The Bank Street Education Center partners with schools and districts across the country to help improve teaching and learning at scale. This October, the team released “Coaching: How a Focus on Adult Development Leads to Improvements in Student Learning” to provide district leaders with a closer look at what meaningful teaching and learning looks like for both adults and children.
The new four-part publication documents the professional learning processes, tools, and activities used by the Education Center in their coaching work with school districts across the country, including a large-scale partnership with the New York City Department of Education’s Pre-K for All initiative.
“This new snapshot provides educators and leaders with a closer look at how Bank Street Education Center coaches work to develop the capacity of teachers and leaders and brings to life what strengths-based, developmentally meaningful, and rigorous teaching and learning looks like for both children and adults,” said Jessica Charles, Director of Scholarship on Educator Practice, co-author of the publication along with Milenis Gonzalez, Project Director of the Pre-K Explore team at the Bank Street Education Center, and Emily Sharrock, Deputy Executive Director of Strategy & Systems at the Bank Street Education Center.
“The Education Center’s approach to coaching fuses a deep understanding of child development with careful observation of children and the design of learning experiences that include intentional, responsive teaching,” said Gonzalez. “Through our partnerships, we help educators build their knowledge of human development, sharpen their focus on individual students, and incorporate reflective teacher practices into their work to help shift student learning outcomes.”
“Coaching: How a Focus on Adult Development Leads to Improvements in Student Learning” includes four components:
- Coaching Adults to Improve Student Learning: Explores our reflective three-step coaching cycle and its stance, which is deeply rooted in Bank Street’s beliefs about the developmental-interaction approach, which recognizes that all individuals learn best when they are actively engaged with materials, ideas, and people.
- Professional Supports for Bank Street Coaches: Shows how coaches benefit from a lead coach who models reflective supervision and other professional supports.
- Professional Development Coaching Activities: Provides the protocol for case study activities that help coaching teams to work through problems of practice with coaches.
- Coach Formative Assessment Tool (FAST): Details what high-quality coaching looks like across multiple domains as an aid for building the capacity of coaches.
“Each of our coaching partnerships are tailored to meet the individual strengths and goals of program partners, but our adult learning approach always remains constant: our coaches draw from the Bank Street tradition of developmental-interaction and forward the center’s core principles of supporting large-scale instructional change to promote equitable teaching and learning for all,” said Sharrock.
Robin Hummel, Program Director in Math Leadership at the Bank Street Graduate School of Education, is looking to incorporate these examples of a Bank Street approach in action into the Math Leadership program. “We’re deeply focused on adult learning and I’m eager to explore these resources, including the FAST tool, as an additional way to ground our reflections about what good coaching looks like in practice.”
Click here to view “Coaching: How a Focus on Adult Development Leads to Improvements in Student Learning.”