Coaching & Supervision

The world’s best athletes have some things in common with our teachers and therapists.  They have zeal to succeed, they are highly talented, and they are coached to get even better.

Coaching is essential
We regard coaching of our professionals and paraprofessionals in the fundamental research validated teaching methods as essential to their consistently effective and efficient instruction.  The research literature has taught us what educational methods to implement, but actually doing them requires considerable practice, a strong desire to improve, and the willingness to have others provide constructive feedback.  At TIEE’s schools, we expect all of our direct-service personnel to be eager learners who accept feedback in their effort to improve.  In turn, we organize coaching and feedback sessions so that they are positive experiences, both for the coach/supervisor and for the staff member receiving feedback.

Coaches “walk the talk”
Coaching is conducted by personnel who are able to detect errors in instruction and who can demonstrate precisely how to perform the methods correctly.  Our coaches can jump right in to an ongoing lesson in order to demonstrate how to do it if that is needed.  In addition to such side-by-side coaching, however, we also implement many video observations, which permit multiple opportunities to observe both correct and incorrect implementation of specific teaching methods.  Video also permits individuals to learn to evaluate themselves, and, when they do, a kind of coaching efficiency is obtained.  However the coaching is done, successful coaching includes clear descriptions of what the teacher has done well in addition to a clear description or model of what the teacher needs to improve.  For beginning teachers, the coach must recommend improvement on no more than one or two skills and those chosen will be among the fundamental evidence-based methods.

Selecting teacher behaviors for improvement
At TIEE, we focus attention of our coaches on the fundamental methods of effective and efficient teaching in two ways.  First, we have a system of evaluating professionals and paraprofessionals that identifies over one hundred skills we care about, of which roughly thirty pertain directly to teaching methods.  How to reinforce desirable student behavior, how to obtain high rates of student responding, how to prompt new student behaviors, and so on are among these teaching skills.  Secondly, we have developed and use an Instruction Observation Form that permits coding of specific teacher behaviors during lessons.  Based on five to fifteen minute observations of actual teaching, the codes permit calculating such critical teaching methods as the rate of student responses, the proportion of responses that were group responses compared to individual responses, the proportion of responses that were correct, the proportion of positive consequences to negative consequences delivered by the teacher, and so on.