Optimal Learning Environments are based on the belief that every student can achieve high expectations. Instruction is strengths-based and personalized to ensure students meet the demands of grade-appropriate standards. Kind, caring, and respectful relationships among adults and students are understood to be integral to academic success and personal well-being.

Optimal Learning Environments are supported by a positive, instructionally focused school climate and provide engaging classroom communities that are tailored and co-constructed by students and adults to support the success of each and every learner.

Aligned with Dr. Thomas Guskey’s five levels of evaluation, Designing for Impact is a planning guide for professional learning design and monitoring. The protocol walks teams through a series of questions to define realistic and authentic program objectives and measurable goals. It helps users identify types and sources of evidence to monitor and gauge implementation progress towards those goals. It also elevates an essential aspect of program design that often gets ignored — the necessary organizational supports to create the conditions for success.

Highlights

• Engaging all stakeholders influencing or impacted by the program clarifies how to work collectively to create the enabling conditions for effective professional learning.
• Defining specific changes you want to see in the student learning experience, and measuring what matters first, helps identify what the research says teachers and schools need to do to support that change.
• Building a solid list of types and sources of evidence supports data-based discussions to pinpoint new or unanticipated challenges and the agility to make adjustments along the way.

Why this matters

Professional learning planning, design, and evaluation are too often guided by intuition, assumptions, and unaligned outcomes. Scaffolds for defining goals and evidence of success at every level of participation leads an invested stakeholder community to evidence-based program design.

There are many reasons we love Impact Florida’s Solving with Students Cadre. As a pilot partner, we are learning so much through this innovative professional learning model based on student feedback for Florida math teachers. And it’s not just us. Ninety-eight percent of teachers in the first pilot reported making substantive changes to their practice. What’s most exciting is what we are hearing from learners. Students of participating teachers confirmed the changes their teachers are making are having real impact on their experiences in the classroom.

Solving with Students is an initiative of Impact Florida designed to use student feedback on classroom learning conditions from the PERTS: Elevate survey as a lever for developing teacher practice. The first pilot included 49 secondary math teachers with anywhere from zero to more than 21 years of experience representing 16 districts across the state who applied to participate. Impact Florida supported teachers in the cadre to implement the survey with students in their classrooms, analyze the results, and then test small changes in practice in iterative cycles based on ongoing feedback through follow-up surveys.

Throughout the experience, Impact Florida regularly brought the cadre together for targeted support, to share problems of practice, and to build community. Teachers also had the option to receive six additional hours of formal one-on-one virtual coaching from an NTC program consultant or informal coaching through regular check-in calls with Impact Florida’s cadre leader.

The PERTS: Elevate survey asks students to provide anonymous feedback on learning conditions in their classrooms.

One reason we are so enthusiastic about the project is it incorporates key design features that matter according to the research on what works in professional learning. These features, which also guide our approach at NTC, provide a solid jumping-off point for innovation and include:

• priority emphasis on building relationships
• well-planned opportunities for teacher collaboration
• one-on-one coaching with follow-up
• focus on subject-specific instructional practice vs. content knowledge

Another reason is the richness of the data. NTC’s impact team evaluated survey results from the first pilot and gathered insights from coaching conversations as well as teacher and student focus groups. Participants authentically shared stories of their hopes, fears, challenges, discoveries, and the important lessons captured in the nuances of what students had to say. Taken together, the findings from the pilot cadre were compelling. Not only did we see almost immediate student-reported improvements in participating teachers’ classrooms, we saw how teachers’ mindsets shifted as they engaged, with peer and coach support, in increasingly deeper ways with the feedback from their students.

We are also encouraged by the nature of teacher commitment we saw. Even after so much hardship and disruption over the past several years, cadre teachers — the majority of whom were long-term veterans with 10, 15, 20+ years of experience — jumped at this opportunity to grow professionally. They weren’t “voluntold” to participate, and the small stipend notwithstanding, they applied because they were genuinely interested in analyzing their practice from their students’ perspective to make positive changes. That willingness to be vulnerable, in and of itself, had a powerful influence on the classroom relationship, according to both teachers and students.

NTC senior program consultant and former math teacher Tiana Pitts, who coached about half the teachers in the pilot cadre, concurred. “It’s important to consider what teachers were messaging to their students by participating. They were essentially saying to them: ‘I want to grow. I want to learn. And I need you to help me,’” Tiana said. The surveys then allowed students to anonymously share their true opinions — if they thought their teachers cared about them, how the classroom community felt, if the work they were asked to do was meaningful. Using this data, teachers then chose an area to focus on, validating students’ feedback and, in most cases, bringing them into partnership to identify and test new strategies.

