Date: Entry Comments

9/13/21 1 Sonia Alvarez is a 3rd grade teacher at World Language Academy.

She teaches math and Spanish language arts. During a grade level
meeting Sonia mentioned she has noticed that students are
struggling with addition and subtraction specifically with 3 digits. I
offered my assistance to find technologies she can implement into
the classrooms to help students with their addition and subtraction
facts.

I will start by recording a lesson of Sonia completing an addition

and subtraction lesson and observing the student behavior. I also
want to look at the current resources she is using. Once we have the
recording Sonia will watch the video and I will watch the video
individually. We then will meet to discuss what we each saw in the
video and create a goal.

My goal is to meet at least every two weeks during our planning

period to discuss how the students are doing. During the meetings
we will discuss the next steps and how to move forward. Once we
start getting student data we can begin to see if we are moving in the
right direction towards our goal. Once we have the next steps in
place Sonia will have 2 weeks to implement the strategies into the
classroom and collect data.

While I am not actually sure of the reasons why students are

struggling, I am already thinking through the technology resources
we have available. One resource that comes to mind is Gizmo.
Gizmo is a brand new resource available for teachers this year that
focuses on math and science. From what I have seen so far is that
teachers have the ability to assign Gizmos to students. The Gizmo
focuses on a specific area such as addition and subtraction. The
students play a game using their math facts. The Gizmo also has
pre-made worksheets and assessments the teacher can print off and
use. I think this will be a great way to keep students engaged as well
as help them improve their addition and subtraction.

Overall I am feeling a bit nervous about this process. Sonia has been
teaching for nearly 18 years and is very skilled in her teaching. I am
hoping I will be able to provide her with something new that will
 help change the dynamics in her class.
10/15/21 2 In the identify session I had Sonia record a video on a subject that
she wishes to improve. I choose to record a video because Knight
says that a “video gives a teacher and coach a perspective on the
classroom that cuts through perceptual errors (Knight, 2018).

She chose to record a math lesson because this is an area that is a

major part of her teaching and the most important. After recording
the video I asked her to watch the video and think about how she
would wish to improve. I also watched the video and made this
same observation. We then came together to discuss what we
observed. Sonia observed that she would like to add more active
engagement in the lesson and I observe that the technology she was
using was causing her lesson to be a little choppy and not flow as
well as it could. Her original thought was to find a way to help
students improve their math fluency but after watching the video
she realized she wants them to be more engaged and actively
participating during the lessons. We both agreed that this would be a
great place to start and hopefully once students are more engaged
then the fluency would improve.

While the overall lesson was successful and students were raising
their hands to ask questions, it was the same group of kids always
responding. She wants to be able to get an overall gage of how the
students are doing. Since she teaches in Spanish she often has to
translate books from English to Spanish. She does this by adding the
book illustrations to a Google Slide and then adding the translation
into the speaker notes. The problem is that she doesn't want to be
tied down to one place when she is teaching. She wants to be able to
move around the class. For her to do this she had to take the
presentation out of a present mode which made it hard for the
students to focus on the one slide at a time because they could see
the ones that were coming up next. She would like to record herself
reading the book that way she can pause it when needed but also
just have the one page up on the screen.

We then went on and I asked her the 10 questions from the Jim
Knight book. At the end the goal we decided on was to include a
technology tool that would help with the flow of the lesson as well
as add active engagement into the lesson. We will measure the
active engagement piece by looking at student responses during the
 lesson to gage of they are understanding the topic. We will measure
the flow of the lesson based on how she feels the lesson went and if
it flowed more easily. After we met I went and looked through a
couple different technologies I knew that would help her achieve
her goal. I decided that Nearpod would be the best tool for her to
use because she can record herself reading a book and then add
interactive activity throughout the video to help keep students
engaged in the lesson.
11-4-21 3 I was so nervous going into the session for some reason but it went
so well! We had a great conversation and the conversation flowed
naturally. Before meeting I created a checklist that would help us to
make sure the goal would be met. Knight says that “Checklists
make it easier for coaches to clearly describe teaching practices”
(Knight, 2018) The checklist consisted of 5 simple tasks that would
help her through her planning process.
Before meeting I suggested the use of Nearpod. So before we met
she had previously played around with Nearpod and was prepared
with some questions and I was able to answer them. Before our
meeting, I sent her a video of myself modeling a Nearpod lesson
with my students. In that lesson I tried to add in some of the features
I thought she would be interested in. I used the drawing feature,
embedding questions into a video and poll type questions. I sent her
the video to watch before we met for the planning part of her lesson.
During our meeting we discussed which features she liked and how
we could incorporate them in math. During the time she was playing
around with Nearpod she saw that you can add virtual reality type
engagement. She wanted to see how it would look on the students'
view to see if she could use it to have students find arrays in city
buildings. We created a blank Nearpod and explored and added
those features. We then previewed it as a student would and she was
eager to try these features in her class.
During our meeting we had another teacher walk in and saw what
we were doing and she later asked me if I could sit down with her
and go over how to use Nearpod to help make her lesson more
engaging and to keep the students more actively involved.
11-19-21 4 I felt much more confident going into this session than I have any
other. I used the questions from chapter five to help guide our
conversation. Knight suggests confirming the direction of the
conversation by asking a question like “what’s on your mind?” or
“What’s the most important thing for us to talk about?” (Knight,
2018). This helped to get the conversation flowing and helped me
see which way the conversation was going. I then moved on to the
next steps Knight suggests which is, review the process and invent
improvements. During this part we were able to discuss what went
well and what roadblocks Sonia ran into. One of the roadblocks she
ran into was live participation versus the student led participation.
She originally wanted to do live participation. The roadblock came
when she assigned the Nearpod into Canvas and didn’t know which
option she should have chosen. She ended up clicking the wrong
option and the lesson didn’t flow as smoothly as she would have
liked. While we were switching classes she quickly asked for my
help and we were able to get it on the right setting and she said the
second time went much more smoothly and was what she was
wanting. Going forward I will make sure I show teachers how to
integrate it into Canvas. She loved how she was able to walk around
the room more and that students could see other students' responses
to see if their thinking was similar to their peers. She said the
students were much more engaged and that she didn’t have any
students having side conversations, which was a big celebration.
Sonia wants to keep focusing on this goal and wants to use more of
the features available in Nearpod. She wants to utilize the
audio/video record option when students are responding to
questions to get them using the Spanish vocabulary more and to
hopefully get more of a response out of them rather than typing. I
also suggested the use of the Time to Climb feature which allows
students to answer questions and compete against each other. The
last step was to plan the next actions. We plan to meet again in two
weeks once she has used these new features. We will discuss the
things that went well and adjust our goal from there.
Overall these coaching sessions have been successful. I was nervous
about coaching a veteran teacher with much more classroom time
than me. But at the end of the day she said one of her weaknesses
was implementing technology into her lesson in an engaging way.
Luckily this is an area I feel strong in and was able to offer support
and suggestions. Coaching like this is so important because it allows
teachers to explore new technology and get them out of their
comfort zone with the normal tools they would use. I most
definitely feel more confident going forward and helping other
teachers. I have even had a few teachers reach out to help them with
implementing technology into their classroom.
Knight, J. (2018). The Impact Cycle: What Instructional Coaches Should
Do to Foster Powerful Improvements in Teaching. Corwin, A Sage
Company.