accomplish.  While in the classroom, I often despised when an instructional coach would come in to observe. I felt like they were trying to “catch” me doing something incorrectly and run back to report it to my administrator. As a student