246. Coaching Teacher Teams? Try This Template.

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In this solo episode, Lindsay shares a Google Doc template—the Group Implementation Coaching Call Template—designed to support teacher teams in continuing their professional development work after initial workshops. Lindsay talks about how this resource was created—key contributing people, research, and ideas—and how to practically use it in your setting. 

Drawing on research that shows teachers need about 20 practice instances and ongoing coaching to master new teaching skills, Lindsay walks through a structured approach that combines asset-based thinking, equity-focused inquiry, and practical coaching moves to help educators implement pedagogical strategies effectively over time.

Why? 

One-off workshops simply don't create meaningful change. But continuous learning and iterating with feedback from students, peers, and coaches does.  

This is backed up in the literature. Research from Joyce and Showers (2022) demonstrates that teachers rarely transfer newly learned skills to the classroom unless training is accompanied by coaching; the percentage of teachers who accurately use new skills jumps dramatically from 5% to between 75-90% when coaching is included. Further, teachers need approximately 20 practice instances to master a new teaching skill. This resource supports teacher teams to meet that threshold and successfully master new skills. 


What?

Here’s a walk-through of the Group Implementation Coaching Call Template, which you can access as a free resource (link below).

Step 1: Set the Foundation (meeting one)
Start by identifying team and individual strengths, clarifying core values, and establishing an equity focus by naming which students are at the margins. Define what success looks, sounds, and feels like in observable terms, then co-design an inquiry question that positions teachers as learners pursuing answers alongside their students.

Step 2: Build Your Coaching Bank
Develop a set of coaching moves to use throughout sessions, including clarifying questions ("Can you say more about that?"), mindset shifts ("How might we think differently about this?"), prioritization prompts to address scarcity thinking ("What is most important here?"), and values alignment questions to surface competing commitments.

Step 3: Start Each Session with Connection and Implementation Check
Open with human connection activities like listening dyads or celebrations, then conduct an implementation check and hold each other accountable to what you said you’d do since the last meeting. 

It’s important to honor initial teacher reactions by exploring questions like, “What went well?” and “What surprised you?” Finally, reflect on data using "I notice, I wonder, I want to learn more about," and ask deeper questions about how instruction led to observed trends in student work.

Step 4: Apply the GLEE Framework
Work through each step:

1. Goal: What learning experiences do you hope to foster?
2. Learn: What did the data reveal about student strengths and areas for growth?
3. Explore: What instructional moves could grow the identified skill while enabling student agency?
4. Expectations: What will we try and what data will we gather before the next session?

Step 5: Choose Your Instructional Move
Select from various instructional options and decide what you want to implement in your classes. This could be things like clarifying expectations, introducing learning tools or protocols, adapting lessons using UDL principles, creating micro-groups for differentiated support, or improving feedback systems. Always ensure the approach maintains student agency and coaches learners to use tools themselves rather than simply making tasks easier.

Final Tip

Prioritize getting into spaces with other educators to work together and pursue professional coaching. We need to go beyond just showing up for a PD day, but share feedback and data with other educators in a way that sparks meaningful change in our classrooms. This takes intentionality and effort… It’s worth it!

Grab your copy of the Group Implementation Coaching Call Template for free, and start using it with your teaching team to bring transformation to your school. If you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 246 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

Quotes: 

• 4:18 “ We also wanna identify our values, both as a team or as individuals. Those things are really important, and they're going to be a place we return to when we're stuck in a challenge mode.”
• 8:45 “We want to get clarity as often as possible. So, “can you say more about that?” or “can you share an example” is a good go-to.”
• 25:39 “ I urge us to find small ways, peer coaching or otherwise, that we get teachers in spaces with other educators and get some feedback and get some shared data assessment practices or protocols in place so that we can then make decisions about what action we're gonna take.”

