TOUCHSTONE 11: I coach students to mastery.
Explanation
Athletics is an amazing reflection of education, superb coaching takes poor athletes to average athletes, average athletes to good athletes and good athletes to great athletes. Every coach worth his weight in salt abides by; good is the enemy of great, this is a fabulous synopsis for touchstone eleven coaching students to mastery. Good coaches understand that we should observe the best at their craft and model those skills and behaviors. Athletes as well emulate those at the top of their field to improve. It is in our nature as humans to learn from the best, this concept translates to the classroom too. Students want to learn and achieve mastery level from teachers they consider master of their content. Master teachers frequently use formative assessments to make sure students are understanding content. These formative assessment strategies can be reciprocal questioning, allowing students to talk, technology such as clickers or web polls, exit tickets and the use of homework. Educators also set time for deliberate and observable individual practice with great positive feedback. This practice is only beneficial when teachers set clear purpose and direction for the practice allowing for various types of knowledge retrieval for students. Allowing for cooperative learning, class discussions and various types of non-graded practice. To push students to that mastery level, educators have to be humble when their tried and true methods might fail a certain type of learner. We need to re-evaluate and re-teach if our first approach fails to produce results. Taking on student failures as our own failure keeps us humble. We should be thirsty for professional development, journal our success and failures, find the holes in our teaching and ask for specific coaching. We should reach out to colleagues down the hall for advice and observes others that are masters in our field. Educators should mirror themselves to the greats and view themselves as educational coaches, you can bet the great John Wooden even set in a few coaching clinics taking notes and implementing ideas on how to improve his craft.
Application
In the application of touchstone eleven, a multitude of strategies were used to breakdown the standards in small chunk lessons that could be digested in small forms. From the journaling exercises on the importance of goal setting, to the athletic self-inventory, to the goal pyramid project, to the worksheet on breaking down a goal and finally to the forming of a personal athletic goal for the season complete with short-term goal action steps. Students also had an opportunity to showcase mastery with individualized feedback by challenging teammates to purposefully help in establishing team goals. Once more these students got to act as the coach, by helping teammates whom have not went through this course set individualized goals. The data exhibits from the pre-test to the post test that the students that entered this unit had very limited fundamentals on proper goal setting, but left with what I consider mastery level and exponential growth within the subject matter. Below is a data triangle that represents that level of growth. On the left side of the triangle is pre-test results with the majority of students in the approached and partially met categories, on the right side is the post-assessment showing the vast majority of students reaching the meets or exceeds portion of the triangle. This data triangle is a great visual representation educators can use to highlight possible pitfalls in a lesson using state assessment data, as well as indicators of achievement and growth in local summative assessments.
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