Eagle Rock and Student-Centered Coaching

The Professional Development staff here at Eagle Rock are organizational school change consultants who work with schools, school districts, and youth service organizations to create healthy, high-functioning learning environments in order to improve student achievement.

Recently, the team took on an instructional improvement tool here on campus called Student-Centered Coaching (SCC), which has more of an impact on students than Teacher-Centered Coaching or Relationship-Driven Coaching.

The sequence of this SCC cycle includes the “tuning” of a lesson plan with the instructor. When we tune a lesson plan we generally have two basic aims: a learning target, and a set of activities sequenced in a way that will help students meet that learning target.

The objective is to give and receive feedback from colleagues about the degree to which the activities seem likely to get students to the learning target. The plan is “in tune” when the learning target and the activities are most in alignment.

While observing the lesson, peers then analyze student work against the learning targets. We debrief those observations with the instructor, with an eye toward continuous improvement.

With collaboration between our Professional Development Critical Friends Group and the Professional Development staff, our focus on Student-Centered Coaching provides our instructional specialists and Public Allies Teaching Fellows with the tools and practices they need to ensure that coaching impacts teaching practice and student learning.

Student-Centered Coaching introduces a new way of looking at and delivering Eagle Rock-based coaching that puts student-learning front-and-center. By focusing coaching on specific student learning targets rather than on changing or fixing teachers, our peer coaches and Professional Development team can navigate directly toward a measurable impact and increased student achievement.