A new program at Franklin schools will help teachers improve their lessons, deal with behavioral issues and achieve their goals, all with a focus on helping students.
The school district expanded its instructional coaching program this year from one coach to eight — with one coach in each school — who work with teachers to help them better reach their students.
The goal is to increase overall student achievement, said Deb Brown-Nally, executive director of curriculum and instruction.
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“We want to help them hone in on their instructional skills,” she said. “We’ll help teachers set goals and select strategies to help student growth.”
Instructional coaches work with teachers to help improve their lesson plans, set goals and assist with certain problems they face in the classroom. The program is one schools across the county and state use to help their teachers improve and better meet students’ needs.
For example, one key area that teachers have asked for help in the past was with developing writing skills and engagement. Denise Rodenhuis, who has been an instructional coach for five years with 30 years of education experience, has an activity where students must take on the persona of an author to further understand the meaning of their work.
“Teachers appreciate the fact that I’m a different voice in the classroom,” Rodenhuis said.
Franklin schools previously had only one instructional coach. Rodenhuis played a role in selecting the new coaches, all of which were teachers at Franklin schools, she said.
“We knew we needed to hire the best of the best,” she said. “And we knew we had the best of the best in our classrooms already.”
Now Rodenhuis is the coach of the coaches, she said. She will assist the new instructional coaches with problems and ideas, but will also continue to help out in classrooms as needed, she said.
Anne Wilson, the instructional coach at Franklin Community Middle School, said her goal is to make an impact. That was one of the key ideas she took from a five-day training program at an instructional coaching institute that all the instructional coaches attended.
“I can make an impact on teachers through my coaching, and hopefully teachers can impact their students,” Wilson said.
Coaches will help improve lesson plans or with behavioral, academic or engagement problems. Wilson uses three steps in her coaching: identify a problem, learn how to fix the problem by setting a goal and then improve the problem.
“We want to help teachers engage, excite and empower,” Wilson said. “If we can get students to feel this, then we can really make learning a lot of fun.”
They will focus on working with new teachers at the beginning of the year, but Wilson also hopes to work with veteran teachers, she said.
“As an educator, you want to get better,” Wilson said.
The expansion of the program is being paid for with federal funds that provide financial assistance to schools for extra instructional services, Brown-Nally said.
