Communication
Q. How to guide teachers learn from each other’s experience?
Recommendations: Encourage teachers share experience with each other.
Activities:
• During teacher meetings or discussion, create chances allowing teachers to share their classroom conditions and ideas about enhancing their working environments and their students’ learning environment.
Q. What to better communicate with teachers?
Recommendations: Plan prior to your communication with teachers and make sure there are chances to meet with teachers in person.
Activities:
• Develop a communication plan: research, plan and evaluate. Find out who you are going to talk with, determine where they would like to get their information, and plan measurable objectives to accomplish this. This communication plan should be updated monthly.
• The best way to communicate with each teacher is to be in their classroom, recognize their hard work, and share with them what you have learned from them. This personal communication builds trust and a stronger relationship with each teacher, and shows an investment and partnership in their work.
• Teachers need conversation directed towards their work inside the classroom, including in depth conversations on issues related to student outcomes and school improvement.
• Equally distribute communication time and effort among all teachers.
Teaching Capacity Building
Q. How to maintain an effective teaching team?
Recommendations: Optimize collaboration and incorporate students’ opinions to the team.
Activities:
• Provide a teamwork model, allow time for collaborative work, and actively advocate sharing and peer observation.
• Build foundational protocols and norms for the teaching team.
• Attend their team meetings whenever possible.
• Invite the student counsellor to the team meetings to help provide solutions that respond to the students’ learning challenges.
Q. How to enhance teachers’ connection to school activities.
Recommendations: Create welcoming school environment that interact with both teachers and students.
Activities:
• Be approachable to teachers and organize interactive activities that strengthen teachers’ connections.
• Create a school environment that welcomes different ideas and suggestions from teachers.
• Help new teachers to get familiar with the school, their classes and teaching. Also help them to understand their future career path. Equip experienced teachers with novel instructional methodologies and technology.
• Know your students on a more personal level (including their names and the names of their teachers, their classroom, and their extracurricular performance) and give public praise to students.
Q. How to motivate your teachers? improve teachers’ professional competence?
Recommendations: improve teachers’ professional competence and recognize their accomplishment.
Activities:
• Invite teachers to attend any professional teaching workshop to enhance their teaching knowledge and abilities.
• Put teachers’ achievements and successful volunteer work in a weekly school newsletter.
• Highlight teachers who present their work in any conference/workshop in a weekly school newsletter.
Q. What principals can do to facilitate teacher professional development?
Recommendations: Give teachers training and material; and teachers need to be familiar with each students’ performance.
Activities:
•Teachers need to be provided with the training, teaching tools, and the support they need to help all students reach high performance levels.
•Teachers need access to curriculum guides, textbooks, or specific training connected to the school curriculum. They need access to lessons or teaching units that match curriculum goals. They need training on using assessment results to diagnose learning gaps.
•Teachers must know how each student performed on every multiple-choice item and other questions on the assessment measure. And training must be in the teachers’ subject areas.
Q. What are types of coaching conversations that effective leaders must have?
Recommendations: The five types of conversations need to be implemented, role and relationship orientation, quick connects, check-ins, developmental coaching and formal reviews.
Activities:
• Role and relationship orientation – These coaching conversations are needed when a new teacher or staff member joins the school, when job responsibilities shift, and when employees change roles.
• Quick connects – These coaching conversations give leaders the opportunity to assess quickly how an employee is doing and to identify successes and barriers.
•Check-ins – These coaching conversations are more formal opportunities to seek and give feedback on goal achievement, priorities, progress on tasks, and assess employee needs.
• Developmental Coaching – These coaching conversations aim to direct and guide teachers and staff to improved performance and individual career development
• Formal reviews – Formal reviews of progress on goals, expectations, and planning for future opportunities
Gallup, Inc. (2017). State of the American Workplace. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/gallup2017leaderscoach
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