Lucy West

Content-Focused Coaching: Transforming Mathematics Lessons
Content-Focused Coaching provides useful, field tested tools for designing lessons that meet the need of a range of learners in ways that excite and engage even the most “difficult to reach” students. CFC is not a “program” it is a practice that builds pedagogical skill, content knowledge and fosters robust learning among teachers and their students.

Collaboration Sites: Teacher-Centered Professional Development in Mathematics
Published, January 2004, Teaching Children Mathematics, NCTM
Collaboration sites provide formalized opportunities in which up to twenty-five teachers coaches and administrators meet to plan, observe, and refine their teaching practices. The work is collaborative and both experienced and new teachers use research based planning tools to guide them through designing, observing and reflecting on lessons. The visiting teachers then return to their schools and work on the same or similar lessons. This is a cyclical process that can occur three or four times a year and usually involves teams of teachers and coaches from various schools.

Coaching as Leadership
Forthcoming in NCSM yearly monographs, April 2006
Coaching as a professional learning strategy is a systemic, long-term, evolving process that challenges many of our present power structures and beliefs. When the vision unfolds, it will be common to see coaches, principals, teachers and district level staff working side by side in classrooms across the district; hear student achievement central in professional dialogue and witness robust learning at every level. Conversations informed by cutting edge research, outside expertise, data, and a relentless focus on improving instruction will flourish. Coaches--initially experienced consultants from outside the district--give way to coaches who are predominantly teachers who had been coached, became teacher leaders, and are groomed to take on the role of coach. Coaches play a pivotal role in helping teachers develop a repertoire of instructional strategies and more flexible content knowledge. Coaches also assist principals in their developing understanding of what to look for in effective mathematics lessons. In many schools the relationships between and among teachers, coaches and principals are collegial, productive, and enjoyable. Coaches attend school board meetings and influence policy by informing policymakers of what field-tested practices really do make a difference.

In this manner, coaches are poised to lead the way in creating life-affirming professional learning communities on a wide scale that upgrade the teaching profession to one that is supremely qualified to valiantly and intelligently prepare the next generation for the rapidly changing, demanding, diverse and complex, global society of the 21st century.