“It’s important to consider what teachers were messaging to their students by participating. They were essentially saying to them: ‘I want to grow, I want to learn. And I need you to help me.’”

Following each cycle of survey feedback, teachers were asked to report the extent to which they interacted with students about their focus area and strategy for addressing results. In general, teachers who intentionally engaged students in conversations about changes they were making saw more improvement in learning conditions. When teachers did not engage students in inquiry cycle conversations, the percentage of students providing positive feedback generally declined or remained flat.

Research suggests that efforts to promote student voice in the classroom can influence student engagement in learning. We believe Solving with Students reflects that potential in alignment with NTC’s guiding belief that meaningful teaching and learning is a partnership — a reciprocal, relational, human interaction between teachers and students that nurtures the potential of each individual in a community of learners.

The value-add of coaching — Teacher well-being and accelerated growth

To learn more about how coaching can both deepen and extend the impact potential of student data on teacher practice, we talked with Tiana about what she did and what she learned in her close collaboration with participating teachers. All of her coaching moves, she said, were designed to create safe spaces of optimal learning for teachers.

Of the teachers who received formal coaching, 81% strongly agreed they had made permanent and substantive changes to their practice.

Establishing the relationship

NTC’s Tiana Pitts (right) working with Impact Florida

For those teachers who opted in, Tiana provided six hours of remote one-on-one coaching from February to June, focusing on four cycles of student surveys from the teacher’s classroom.

In her first interactions with teachers, Tiana said her priority was to create connections. “They don’t know me. We’re meeting virtually. I’m in North Carolina. They’re in Florida. So, it was critical for me to establish that relationship from day one, set a really solid foundation, to build that rapport and trust in order to have some tough conversations later. That first coaching session, I said, ‘we’re not looking at data; we’re talking to each other. Let’s talk about how your life is; let’s talk about how things are going.’ I asked them to tell me about their journey in education. ‘Where did you start? What made you decide to teach? Why are you still teaching? Why are you teaching at the school where you are now? Why did you choose this particular professional development opportunity? What are you looking for out of this experience?’ I also told them a little bit about myself, my background, that I was a math teacher, and I understood where they were coming from.”

“They don’t know me. We’re meeting virtually. I’m in North Carolina. They’re in Florida. So, it was critical for me to establish that relationship from day one, set a really solid foundation, to build that rapport and trust in order to have some tough conversations later.”

Taking a deep look at student feedback

The next thing Tiana did was ask each teacher to re-engage with the student data, understanding the competing priorities teachers are continuously juggling. I said to them: “I know that you probably have looked at your data, but you probably had interruptions because it was your planning period or you looked at it real quick after hours at home, so I want to take some of our time together to look at it with fresh eyes.’ We spent a good 10 minutes looking at it independently; my camera is off, their camera is off, to really ground us in the data before we talked about it.”

Spending that time to look at the student feedback in more than a cursory way, and in the context of having an immediate and immersive conversation about what the data meant and what to do about it, was what made the difference. One focus group teacher said: “I look through the survey, and I’m like, ‘Oh, oh, okay. I don’t know how I’m going to fix that.’ And then you have that hour with Tiana, and she’s like, ‘Well, wait a minute. It’s not really that bad … let’s work on this.’ She pointed out things that I would never have taken the time to look at, and it helped me tremendously.”

Spending that time to look at the student feedback in more than a cursory way, and in the context of having an immediate and immersive conversation about what the data meant and what to do about it, was what made the difference.

Starting with what’s working — Assets, not deficits

Another key step was to focus on what’s working. Tiana said she had to push teachers not to overlook data that indicated where they were already having positive impacts on the learning environment. “They’re math teachers; they want to solve problems. They’re going to go to the problems first. That’s just how our brains work. As a coach, I have to help them prioritize looking for the things that are going well. I have to push them. It’s part of building the rapport, but there’s also a lot of meaningful data there that they shouldn’t overlook. For example, if your results for ‘meaningful work’ are at 80%, that’s a good thing. Of course, we have to look at that 20%, but let’s start with the 80% —‘What do you think you’ve done to create that kind of environment for your students?’ That’s hard for them, first to stop and name what’s going well but also to identify what behaviors or actions might account for that, and that’s really important to know.”

