Throughout this course, I realized that coaching needs lots of time and effort from both parties. During my coaching experience, I ran into many problems. The person I was coaching became ill, and missed several weeks of school. I did have a backup plan, another colleague, but I was already halfway through the semester, and starting over would be difficult. I contributed working with the teacher, mainly because she wanted me to continue coaching her, I made the adjustments and did. I felt that with the time I spent with her, not much was accomplished. More time was needed in order for us to show success in our plan.
As far as growth, I feel that I have demonstrated great growth in the area of coaching. This was my first experience as an official coach to another colleague. One of my leadership strengths are building relationships and winning others over, they came in handy when it came to coaching. I easily made a connection with the teacher I coached, which made it much easier to give appropriate feedback. Even though my coaching experience was rushed, and more time is needed, the relationship part of coaching was strengthened through this experience. I also learned that listening was a weakness of mine. While coaching, I assumed I knew what my peer was wanting me to coach her in when she stated that she wanted me to coach her in creating electronic portfolios with her students, and tried to show her a program that she had no desire to learn, then stated that she already shared with me that she only wanted to use a certain program. I put in work on locating information for her that she had no desire to use and kind of wasted my time.
Based on time, I feel that my on-going development will be to work on timing and planning an agenda for coaching. Creating a timeline would help me and my peer stay on pace and maximize our time. We maximized the time we did have together, but it wasn’t as much time as we needed to be successful. Coaching with this teacher is continuing even though the course work is complete. I am going to continue to refer to Knight’s book about coaching when meeting with the teachers that I coach. Knight’s text is a great reference for coaching, and the information that I used in his text have worked.
As far as growth, I feel that I have demonstrated great growth in the area of coaching. This was my first experience as an official coach to another colleague. One of my leadership strengths are building relationships and winning others over, they came in handy when it came to coaching. I easily made a connection with the teacher I coached, which made it much easier to give appropriate feedback. Even though my coaching experience was rushed, and more time is needed, the relationship part of coaching was strengthened through this experience. I also learned that listening was a weakness of mine. While coaching, I assumed I knew what my peer was wanting me to coach her in when she stated that she wanted me to coach her in creating electronic portfolios with her students, and tried to show her a program that she had no desire to learn, then stated that she already shared with me that she only wanted to use a certain program. I put in work on locating information for her that she had no desire to use and kind of wasted my time.
Based on time, I feel that my on-going development will be to work on timing and planning an agenda for coaching. Creating a timeline would help me and my peer stay on pace and maximize our time. We maximized the time we did have together, but it wasn’t as much time as we needed to be successful. Coaching with this teacher is continuing even though the course work is complete. I am going to continue to refer to Knight’s book about coaching when meeting with the teachers that I coach. Knight’s text is a great reference for coaching, and the information that I used in his text have worked.