Coaches Hone Their Teaching Skills
New York, NY, February 17, 2011 – Hidden Sparks coaches gathered for a day of professional training at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, February 16, 2011. Coaches participated in a series of workshops and study sessions focusing on strategies designed to hone their skills and strengthen their ability to teach struggling learners and to guide teachers who work with the students.
Hidden Sparks educational experts, Esther Kramer, Claire Wurtzel, Rona Novick, Ph.D., and Karen Kruger, opened the daylong retreat with workshops centered on classroom observations, workshops on the processes of observation, description, and reflection. Using students learning profiles of strengths and weaknesses to study how learning works, Esther Kramer, Hidden Sparks Internal Coach Program, Coordinator and mentor, set out basic guidelines for understanding mental representation, involving language, memory, attention, sequencing, and social cognition.
By looking more deeply into the processes by which by which we all learn and communicate, teachers gain valuable knowledge about children’s coping strategies and learning patterns. Esther sparked heated dialogue and a valuable exchange of ideas, enabling coaches to gain new insights on how children learn.
Moving from neurodevelopment to conversations about students, Rona Novick, Ph.D., Co-Educational Director, Hidden Sparks, began her workshop sessions with specific questions: “What do you pay attention to in your classroom? How do you give instructions? How do you talk about your students? And, how do we characterize students as we talk about them? ”
To encourage reflection about how teachers talk about struggling learners, Rona invited coaches to listen to themselves, to ‘hear’ what they say both to their students and in conversations about their students. Her objective was clear: to move the conversation to a different new level and to elevate the language so that it is more descriptive, substantive and meaningful.
Claire Wurtzel, Hidden Sparks Co-Educational Director and teacher extraordinaire, worked with coaches on observing students with a variety of learning challenges.
“Describe what you see,” Claire asked the coaches. Through careful observation and descriptions of the observations coaches/ teachers understand students better and the description drives the strategies to be used to support the student.
The afternoon was devoted to case studies, which examined specific learning issues in depth. Particular emphasis was placed on moving beyond traditional methodologies and looking at struggling learners through alternative lenses. Closing the day, coaches discussed strategies for using Hidden Sparks Without Walls webinars in their individual schools as a way of promoting cooperative learning and collaboration.
Debbie Niderberg, Executive Director, Hidden Sparks, in her reflections about the Coaches Retreat said, “We feel that these opportunities for continued professional growth for our coaches and the teachers who have been trained as internal coaches are so important. We are dedicated to providing mentors and educational leaders of the highest caliber. By reinforcing and strengthening the skills of our coaches, who are in the schools working with teachers every week, we are increasing the immediate and long term benefits for multiple teachers and students. The retreats and monthly meetings provide that platform.”
View photos from the 2011 Coach Retreat.
By Marcia P. Neeley for Hidden Sparks