​​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT
Lindsay Lyons: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Time for teachership podcast. This is episode 2 46 and we just revamped the website. So I'm gonna read directly off of our newly designed website, which you can [email protected]. One-off workshops do not create meaningful change, continuous learning and iterating with feedback from students, peers, and coaches does.
So I'm gonna go in this episode through a Google Doc template I've been working on to support teacher teams to continue work after initial. Workshops on a pedagogical approach or strategy, calling these group implementation coaching sessions, and join us for this conversation. Here we go. I first wanna acknowledge all of the folks who have informed this work.
So this Google Doc template has been a work in progress for a couple of years, and there are so many folks. We never do this work alone. There's so many folks who have influenced it. So one, wanna shout out the [00:01:00] PLC at work folks. So July, 2024 on our podcast, we did a mini series. On PLCs, so folks like Dr.
Anthony Mohammed, Dr. Chad Dumas, super practical work of Bob Sanju, Marin Powers and Shalene Miller were super effective in helping me think about what really needs to happen. So certainly these are PLCs a little bit different from like an implementation coaching model or a more kind of informal process.
They certainly, want to clarify like what exactly. PLCs are and how they are distinct from other conversations, but that was hugely impactful. Also, the Grow Model better lesson as a company introduced me to this Raman Behan, who is in episode one. The very first episode of the Time for teachership podcast has taught me a lot about.
Coaching, one-on-one coaching, group coaching, coaching coaches, all sorts of things related to coaching and how to use this model and others. So that has been really helpful and I wanna shout him out specifically. The field of positive [00:02:00] psychology has been very influential in my approach as I learn even more from education scholars who talk about asset-based education as well as the values and action website, which I find a very valuable resource to think about values and values.
Really how they come into play in our teacher lives and are feeling aligned to our values as we make pedagogical decisions. So you'll see that definitely in this, or you'll get that vibe. Also wanna name a few recent books that have been helpful. Street Data, as I love from doctors Shane SFI and Jamila Dugan, as well as the more recent pedagogies voice book from Dr.
Shane Safier, Marla bse, Dr. Swan Jabber and Crystal Watson. Super helpful to think about things. Like just orienting to the margins to think about how we're focusing on equity. And we're centering like human connection. Also as Reta Hammond's latest book, rebuilding Students' Learning Power, teaching [00:03:00] for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice.
I'm really giving you a reading lesson here. Has really helped me to think about things like in the looking at student work protocol I've talked about before from Desi. Questions you'll see in this are we over scaffolding? Do we wanna just try to make the task easier and thus not great appropriate?
Or are we really coaching students to own the tools, use them theirselves, and really expand their own learning power? Ideally, that one. Also inquiry pedagogy, which I've really been informed by and through the investigating history curriculum out of dsi and colleagues I've worked with on that. As well as you'll see a visual of a framework, which is currently still in development, hopefully to be published in, in coming years with Car Panko and Dr.
Eric Soto Shad. So with all of that, let's get right to what exactly is this template? What does it consist of? What are the different parts and the why. So here it is. The first meeting, really thinking about a couple things from the asset based [00:04:00] lens. We are thinking about identifying team strengths.
We also, before any of this, I do wanna say, we also wanna get really clear on how to pronounce everyone's name and what their roles are. So there's certainly a space for that. But we wanna leverage our strengths as a team and or as individuals, right? So we wanna make sure there's space for that. We also wanna identify our values, both again, as a team or as individuals, but those things are really important and they're going to be a place we return to when we're stuck in like a challenge mode, right?
We're stuck on this thing. We're in kind of scarcity mindset. How do we leverage our strengths? How do we feel aligned to our values? If we're between two decisions, how do we make sure we're aligning with the one that is values based? We also wanna hold onto equity and what I'm calling critical hope, really making sure that our focus is on the margins.
So again, borrowing from street data and pedagogies of voice texts. Which students are there in the margins right now, and how do you know what information is telling you this? Getting very clear on if we are talking to anybody, we're talking to this [00:05:00] group and we're trying to seek equity and justice for this group.
That is always our centerpiece. I always find it to be helpful when coaching or when thinking through decisions. To center a particular student or group of students and say, okay, what would work for them? Or Let's get really specific, yes, maybe this is the skill the class needs to grow, but what about this group?