Starting with what the teacher was doing right proved very meaningful for participants. It also modeled a critical stance of asset-based, learner-centered teaching. “I had a couple of teachers start crying. You can go into it with a deficit mindset of all the things you’re not doing right. Me reminding them of the things that are going well is good for their spirit. I had one teacher say, ‘thank you for pushing me to see that because I thought I was failing my kids.’ They’re hard on themselves, some of them are really hard on themselves, and I get to see all the data. So I say, ‘do you understand that two-thirds of your kids think that you care about them? That’s a good thing.’”

“I had a couple of teachers start crying. You can go into it with a deficit mindset of all the things you’re not doing right. Me reminding them of the things that are going well is good for their spirit. I had one teacher say, ‘thank you for pushing me to see that because I thought I was failing my kids.’”

Tiana asked teachers to identify what actions or behaviors they thought created these positive experiences. “We dig into it and write it down. We don’t just talk about it. We want them to keep doing that stuff while they are also focusing on where they want to improve. Unless you name that explicitly, those actions and strategies might get lost.”

“It’s only after that that we talk about what they want to focus on,” Tiana said. “And I want to point out that the language of that conversation is huge. It’s not, ‘where were results low; it’s, now what do you want to focus on?’”

From there, Tiana supported teachers to dig deeper into their data, encouraging them to look at even smaller differences that might illuminate how some aspect of their teaching practice could be changed. And the more teachers learned, the more they wanted to know. “What was so cool,” Tiana said, “was that the teachers’ mindsets were changing, and the kids were getting a different person. There was one teacher who was about to walk away from teaching after the pandemic. This experience totally turned her back around, rejuvenated her, because she connected with her kids on a different level.”

Coaching for collective impact

Impact Florida team members work with NTC’s impact team on design

In addition to supporting individual growth, coaching served as a conduit for teacher collaboration. To help teachers think about what they were doing well, Tiana appealed to their instincts to help other teachers for the collective good. “I tell them: ‘I need to know what you did so I can tell other teachers. That’s a part of coaching. We’re collaborating. I’m not sitting here telling you all the answers. I need to hear what you’re doing right because somebody else is struggling in this area and what you’ve learned could help them.’ Naming that I am learning from them in ways that could help other teachers continues to build that rapport and also appeals to their spirit of teamwork…. We’re all in this together.”

In focus groups, teachers also talked about the value of working with their peers across the cadre on similar problems of practice. “What can I do differently to build relationships with my kids? It’s really, really comforting knowing we all have the same issues…. It’s a common bond we all have…. [How can we] break that cycle as a group? What can we come up with?” Focus group teachers also expressed a desire to extend what they were learning in the cadre to influence change in their school and district culture. “I’m going to take the results and information and show them. Because we need to modify the culture of our school,” one teacher said.

This impulse toward collective action is just one example of the ripple effect we anticipate from this unique professional learning opportunity as Impact Florida continues experimenting and bringing the cadre approach to scale. “We’re already impacting students all over Florida,” said Tiana, and word is spreading quickly. Over 130 teachers applied for the 75 openings in a second expanded cadre experience offered in Fall 2022. And with 34 teachers from the original pilot applying to participate again, Impact Florida incorporated a school-based Professional Learning Community (PLC) focus into the design to extend the learning to other educators at cadre teachers’ schools. Staff reports that teachers from other subject areas want to join as well.

Our takeaways from our partnership with the Solving with Students Cadre are significant, with implications for how we think about involving students in the co-design of new models for coaching and teacher development. Creating safe yet challenging opportunities like the cadre experience — that prioritize student voice and encourage connection in the classroom — is where we need to focus our energies as we continue our work to reshape the future of teacher professional learning.

Your district has invested in a two-year effort to rewrite curriculum in alignment with new state standards. You’ve organized a string of professional learning sessions to get it into classrooms. You and your staff are consistently using your “look-for” tools in schools to see if teachers are implementing the strategies from the initiatives central to your improvement planning. You regularly do step-backs to monitor progress. You have a well-established mentoring program for your beginning teachers, and you are ramping up your coaching program around your belief that every teacher deserves a coach. And yet, you still aren’t seeing anywhere close to the results you were hoping for. What isn’t working? Are teachers not implementing the curriculum? Do they need more professional development? How can coaches help? Or, are teachers and coaches doing what you asked them to do, but it’s just not the right approach for their kids, and teachers don’t have the time and the space to figure out how to adjust?

