Coaching
Newton Education Solutions
Our onsite and virtual consulting model focuses on customized approaches and responses to address each school’s specific, individualized needs. After an initial overview of a school’s math environment, practices, resources and policies, our consultant will work with school teams to create a targeted action plan focused on the school’s current needs and goals. We work with you to help teachers and coaches create spaces and places for the teaching and learning of mathematics by:
- providing onsite and virtual professional development that targets specific areas of need in the school
- addressing the gaps, misunderstandings, and error patterns that students are having
- coaching individual teachers and providing in-class support for teachers through co-planning, co-teaching, reflection, and re-teaching lessons
- facilitating grade-level meetings and lab sites
- facilitating whole-school professional development meetings and workshops to deepen teachers’ and math specialists’ math content, pedagogical and assessment knowledge
- facilitating the whole district professional development math meetings and workshops for teachers, coaches, and interventionists’ content, pedagogical, and assessment knowledge
- developing standards-based curriculum maps, units of study, and assessments
- unpacking, analyzing, and interpreting data to inform data driven instruction
- introducing protocols for the analysis of student work and assessment data
Administrative PD Days
Administrative PD Days are designed to build leadership capacity within your school, with customized, collaborative coaching that will guide and support the development of your instructional leadership team. Our consultant and your school’s instructional leaders will work together to identify key instructional priorities, to set goals, and to develop strategies for overcoming specific curriculum and instructional challenges.
Typically, our consultant will also meet with your school’s administrative team to look at student work and grade level and/or school-wide data to guide and support leaders in the creation and implementation of a clearly defined action plan for math improvement based on an analysis of data and an audit of the math environment, practices, resources and policies. Our consultant may also do learning walks/instructional rounds with administrators and math coaches to support the administrative team in further developing their understandings of best practices for mathematics teaching and learning.
Coaching Cycles
During 1:1 Coaching Cycles, your school may set up a schedule for our consultant to work with selected classroom teachers during math lessons to provide individualized feedback and coaching to establish exemplary math classroom instruction and improve student outcomes. Our consultant will typically meet with teachers individually prior to a lesson to co-plan the lesson and again after the lesson to review student work and plan next instructional steps.
Each coaching cycle will focus on the the development of one or more high-leverage practices critical to advancing skill in teaching so that all students learn important content. Based on the needs of individual teachers these high-leverage practices may include:
- implementing organizational routines
- implementing norms and routines for classroom discourse
- designing single lessons, sequences of lessons, and units of study
- setting long and short-term learning goals for students based on assessment data
- setting up and managing small group work
- explaining and modeling content, practices, and strategies
- eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking
- coordinating and adjusting instruction during a lesson
- selecting, designing and implementing informal and formal assessments of student learning
- analyzing student work and diagnosing common patterns in order to plan for differentiated instruction
- providing feedback to students; and
- analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it
Planning Days
During Planning Days our consultant will typically meet with your school’s teachers and math coaches/specialists in grade level or vertical planning teams to plan an upcoming series of lessons or unit of study. These sessions may also be used to write or revise curriculum maps and to further develop teachers’ math content and pedagogical knowledge.
Team Coaching Cycles
Team coaching builds a community of learners through collaboration, while allowing grade level teams to share their experience and expertise. During team coaching days one model classroom is chosen from each grade level involved. Prior to the labsite, teachers in the grade level meet with our consultant to co-plan a lesson or mini-lesson. The teachers then visit the labsite classroom to observe the lesson through a particular lens and practice their teaching with support from our consultant. After the lesson our consultant will facilitate a lesson debrief to allow teachers to reflect on the teaching practices that supported student learning and review student work with a focus on learning and misconceptions. Finally, our consultant will work together with teachers to plan the next instructional steps. In order to develop habits of self-reflection and critical thinking, lesson study cycles may also be utilized to enable groups of teachers to plan, observe, analyze, and refine mathematics lessons over a period of time.
Workshop Days
Our research-based Workshop Days offer interactive learning experiences designed to improve teachers’ instruction, advance students’ learning, and increase achievement in math. Our consultant will collaborate with school leadership to decide on a topic aligned to the school’s curriculum in order to nurture instructional excellence through the introduction of research-based best practices. Frequently requested Workshop Days include:
Grades K-2
- Assessing Fluency: Math Running Records in K-2
- Counting is More than 1,2,3: Structures and Routines for Developing Counting Skills
- Fluency Doesn’t Just Happen: Building Math Fact Fluency Power in K-2
- Developing a Deep Understanding of Addition in K-2
- Developing a Deep Understanding of Subtraction K-2
- Building Number Sense, Flexibility in Thinking and Student Discourse with Number Talks in K-2
- Creating and Using Powerful Fact Fluency Workstations
- Developing Math Power through Energizers and Routines
Grades 3-5
- Assessing Fluency: Math Running Records in 3-5
- Assessing Fluency: Math Running Records in 6-8
- Fluency Doesn’t Just Happen: Building Math Fact Fluency Power in 3-5
- Developing a Deep Understanding of Addition in 3-5
- Developing a Deep Understanding of Subtraction 3-5
- Exploring Multiplication Grades 3-5
- Exploring Division Grades 3-5
- Multiplication and Division Fact Fluency from Conceptual Understanding
- Building Number Sense, Flexibility in Thinking and Student Discourse with Number Talks in 3-5
- Creating and Using Powerful Fact Fluency Workstations
- Developing Math Power through Energizers and Routines
- Models and Strategies for Teaching Fractions with conceptual understanding
- Models and Strategies for Multi-Digit Multiplication and Division with Whole Numbers and Decimals
- Please contact us for more information about virtual and on-site math consulting options and/or a quote based on your school’s needs: Email Dr. Nicki at: drnicki7@gmail.com
Phone Number: (347) 688-4927
