What is coaching all about?

As the science coach for Kindergarten and First Grade, my goal is to help teachers learn best practices for teaching science to our future scientists. For the most part, that entails having meetings to discuss the standards, curriculum, look at student work, and discuss ways to teach in an inquiry classroom. For many teachers in the primary grades, they are still learning how to write and teach lessons in the 5 E model . Some times we forget that teachers are just like our students - they learn from modeling. This week I spent Tuesday in 5 Kindergarten classes teaching a lesson from their pumpkin unit. Hopefully, spending time modeling one lesson will increase the time and passion that each one of them spends in science instruction. Hopefully, they are able to vizualize exactly what some parts of the 5E model look and sound like. Hopefully, I made a difference for not just one teacher, but 5 teachers. That is what coaching is all about!