At NTC, we work closely with our partners to examine and overcome impact challenges like these.

“One of the things we’re learning,” said NTC’s Senior Director of Impact Lisa Schmitt, “is that sometimes assumptions about what the issue is can get in the way. There are so many moving parts, so many inputs, that it’s hard to zero in on where the disconnects are. That makes it hard to design solutions that will have real impact.” In response, we’ve been working with partners to define the unique landscape for change at their sites as a starting place for designing programs — What is the current state of instruction? How would students characterize the learning environment? Where are the strengths? What are the school- and system-level enabling conditions that have to be in place to support success?

Landscape Analysis

To help partners answer some of these questions, NTC’s program staff uses a suite of customizable data collection tools and processes to guide “current state” analyses. The goal is to target optimal starting points for designing and implementing improvements. These tools can be used for audits, instructional reviews, or strategic planning conversations to help identify trends, gaps, and opportunities to design appropriate interventions. The toolset may include:

• teacher and student focus group protocols
• student surveys
• curriculum review rubrics
• student work sample analysis rubrics using NTC’s mentoring/coaching tools
• walk-throughs and observations using customized instructional practice guides and other rubrics aligned with specific teacher practice and/or student experience goals
• consultative support focused on family/community representation and inclusion in audit and review processes

“We also encourage partners to extend invitations for ‘learning walks’ to site leaders, administrators, and others to help get a much wider group than might be typical on the ‘same page’ about the instructional landscape,” Lisa said. Our NTC team then supports partners in strategic planning conversations first to analyze the data and then to articulate very targeted findings and trends as the launching point for designing or modifying an improvement strategy or coaching priority. “In addition to observations, we really encourage partners to gather student and teacher perspectives from focus groups and surveys and analyze student work samples to better inform their planning,” she said.

“We encourage partners to extend invitations for ‘learning walks’ to site leaders, administrators, and others to help get a much wider group than might be typical on the ‘same page’ about the instructional landscape.”

— Lisa Schmitt, Senior Director of Impact

Common 5+1

Another “impact by design” approach we’ve been piloting is based on program evaluation research that integrates Guskey’s five levels of evaluation of professional learning. This framework differentiates data collection and indicators of success according to stakeholder input, program type, and depth of engagement. We call it: Common 5+1.

Participants value the experience → Participants learn → Organizations support, or change to support, implementation → Participants transfer learning to practice → Students learn and thrive + Improvements are sustainable/Ecosystems become healthier

The Common 5+1 approach is aligned with our theory of change — professional support of educators leads to student learning through a logical sequence of events and supporting conditions. Lisa continued: “We especially like this quote from Guskey about the broader system supports — ‘Organizational dimensions … can sometimes hinder or prevent success, even when the individual aspects of professional development are done right.’ That’s one shift we are trying to encourage by expanding the data we collect and by getting partners to articulate what the supporting conditions need to be. This drives a greater level of collective responsibility and accountability for the success of a new approach. It also helps us codify enabling conditions.”

Both of these approaches to NTC impact measurement focus on more immediate, student-centered, and site-specific measures in the unique contexts of our partner sites. “So often we will take a research-based initiative, and our goal is to have an impact on student performance on state tests because that’s how the field tends to measure success. But we don’t take into account all the existing variables in the context for implementing the strategy, including starting places and potentially limiting conditions on the ground that you need to design and adapt for. Half the time, we don’t even know what those hidden challenges are,” Lisa said.

So, instead of prioritizing statistical models and test data over all else, we are elevating student-reported experience data, classroom observations, and other qualitative measures. We are working with our partners to gather site-specific baseline data and then support them to co-design solutions that reflect their goals and appropriate methods of measuring impact. In all of this work, including expanded groups of stakeholders is key to designing solutions that honor and value partner, community, and student realities, needs, and priorities. Our ultimate goal is to build capacity at our partner sites to identify gaps for data collection and system supports, engage in goal-setting and action-planning around very targeted and meaningful outcomes for teachers and students, and effectively use authentic data to design solutions that are organically easier to monitor internally.

“We are learning from our partnerships all over the country about how to do this better,” Lisa said. In Florida and Houston, our partners are using student feedback from surveys to design professional development. In Massachusetts, parents and community partners are providing input to help shape social studies curriculum. Our Tennessee Math partners used our data collection tools and Common 5+1 structure to design site-specific strategies around a shared goal to prioritize conceptual understanding in math instruction. In Osceola, our partners are using a landscape analysis to align professional development and coaching strategies to support curriculum implementation.