How do they need to grow it? In what ways do they have strengths? Or what way does this specific student have strengths that can be leveraged in growing that skill? It's super helpful to get very clear, and so to name the margins is really important. Also, in the line of critical hope, thinking about the dream, so drawing on freedom, dreaming, and other things.
We talk about all the time on the podcast. Getting really clear on the observable criteria and using that then as a metric for success as we move forward. So what does success, I would argue look slash sound, but also feel like what does it feel like to be in your classroom?
What does success look, sound, feel like? Get really clear on that and think about the ways to measure that, and that'll be an ongoing conversation. And [00:06:00] finally really thinking about inquiry and evidence. My social studies, teacher and coach mindset hat is on here where we think about, let's co-design an inquiry question.
This also comes out of pedagogies of voice, right? What is the thing we want to pursue and learn more about? Just even that language really centers the learning process here as opposed to. The traditional way of thinking about teachers as having all of the answers right, or that there is one right way or that the right way comes from a particular place such as peer-reviewed journals versus co-constructed informed by peer-reviewed journals, certainly, but also co-constructed with the kids in your class, right?
And so again, that kind of points to the evidence. So what information will we gather to learn more? Certainly. Things like research, also things like, let's ask the kids in the class, right? So thinking about inquiry and evidence is a final piece. This is really meeting one. And so meeting one is setting the stage, right?
We're defining all of those assets. We're thinking about. Who we are as a team, what we [00:07:00] believe in, what we're out to do. And then there is a coaching bank, both for that meeting and future meetings that I put in just for my own self. I like to have a little coaching bank. You can certainly remove this from the template and have it as a one-pager or something and a physical copy, move it into a separate doc, whatever you'd like.
If you wanna, make your coaching doc public to the group. But I like to think about some coaching moves that are maybe hard for me to remember in the moment. Or the languaging around the coaching move is hard. Certainly build your own here, add to this list, adjust as needed. But I think one thing that's been helpful for me as a coach is to clarify.
So an example is like someone says, oh, students aren't really good at this thing. Or, I've tried this and students responded this way. It didn't work right? And so my follow up there is to get clear on what's going on. I might say something like, can you say more about that? Or share an example. Like basically, how do you know?
Let's get to the evidence, and what I find is that anytime we share an example, we get really concrete, [00:08:00] then I'm able to coach better. Often we have peer coaching because this is a group coaching situation. We have peer coaching, tapping in. I recently did this in a workshop with about 10 educators in person.
And it just like the example grew into a 10 minute conversation with minute, like detailed feedback from way more people than just myself, right? Three or four, five people jumped in to offer clarifying questions and we just got really into it and it was so much more fruitful than leaving it at oh, this is a hard thing.
How do I respond to this, right? Because that's so vague that it's really hard to coach on and it doesn't illuminate the problem in the same way for that person to ask the question or made the comment about the challenge or anyone else in the group, right? We wanna get clarity as often as possible. So can you say more about that?
We share an example is a good, for me, a good go-to the next thing is sometimes we're in a mindset that just is looking at a problem, maybe in a deficit way, maybe in just [00:09:00] like a. A way that doesn't feel productive or like we've gone around a bunch of times with ideas that haven't worked.
Maybe we've tried a bunch of pedagogical moves and we're getting the same result and we're just feeling stuck. We might need to shift mindsets. So it might be, how might we think differently about this? So one thing that I've seen particularly in inquiry pedagogy, is. A frustration with students not having specific information about the time period of study in a history class, for example, or the people being studied, right?
And so the concern is if students don't have any quote, background knowledge on this topic, they're not able to engage in inquiry. They're not able to have questions that are thoughtful or anything like this. And so one fellow coach who also coaches on an inquiry curriculum that I coach on. Just said this and I wrote it down because I was like, this is so good.
Curiosity and inquiry pedagogy is more [00:10:00] valuable than background knowledge. And so just being able to offer that as a reframe. So it might be a coaching question, like, how might we think about this differently? But it also might be like, let's pause to think about the values or the priorities of inquiry pedagogy.
Like what skill is more important? Is it more important that they have memorized a bunch of information that they can recall? Is it more important that they are curious and they nurture that skill? Ideally we have both, right? But to say curiosity is more valuable than background knowledge.
