Coaching in Schools: Using Data to Clearly Communicate Your Work to Others

Brainstorming

After about six months of brainstorming and categorizing, we then moved on to defining each of the categories.  We went anywhere from fifteen all the way down to two categories. Those two happened to be “people facing” and “behind the scenes.”  This was a bit too broad.  We ended up settling on the following categories:

1. (CDI) Curriculum Development and Implementation: Engage in designing of learning experiences that facilitate the meaningful and authentic integration of the following:
2. (CPT) Computational Thinking: Problem-solving methods that often, but not always, involve computing, coding and robotics
3. (DEN) Design and Engineering: Creative processes to identify and solve a problem through the development of solutions
4. (DGL) Digital Literacy: Ability to navigate in a digital world
5. (PFL) Professional Learning: Preparing our staff through learning opportunities that expose them to new teaching approaches
6. (DTL) Data and Logistics: Organizing and making sense of the information we collect to help guide instruction; ensuring our devices, software, subscriptions, testing environments, and networks are functioning as expected
7. (PLC) Professional Learning Community: Working collaboratively with grade level colleagues to plan, prepare, and reflect on best educational practices

Tracking

Now that we had decided what we did, we had to come up with a way to capture it.  We wanted to know exactly what percentage of our time we were spending in each of these key areas.  We needed a system for this.  Each of us had Google calendars that we scheduled some events with teachers and classes. 

We decided to be more deliberate with our work and schedule everything.  In addition to scheduling, we would also tag each event in our calendars.  If we were in a PLC meeting, we would be sure to add the tag “PLC” to the event.  If we were working on robotics with a class, we would tag it as “CPT” for computational thinking.

Through the use of some spreadsheet magic and an API script, I was able to create a system that collected all of the calendar events from each of the four people in the office on a monthly basis.  The events were added to a spreadsheet which calculated the time spent in each category for each person as well as an overall team average.  Once the data was collected, it was just a matter of visualizing the information for the team and for others.