Using SchoolMint Grow for Teacher Coaching in Your School

Take teacher coaching in your school from vision to reality with SchoolMint Grow.

You set a vision for teacher coaching in your school. You and your leadership team set goals and teacher coaching standards, designed teacher coaching forms, and communicated to teachers that coaching would be frequent and growth-oriented…

And then the chaos of the school year hit and never quite stopped.

In a school, there’s a new fire to put out every day (sometimes every hour). Days evaporate as everyone deals with last-minute meetings, urgent messages from parents, and fire drills both literal and metaphorical. Sometimes, teacher coaching must shift to the back burner.

Decisions to adjust and re-prioritize teachers’ coaching plans are often made on the fly, but weeks and even months can pass without classroom observations or feedback meetings.

It’s easy for a school to get off track and for a well-meaning principal to find themselves losing sleep over seemingly impossible-to-answer questions:

• How do I deliver meaningful coaching for teachers in my school when I’m pulled in 100 directions by 11:00 AM?
• How can I energize and engage my leadership team around teacher coaching and keep everyone updated on how we’re doing?
• We just got our interim results back and need to kick it into high gear. How do I ensure my team is coaching on our new instructional priorities and maximizing the time spent with teachers?

How Do I Get My Teachers Better Faster?

To answer these questions, thousands of schools have shifted from stodgy, annual performance evaluations to high-frequency teacher coaching models that increase the number of feedback touch points a teacher receives throughout the year.

Rather than giving teachers a list of strengths and weaknesses at the end of a school year, school leaders now spend 10–15 minutes in classrooms on a weekly basis, observing for one high-leverage step a teacher can take to improve their practice.

With this type of teacher coaching model, leaders and teachers meet to debrief the observation and collaboratively set an action step for growth.

Teacher coaching makes teachers engaged and energized because they are constantly growing and supported, keeping leaders tied to what’s happening in their classrooms.

Square Peg, Round Hole: Spreadsheets Don’t Work for Coaching

Schools getting started with coaching often try to manage the process by using spreadsheets but quickly run into problems:

• Managing multiple spreadsheets for anything more than a handful of teachers is unwieldy and oh-so impractical by week two.
• Tracking classroom observation notes, feedback, and action steps for 40 weeks’ worth of teacher coaching is cumbersome at best.
• Spreadsheets don’t provide an easy way to give ongoing feedback.
• There’s no way to capture time-stamped notes.

Evaluation Platforms Don’t Make it Easy to Track Teacher Coaching

Some schools use spreadsheets. And other schools swing far in the opposite way, choosing outdated, clunky teacher evaluation platforms that were made for scoring rubrics and printing reports once a year.

With these platforms, it’s nearly impossible to capture action steps, track classroom observation frequency, or analyze trends in the frequent feedback your team gives teachers.

But a platform built for schools and ease of use makes everything possible.

SchoolMint Grow was built with school leaders in mind to make it easy to manage teacher coaching. SchoolMint Grow is an intuitive, easy-to-use platform that:

• Gives schools one home for everything related to classroom observation, feedback, and coaching meetings (and evaluation).
• Lets leaders see real-time data on observation frequency, action steps, and teacher coaching trends, in addition to standard evaluation reports.
• Engages teachers and leaders by enabling them to see how their work during coaching sessions is moving the needle forward.
• Lets you quickly and seamlessly share vital feedback with teachers and share the right data with the right people at the right time.

Why SchoolMint Grow?

SchoolMint Grow was born out of necessity from a school team who needed a better way to track teacher coaching.

For more than 10 years, principals across the country have loved using SchoolMint Grow for teacher coaching because it was built with them in mind:

• Intuitive and easy to use. One digital home for teacher coaching lets you quit fighting with spreadsheets and chasing down feedback in email chains.
• Built-in teacher coaching best practices structure your team’s work around proven teacher coaching strategies.
• Flexible and customizable: SchoolMint knows every school is different. That’s why we made it easy to customize SchoolMint Grow with your school’s unique teacher coaching process.
• Teacher coaching analytics let you measure teacher growth with more than just numbers.
• Seamless sharing lets you send feedback to teachers with the click of a button.

Ready to see SchoolMint Grow in action for yourself?

Request a free demo here, and we’ll get you set up with one of our friendly teacher coaching experts!