I think it's a really helpful reframe where we might have gotten stuck, but if we have this shift, then it's okay, then knowing that, how do we amplify curiosity? Now we're going in a different direction. We're not even trying necessarily to increase background knowledge, quote unquote. We are actually trying to do something different.
Which is to value affirm and encourage more curiosity, which is actually a completely different thing, right? So it just really shifts mindsets [00:11:00] and directions. Relatedly, I think one of the most common mindsets that we can get stuck in is this scarcity. One. We just never have enough time as teachers.
That is so true. The response to this, or the best response that I coach myself on all the time is a prioritization game, right? Like it's not about not having enough time, no one has enough time. It's about how are we using the time that we have. So the question that's in response to the scarcity based comment is what is most important here, right?
If you only have 30 minutes to teach this lesson, if you only have, however long to do X thing, what is most important? And that could be what is the most important skill? What is the most important content? What is the most important way that you're making a kid feel? What is the most important based on like your vision of success that we defined at the outset?
It could be a lot of things, right? But. Shifting from scarcity to prioritization as a mindset here can be really powerful. And the final coaching move I added and again, by the time you check this [00:12:00] out, it may be different. I may be adapting or adding as we go. 'cause nothing is ever set in stone, right?
We're constantly learning and evolving. But the last one currently, as I record this, is aligning to values. So you could also use this to address scarcity and prioritization, but with which value or values is this pedagogy or this use of time most aligned. So often in adaptive challenges when we're finding ourselves stuck in a long period of time, we try different things.
It's not working. What we can do is actually take a step back and say, okay, it seems like we might have some competing commitments here. I believe and want to, encourage students to have more agency. I know they can. I believe in them and I want this, like this is a core value for me is like teacher as coach or student agency, whatever the thing is. That is one of my core values. Or maybe it's, transparency. I wanna be really honest and clear with students. I wanna give them really clear feedback. However to use time, again, time is [00:13:00] a constraint or we have a curriculum that is set by the district and we need to teach that.
So I don't have as much freedom to give students agency, right? Whatever the thing is, we are I imposed upon whether it is a time restriction, a curriculum restriction, and we are finding perhaps that it's not really what we want. We want this thing. And we're being told to do this other thing, and sometimes those feel conflicting.
And so just naming the competing commitment or kind of the value that you think is displayed by your current use of time or the current pedagogical move and like what you actually value, sometimes it takes that deeper conversation to unearth oh, I've been saying I'm all about student agency and yet.
This is how I've been doing my lessons. I have been saying, talking at the kids and then asking them to do a multiple choice quiz, and then that's how I assess them and then we move on, right? Versus, oh, I actually, when I became a teacher, I really wanted student, an agency, and I wanna be able to invite them to, share in these multitude of ways using [00:14:00] multiple means of expression based on UDL.
But all I'm asking them to do is this one thing that the curriculum says can I, for example, in that scenario. Adapt or give multiple means of expression that answer the same question, but adapt the format to be student selected. Still assessing the same skills and content knowledge, but enabling a wider range of options, right?
Are there ways that we can align more closely to our values? 'cause we're not gonna feel good if we're not values aligned in our teaching and in our pedagogy. Okay, so that's the first meeting, the coaching moves that can be used in any meeting. And then I wanna say after meeting one here is how I would structure this or have been trying to structure these things.
One is to start with human connection. Pedagogies of voice really reminded me of this. You might have a listening dyad, you might have a group check-in. You might have celebrations. I know the PLC at work. Folks are really good about naming celebrations as an opening. Again, asset based positive psychology.
Let's bring it all in. And then we go to an implementation [00:15:00] check. So you may name this thing different, but basically a reminder that last time. We said we were gonna try this thing, we were gonna gather this piece of data. Was it assessment data? Was it experiential student report data? Was it both from, X assessment or these particular students or from this survey, right?
Whatever modality we're using. And then it structured it into three groups. I think there's three containers for this. One is let's honor the initial teacher reactions and your teachers best. So there may be. Some moments where this doesn't quite work as well. Maybe if you open it up it you'll, it'll be really hard to get back to data.
So maybe you start with data, but I think for a lot of groups I work with, it's nice to be able to honor like, what are your initial responses? And so I'm pulling from Dr. Frederick Buskey actually and has brilliant daughter Mara, who do a five minute coaching around three questions. I've reduced those to two here.