These are just a few of the reports we’re hearing from our program staff.

— “This has just been a really good opportunity for us to think, with our partner’s end goal in mind, about what needs to happen at each level of the Common 5+1 plan to make sure that we get there. This work is super adaptive. We are meeting folks where they are … and helping them think through some of those system shifts and structures that need to be in place to be successful.”

— “We’re doing a set of focus groups with teachers, coaches, mentors, and administrators. We are also doing some with students and parents. We’ve been thinking – why are we trying to solve problems for students and parents without asking students and parents what they need?”

The aim of NTC’s new impact agenda is to be better able to co-design impact plans with our partners that measure outcomes that are meaningful and aligned with district needs. Our ultimate goal is to build capacity at our partner sites to engage in sustainable, evidence-based, systems-level continuous improvement that makes a real difference in the learning experiences of those students it is our mission to serve.

Traditionally, when we think about coaching, we think about a conversation between adults. A coach or mentor sits down with a teacher to talk through the day-to-day work of teaching (planning, analyzing student work, and reflecting on classroom observations). But what if we think about instructional coaching as a three-way conversation — between students, their teachers, and the coaches who support them?

That’s what our partner, Houston ISD, is exploring, working with students to collect feedback on their learning experiences to support teachers as they develop their practice. NTC is pleased to collaborate in this effort to reimagine instructional coaching as a learner-centered design solution.

Starting small, learning fast

A small team consisting of NTC Senior Program Consultant Sharnice Jenkins-Gallant, HISD Academic Program Manager Vanessa Nieto-Gomez, a core group of HISD school support managers, and four case study coaches are co-designing the initiative, with coaches leading testing at the ground level. Participating coaches are experienced teachers who have completed NTC’s foundational and advanced coaching institutes and, in addition to teaching full time, support anywhere from one to three teachers at their home campuses.

To get started, the team developed a simple empathy interview protocol to collect student feedback as an entry point for coaching conversations. With their supported-teachers’ permission, case study coaches selected three students from their teachers’ classes for interviews that provided a broad demographic representation of the class.

To hear how the students were experiencing instruction, they asked:

• What does your teacher do to make you feel safe when you are engaging with others and with challenging assignments and lesson materials?
• What does your teacher do to make learning interesting and fun?
• What do you wish your teacher would do differently during their lessons?
• What has been most challenging this year? What could your teacher or school do to support you?

And here is a sampling of what they heard:

• We talk to our friends to look for answers
• He asks questions if I got it or not
• It’s fun when she uses interactive games
• She gives you a second chance
• She makes me feel safe because she is always in the classroom walking around
• She takes care of us
• She breaks it down in steps
• I need her to show a different way to solve
• Homework is piling up
• I would like for my teacher to give us more work for the students that are done early and not paying attention
• Have us talk more
• During a lesson it would be good to have less paperwork and also for us to have more time to finish the work
• I’m feeling crowded and rushed during transitions
• We could use more practice, more group work
• He stays on one side of class which makes it harder on the other side to hear

In reflecting on the empathy interviews, one coach shared that she was surprised by students’ willingness to provide feedback as she had anticipated that they might be hesitant. Instead, they jumped right in, she said, and were very comfortable doing so. Another coach saw how empowering just asking students’ questions about their experiences was. Another insight was the range of student perspectives on the same teacher’s practice, from “she always makes me feel safe” to “I feel like she’s picking on me.”

Powerful conversations

Coaches then used the feedback they gathered as an entry point for conversations with their teachers, reviewing student’s responses, celebrating what was working in their classrooms based on student feedback and discussing possible next steps to address needs that surfaced.  Using NTC’s Knowing Teachers conversation protocol as part of this process, coaches encouraged teachers to share and reflect on their own experiences, mindsets, beliefs, and aspirations to elevate teacher awareness about how they might be “showing up” in the classroom. Coaches also guided teachers through reflections on what they did and did not know about the students who had agreed to be interviewed using another coaching protocol called Knowing Students. 

Case study coaches described the benefit of investing this time up front in learning about their teachers and their students as “huge.” They also found that NTC’s flexible conversation protocols were “invaluable” in supporting the process. Vanessa said: “We looked back at the tools, and we saw that they already guide us toward these student-focused questions, but we often skipped that part.

