Teachers Teaching Teachers, February 2006, Vol. 1, No. 5
Role: Curriculum specialist
School-based coaches tackle a range of challenging tasks when they play the role of the curriculum specialist. They assist teachers in understanding and aligning the curriculum, they help to identify and interpret standards, they explore what to assess. Such a range of tasks is daunting and becomes more so when you consider that coaches often have to be curriculum specialists across disciplines and grade levels.
Read more about the curriculum specialist role and step into one coach's curriculum shoes in this article.
By Joellen Killion , Cynthia Harrison
NSDC profile: Christy Christian: Reading coach greets her new class -- of adults
Christy Christian views coaching as a "non-threatening staff development strategy." Coaches work one-on-one with teachers; meanwhile, teachers become more trusting and can ask for the guidance they need. Christian is in her second year as a reading coach in the high-performing Mountain Brook school district in suburban Birmingham, Alabama. "Working with adults is different. What helped me was starting to look at the teachers as my new class."
Learn more about Christian's journey as a coach in this month's profile.
By Joan Richardson
Focus on the NSDC standards: Students learn when the teacher knows
When coaches focus on quality teaching, they get to the core of a teacher's work -- content knowledge, instructional practice, and meaningful assessment.Explore the coach's role in helping teachers to reach this standard. In addition to detailing key aspects of the standard, Killion shares an experience that showed her the influence of a teacher's knowledge on what students learn.
By Joellen Killion
NSDC tool: Four-step reflection process
An essential component of learning is reflection. Use this tool with teachers to debrief a lesson they taught, or encourage teachers to write answers to the questions in a journal.