Because I think we get to the third and then other parts, but what went well, again, asset based and what surprised you. This [00:16:00] question itself is surprising and I think jogs us out of the typical glows and grows yeah, what was surprising and then what I read into that is like basically what did I learn, right?
'cause when you are surprised, you then have to, you have this like disorienting dilemma. I thought this, but actually this happened. And then you have to make sense of that. So you are learning in that process. So it invites you to think about what you've learned. Then I think reflect on the data.
I like using something I've adapted from Panorama education. I notice, I wonder and I want to learn more about, so notice exactly what the data says. If a student said this particular quote in response to the lesson and they thought you should do this differently. I notice quote, blah, blah, blah. I notice X amount of students that you know how to do this. Okay. And then I wonder, I like here to encourage yourself to think about, or the teachers to think about three possible reasons why I wonder if this comes from X or this student said this because of y or this, [00:17:00] trend in student data this.
Area for growth that I've noticed comes from my pedagogical move here, right? Try to think about maybe the, why some of the noticings are happening and then I want to learn more about situates you firmly in the curiosity and learner stance. What information or perspectives are missing from the data you have as a nice kind of corollary question here.
So basically, yeah, I wanna learn more about this thing and thinking about where I'm gonna go seek it out. Where am I gonna go from more information to learn that thing? As in deeper reflection questions here that are pulled from Desi's looking at student work protocol that I really enjoy. So one, if you didn't get to it in the kind of the possible reasons why I wonder section above it would be how did our instruction lead to the trends we saw in student work?
So again, putting the locus of control back on the teacher. We are thinking about what we can do as professionals, as educators, right? To help students. So think about how did my instruction impact the thing I noticed [00:18:00] in the data? And relatedly, how did the use of scaffolds that I put into that lesson, or maybe that already existed in that lesson, impact students' thinking and learning.
So we're interrogating some of that. And I labeled this next question a gut check, but to what extent do you feel like you're wanting to make the task. Easier, like less hard below grade standards versus identifying tools and changes in pedagogy that would support all students in demonstrating mastery of a grade level task.
I think that is the gut check. If we are defaulting to. Oh, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna make it easier. I'm gonna add more sentence strips. I'm gonna, whatever. Versus coaching students to use particular learner moves, right? I'm thinking of Zaretta Hammond here and the five Learn to Learn skills or changing my way of interacting with students, or my way of structuring the lesson.
Like then we're not really gonna get very far right, and we wanna do that gut check to make sure that what we land on here before moving to the next piece [00:19:00] where we're gonna land on an action step is rooted in like good stuff. Wanting students to be better learners and engaging with appropriately challenging grade level text.
And me as an instructor being really the coach. So for the remainder of the meeting, this could be 30 minutes. It depends on how much time you have with teachers. I'm assuming around 60, some have 45, some have 75 around 60, so 30 minutes left or 25 minutes left. I should say. If you did a five minute check-in, if you have an adaptation of what I would say is the grow model, that's how I initially started with this.
I'm calling this glee at the moment. So goal learn, explore expectations. So what's the goal? What learning experiences do you hope to foster before our next session is a question that comes out of pedagogies of voice I believe, and then thinking about I might have a lens toward the content.
I might have a lens toward the skill. I might have a lens toward how I want students to feel. Ideally, I'm thinking a little bit of all of this, right? But like we just looked at the [00:20:00] data. We just noticed some things and we're curious about, right? We have an inquiry pursuit here. We have our larger inquiry question for the year, but we also said, ah, I looked at this data and I wanna know about this thing.
So now what are we trying to learn about? What are we hoping to foster? I think you can change up the question. I'll probably play with that question for a bit, but considering content skills into feelings. What's the thing we wanna pursue before our next session? So again, returning to that learn like what did we learn from the data?
So let's get clear on like the assessment data. What are the student strengths and areas for growth? What's like the biggest leverage points here for growth? And how can we leverage strengths in pursuit of that area of growth? And then what are our students actually saying? So what is the feedback that we got from them?
Did we even ask them? And which students are we asking and hearing from. And then we move to explore. So this is usually gonna be the bulk of this second chunk or this, 25 minute chunk. What instructional move could we use to grow the identified skill and at the same time [00:21:00] enable student agency, right?