Going forward, coaches and teachers are using this data to identify teaching practices, student actions, or classroom interactions to focus on for improvement. They will continue to return to the student input throughout a teaching and coaching cycle of planning and instructional delivery, analyzing student work, and observing/reflecting on a lesson or series of lessons together.

Throughout the process, Sharnice said, participating coaches and their teachers have had some truly “eye-opening” discoveries and powerful conversations about their practice. What’s even more exciting, according to Sharnice, is what happens next.

This fall, students will learn how to use an observation protocol for student-led “learning walks” to complete the feedback cycle, reporting on the changes they see in their teachers’ classrooms based on the input they provided. In this way, students become not just accountability partners but work in close proximity with coaches and teachers to ensure impact. “We will bring students directly back into the conversation,” said Sharnice. “We heard you say x, y, and z, and we tried this out. How did it go? What do you think? Are you seeing the changes you said were needed?”

“This pilot of teachers bringing young people in to co-design and co-create instruction is really exciting. It requires, encourages, a level of vulnerability for educators to tell their students, ‘I don’t have all the answers, and I want you to help me make this academic experience better for you.’”

Bringing student-led learning to scale

Throughout the co-design process with the Houston team, Sharnice said, “we are learners right alongside them.” After the joint training, the team works together to identify and customize new strategies for the HISD context and then articulate a concrete, deeply intentional plan for practicing and testing, gathering feedback from coaches, and refining and redesigning along the way.

It’s no secret that keeping new teachers in the profession can be hard and that the challenge is especially acute in special education as evidenced by chronic shortages in this high-need teaching area.

In this 2023 study on special education teacher turnover, Teach Plus researchers identified some of the big reasons teachers in special education leave the profession or move to general education positions. Despite their passion and commitment to the students they serve, special education teachers typically:

• are not adequately prepared in pre-service for the significant non-instructional parts of the job
• don’t receive effective mentorship and professional learning
• struggle with a workload that is unsustainable and harmful to their mental health
• receive inadequate support from school leaders who don’t have a clear understanding of their responsibilities and duties

As a leader in teacher induction, we’ve benefitted from working with dedicated partners at the local, state, and regional levels to learn from and better support new teachers in special education. And we’ve heard again and again that our mentoring model — our relationship-based, student-centered approach, our optimal learning environment framework, and our high-leverage tools — is uniquely aligned with what special education teachers need as they enter their profession.

As part of our Bright Spots & Big Ideas in Teacher Induction series, we’ve highlighted our partners’ incredible work in new teacher support, including Minnesota, one of several partner states that invests heavily in its new teachers. In addition to supporting the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a statewide induction pilot program, we are also currently providing technical assistance linked with state funding for regional and local initiatives that prioritize support to meet the unique needs of new special education teachers.

Our experience working with the state’s Southwest West Central Service Cooperative (SWWC) goes back to 2018 with SWWC special education coaches adapting NTC’s mentoring model and creating a playbook of NTC tools and strategies to support new special education teachers in this rural region of the state.

We talked with Jessica Robinson about her experience as an SWWC instructional coach for teachers providing special education services through the region’s Educational Learning Centers. She stressed that mentor support needs to take into account the realities and responsibilities, both instructional and non-instructional, across a variety of kinds of special education classrooms to meet an extremely wide range of student learning needs. This includes myriad practical and legal requirements.

Recognizing that no college class could adequately address many of these challenges, Jess described the pressure these beginning educators face as being “brand new and needing to be completely on their game.” That’s where NTC’s approach to mentoring and support comes in.

Jess shared the following insights from her work adapting our model to meet the needs of new special education teachers.

1. Establishing relationships with students

NTC tools and conversation protocols help mentors prioritize the need for special education teachers to establish affirming relationships first and foremost with their students. “It’s important to not just go right to that academic piece, to take the time to get to know each student, to build that rapport,” Jess said. Emphasis on building trust with each student is important because so many students in special education have struggled for years, experiencing in some cases, what Jess characterized as “broken relationships” with multiple teachers. She added, “it can take a lot of healing for some students to be open to learning.”

The range of student needs in any one class is also daunting, especially for a new teacher. “Special education classrooms can be a little like a one-room schoolhouse. Students have such individual needs, and yet you’re trying to do some large group instruction, some small group instruction, some individual instruction, just to make sure that they get all those needs met. There isn’t any typical cookie cutter student that comes through, … you have to know them,” she said. She also stressed that a critical mindset to have from the “get-go” is to “presume competence,” communicating high expectations and confidence in the student’s capacity to learn.

