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Coaches Academy

Coaches Academy

Instructional coaches have the power to support post-pandemic reinvention, including teacher growth and development through:

  • Identifying unfinished learning and accelerating your response;
  • Capitalizing on student strengths;
  • Guiding collaborative inquiry;
  • Expanding use of effective teaching practice.

Learning Forward is the leader in ensuring that school- and district-based coaches with instructional and content expertise also develop critical skills in building relationships, leading professional learning, and providing effective coaching to individuals and teams.

Contact us to learn more:

Using strategies from Taking the Lead: New Roles for Teachers and School-Based Coaches and Coaching Matters, Learning Forward’s Coaches Academy provides comprehensive learning and ongoing support for coaches across a system.

The Coaches Academy includes:

  • Six onsite sessions with a coach facilitator;
  • Sessions for school and system leaders to provide support for effective implementation of a coaching program and ensure conditions are in place for coaches to be effective;
  • Copies of Taking the Lead (2nd ed.), Coaching Matters (2nd ed.) and the Standards for Professional Learning for all participants.

Learn more about how we can help your coaches be learning leaders in your system.

Participants in the Coaches Academy:

Explore a coaching framework grounded in the Standards for professional Learning and focused on the three building blocks of coaching (content, pedagogy, and relationships), and apply it to their work with teachers;

Assess their own strengths and opportunities for growth based on the characteristics of effective coaches;

Explore the functions, responsibilities, knowledge, skills, and challenges associated with 10 essential roles of coaches;

Understand the change process, apply a KASAB model to drive changes in teacher practice, and understand the coach’s role as a catalyst for change in schools;

Develop tools for collecting data about teaching and student learning to use as evidence during planning and reflection conversations and support data-informed instruction;

Apply a coaching theory of change that develops teachers’ instructional efficacy and effectiveness, and increases student learning;

Describe the impact of coaches’ work and conditions that support coaching effectiveness;

Develop partnership agreements with principals and teachers to ensure their work focuses on essential coach roles;

Apply a coaching cycle of planning, demonstration teaching, observation, and reflection;

Deepen their presentation and facilitation skills for work with individuals and teams of teachers;

Acquire and apply essential communication skills to support strong coaching relationships.

What we do

Coaches Academy helps coaches embrace their roles as learning leaders and better understand their relationships with teachers and principals. The academy also helps teachers develop skills in:

Building relationships

Presentation and facilitation

Leading professional learning

Providing effective feedback

Coaching individuals and teams

Selecting learning designs

Our work

coaching-for-impact

Coaching for Impact: Six Pillars to Create Coaching Roles That Achieve Their Potential to Improve Teaching and Learning

Despite decades of efforts to support teachers with coaching, most teachers still do not get the support they need in…

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coaching-matters_full

Coaching Matters

Each chapter in this book describes an element of what research and the authors’ firsthand experiences know it takes to make coaching effective.

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Videos

Through Learning Forward’s training, I feel more equipped to go in and help teachers. I know what I need to do to provide effective feedback and support for teachers.

Leighann Fields

Mentor Teacher, St. Landry Parish, Louisiana

We work with Learning Forward because we want to impact teacher growth through job-embedded professional learning.

Larry Labue

Executive Director, STEAM Center, Allen, Texas

We’ve had 200 people go through Learning Forward’s Coaches Academy. The work has spread across schools and across the entire district. Through this work we are really becoming a culture of learning.

Meredith Fortner

Coach Leader, Alexandria City Public Schools, Alexandria, Virg.