📬 Stay in the loop Join educators getting weekly insights on AI, co-teaching, and instructional leadership. Subscribe “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong (1969) The Mission Control Mindset Picture a professional development session where teachers design instruction the way NASA engineers design a mission. The stakes areContinueContinue reading “From the Moon to the Mind: How Space Exploration Illuminates Learning”
Tag Archives: learning
Holding Two Truths: Education, Evidence, and Fatherhood
As I prepare to become a father, my view of education is shifting. What will I hold onto and what will change when learning becomes personal? A reflection on time, empathy, evidence, and raising a learner in a complex system.
From the Sidelines to the Shoulder: Using Co-Teaching as the Engine for Instructional Coaching
The Gradual Release of Responsibility (“I do, We do, You do”) is a powerful framework for instructional coaching, and it can be delivered directly through co-teaching strategies. Instead of a coach modeling and then simply observing, the crucial “We do” phase becomes a hands-on, collaborative partnership. This post explores how to use specific co-teaching models as the bridge from “I do” to “You do.” I share a single-session example of supporting a teacher with multilingual learners, moving from my “I do” (model) to our “We do” (“Team Teaching”) and finally to their “You do” (with me in a “One Teach, One Support” role), all within a single lesson.
EdTech Leadership in the Age of AI: What Matters Most When Everything is Changing
My coffee is still warm when the first alert comes in. A teacher cannot access Canvas, and their students are stuck at the login screen. I walk the teacher through the SSO steps, confirm access, and move on. By midmorning, I have visited classrooms, supported teachers with technology integration, and observed lessons to plan follow-up coaching. After that, I sit with our engineers to review system performance, troubleshoot issues, and test several EdTech tools and updates planned for release.
At two o’clock, there are three messages on LinkedIn about a new AI tool that promises to transform learning. I scan one, note the potential and the hype, and return to the work I already committed to do. The afternoon goes to email, planning professional learning, and reviewing the week ahead.
Sound familiar?
For many of us in EdTech and instructional leadership, this mix of strategic and immediate work is the norm. Some hours go to multi-year plans, budgets, and compliance. Others are dedicated to making sure one specific app works for one teacher so students can keep learning. The pace makes it easy to lose focus when the day is packed and many things are going on simultaneously. I return to a single question: how do people learn, and how can instruction and technology work together to support that? If we cannot answer that question, systems, budgets, and tools will have little impact.
This post shares how I connect what we know about learning with the daily realities of leading technology and instructional change in schools. I will describe several major themes and then provide a summary of the next steps to help you further reflect upon your leadership and programs.
Instructional Coaches Need to Know How Memory Works – And It’s Not a Muscle
I often hear memory described as a muscle—something that gets stronger the more you “work it out.” While the sentiment is well-intentioned, it’s a misleading metaphor. Our memory isn’t a single entity that we can simply beef up through brute force. It’s a complex system, and for instructional coaches, understanding its nuances is a game-changer for helping teachers truly embed new and refined strategies into their practice as well as teach the teachers we are coaching how learning happens.
Scaling Instructional Coaching: Overcoming Key Challenges
📬 Stay in the loop Join educators getting weekly insights on AI, co-teaching, and instructional leadership. Subscribe While the evidence for instructional coaching’s effectiveness is compelling, translating this potential into widespread impact presents significant challenges, particularly when attempting to scale programs across schools or districts. A primary concern, identified by Kraft et al. (2018), isContinueContinue reading “Scaling Instructional Coaching: Overcoming Key Challenges”
The Power of Rehearsal: The Most Overlooked Step in Instructional Coaching
Instructional coaching is a powerful tool for transforming teaching and learning, but one of its most underutilized strategies within instructional coaching is lesson rehearsal by the teaching being coached—a safe, structured opportunity for teachers to practice new instructional strategies before implementing them in the classroom. Check out how this critical element of instructional coaching can be implemented and be apart of your coaching toolkit and practice.
Instructional Coaching Through Co-Teaching
Co-teaching isn’t an abstract concept for instructional coaching—it’s the practical reality that can be done to amplify your instructional coaching program.
Transform Your Instructional and EdTech Coaching with I Do, We Do, & You Do
Instructional coaching plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between innovative tools and effective classroom implementation. One proven strategy that involves rehearsal within instructional coaching is the I Do, We Do, & You Do!
Proving Our Impact: How Instructional Coaches Can Use Regression Analysis to Demonstrate Their Value
📬 Stay in the loop Join educators getting weekly insights on AI, co-teaching, and instructional leadership. Subscribe Recently, my PLN colleague Roxi Thompson posed some compelling questions on LinkedIn: How do you collect data to demonstrate the impact of your coaching program? What methods have you found effective, especially in showing improvement in areas likeContinueContinue reading “Proving Our Impact: How Instructional Coaches Can Use Regression Analysis to Demonstrate Their Value”