We don't wanna lose that student centered learning agency. We want to grow the skill because we're coaching students to learn better, right? And so some options, there's like a bullet point kind of choice list here on the template. It could be that you're just saying, Hey, you know what? Actually my expectations were just not clear.
If we're talking about a behavioral issue, for example, we might say I was just not at all clear that I wanted this to be done in this way, or that our class discussion norms were never established at the beginning of the year. So of course that student was like talking over that other student, and that was rude, right?
Because we didn't have the conversation. So we need to actually as a class, co-create discussion agreements, or we need to clarify expectations in some way. It could be that you wanna introduce or use a learning tool. This could be a protocol. Okay, I had an open class discussion, didn't have a discussion protocol.
Kids were talking all over the place, or I only heard from four students that were the loudest. Next time I'm gonna introduce a discussion protocol. Or maybe I had a bunch of students who were quiet 'cause I'm not sure that [00:22:00] they. Fully went through the information processing cycles. I'm gonna use some of Zuta Hammond stuff to coach on these.
Learn to learn skills and introduce tools to them that can help their information processing so they're ready to go next time. Another option could be to adapt or design for engagement, representation or expression a link in the template to UDL here. And so there are so many examples. It is overwhelming, but if you zoom into one of those engagement, representation or expression.
You can do what we named earlier in the episode where we're trying to, for example, open it up to multiple formats for ways to demonstrate your understanding of the content or your proficiency with a skill. That's an adaptation of a lesson if you have a set curriculum or maybe you're designing, if you're creating your own curriculum it could be that you want to micro groups.
So you notice some trends in the data. Certain groups have have some strengths, right? You can break the student groups or the class, excuse me, into these little groups where this group needs. This intervention with this particular [00:23:00] skill, this group actually got all of it and they need an extension, right?
Whatever the thing is, it's like a micro MTSS system here. Or it could be that you want to think about how you're providing feedback to students. And so maybe what it is like you came up with all this great data and you're like, wow, actually I don't know how I'm gonna get that to students. I don't have a process in place to let them know what I just learned through this deep data dive in our group implementation coaching session.
I need a better system for providing specific, timely asset-based feedback to my students, and I'm gonna figure that out in order to make that my next move. So that students, again, have the agency to get the feedback quickly, specifically, and then they choose what their next step is, which is reminiscent of my conversation with Dr.
Al Annoy, who says, the students are the ones that take the next steps. We don't, as the teacher give them the next steps. We give them feedback, and we facilitate kind of their information gathering so that they can choose as writers. In his case, you know what to do next. Finally we have the last [00:24:00] piece, which is setting the expectation for next time.
So what will we try as a group? Are we all doing the same thing? Are there some teachers wanting to try one thing, some trying another? This may vary. I don't have a set opinion on this. I think there are great ways, great ideas doing both. But then we wanna know how we're gonna learn from it, right?
You're gonna try the thing before next session when we meet in two weeks or four weeks, whenever the time is. So what are we doing? Getting really clear who is doing it and what data are we gathering so that we can learn and we're committing to bringing that back in the next session. So that was a lot.
You can certainly if you were driving, running, or otherwise occupied while listening no need to have taken notes. You can certainly grab this free resource at lindsay bethle.com/blog/ 2 4 6. And as a final thought, I'm gonna return to what we said at the opening of the episode. Research from Joyce and Showers 2022 shows that on average, teachers need about 20 practice instances to master a new [00:25:00] teaching skill.
And so their research actually shows teachers rarely transfer newly learned skills to the classroom unless training is accompanied by coaching. The percentage of teachers who accurately use new skills jumps from 5%. To anywhere between 75 and 90% when coaching is included. That is wild. Such a important component of professional learning that often doesn't get as much I don't know, financial commitment perhaps, or just like thought time than the typical show up in person PD for a PD day.
I urge us to find small ways. Peer coaching or otherwise, that we get teachers in spaces with other educators and get some feedback and get some shared data assessment practices or protocols in place so that we can then make decisions about what action we're gonna take. That is informed by the brilliance of the group and the great [00:26:00] resources available to us in this wonderful age of education, research, and the internet.
Until next time, everybody have a wonderful day. Think big, act brave, and be your best self.

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