2. Using a life-skills approach to classroom management

Behavioral challenges can complicate relationship building in special education classrooms. “If you can’t communicate in a traditional way, you resort to another way, and that’s behavior, to get your needs met,” Jess said. “Nobody can prepare you in college for what that reality is, so we spend a lot of time on classroom management, de-escalation techniques, how to respond, reinforcing the behaviors that we want to see.”

Jess says that coaching using NTC’s optimal learning environment framework is another way to minimize behavioral barriers to learning, including focusing on:

• supported risk-taking
• safe and engaged interactions/co-created procedures, routines, classroom design
• developmentally appropriate strategies for expression of emotions and conflict resolution
• learner variability
• multiple pathways to learn and demonstrate
• learner agency

3. Working with other adults in the classroom

Depending on the type of classroom, new special education teachers will likely be working with multiple paraprofessionals and service providers, including physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, behavioral analysts, social workers, and school counselors. Jess shared how having that much expertise in the room can be both daunting and a relief for a beginning teacher. “You’re a brand new teacher, and you’re like, ‘I want all the opinions. Tell me what I need to know.’ But it can also be hard to discern what to prioritize for a particular student, especially if they have different opinions. You’re trying to weave together all of these suggestions to develop a cohesive plan for that student. The new teacher is one member of a team with a lot of working parts.”

In her work with new special education teachers, Jess has helped teachers learn how to use NTC coaching methodologies and tools with some of the other adults they work with. “That might involve working with a paraprofessional using data to link a practice to observed outcomes for kids — ‘when we do this, if we change our prompting hierarchy, or if we do a preference assessment, or we find this reinforcer, this is what happens to our data.’ Adult coaching skills help new teachers build confidence in navigating those situations, especially if they’re younger and brand new and in the room with people who, perhaps, have been there longer,” she said.

4. Seeing the paperwork through a different lens

The paperwork special education teachers have to complete can be overwhelming, and not just at first; it continues to be a big lift. As a coach, Jess said she tries to steer away from telling teachers how to complete the Individualized Education Program (IEP) and other paperwork. “We want the coaching to be centered around building relationships with students, lesson development, data analysis, pre-observation conversations, and the feedback from observations, really using teaching and coaching tools as they are intended. Of course, the documentation informs instructional decisions, but, ultimately, we try to stay focused on using those pedagogical practices to make sure we have good outcomes for kids. And what we often find is that what we surface with instructional coaching is aligned with the information you need to complete your paperwork. It’s not something extra.”

Jess said that when she first starts working with a teacher, she might start with the Knowing Students tool, being very intentional about the questions she asks and supporting the teacher to access due process paperwork to find information as they are shaping a profile of the student. Eventually, teachers realize they can cut and paste the information they need for their paperwork from what they’ve gathered through Knowing Students and other NTC tools. More importantly, she said, teachers realize, “okay, what I get from this tool is far more fleshed out than what I need to meet federal requirements. That’s when they start to realize what we mean when we talk about knowing our students. It’s about being intentional. How are we going to address learning diversity? How can we create optimal learning environments?”

5. Aligning standards and IEP goals

Jess described the struggle many special education teachers have in approaching teaching standards. She said that while special ed teachers are aware of teaching standards, they are also wrangling with IEP goals, assessing students, developing programming, and documenting student progress. As a coach, she focuses on how to tie an IEP goal to a teaching standard. She often employs NTC’s Planning Conversation Guide, using the IEP goal as the teaching standard but following the same process to identify benchmarks for getting closer to grade level.

She also shared how she uses the Analyzing Student Learning (ASL) tool, designed to target a specific teaching standard over a short series of lessons. “In the special education world, a student may require 100 opportunities to learn a concept (compared to a child who may only require exposure to a new concept a dozen times or less). Students in special education programming may need a month or even an entire quarter to make observable progress on an objective or benchmark. Tracking these goals over time using the ASL allows special education teachers to observe small units of progress,” she said.

As Minnesota continues to prioritize the needs of beginning special education teachers in its statewide induction programming, we are so grateful for the opportunity to work with coaches like Jess and our partners in SWWC, MDE, and the state’s other regional cooperatives, schools, and districts.