Though it’s rarely discussed openly, it’s no secret that the all-too prevalent one-size-fits-all approach to professional development is leaving teachers feeling unsupported, inadequately trained and under resourced.

And, even though objective feedback combined with effective instructional coaching is the only method proven to help change teaching practice to improve learning outcomes, coaches are spread so thin that providing both is nearly impossible.

Meet Ashley, an instructional coach expanding her practice with TeachFX

Ashley Yazarlou is a Reflective Coach at the Center for Teacher Innovation (CTI) and an EdTech teacher on special assignment in Hemet Unified School District.

Over the course of the 2020-21 school year, Ashley coached 8 teachers, three of whom volunteered to try out TeachFX as part of their CTI inquiry cycle in January and February of 2022. And a 4th teacher was inspired by the other 3 to try it out, and she finished up her March/April inquiry cycle using TeachFX.

Ashley’s experience provided her a framework on how to help teachers create meaningful conversation in the classroom, specifically around what strategies worked to get students talking, what obstacles challenged those endeavors, and how to foster teacher-leader relationships in order to support their professional growth.

See how TeachFX's data-driven platform afforded the tool that Ashley needed to offer her teacher mentees real-time feedback as they sought to increase student engagement. 

But first, here’s how Ashley’s own experience as a teacher working with her own coach shaped her coaching philosophy and drew her to TeachFX’s guiding principles. 

For Ashley, personalized Instructional Coaching Illuminated Blindspots in Teaching, Student Engagement, and Equity

After eight years as a classroom teacher where coaching often felt uninspiring and unproductive, Ashley was finally paired with a coach whose support reached beyond one-time classroom observation. 

With this coach’s help, Ashley was given new insight into her pedagogical blindspots and the means necessary to address her classroom’s most pressing needs. Ashley’s coach understood that the student doing the talking is doing the learning, a belief in the power of student voice to transform educational outcomes. He recognized Ashley’s innate ability to engage students, but also realized that she required new tools to hone her craft and grow as an educator.

To help Ashley better understand her own practice, her coach co-planned a lesson centered on student engagement and student-led academic discussions. He then conducted a classroom observation where he used the timer on his phone to clock student-led participation. 

And he asked Ashley: how many minutes did she think her students spent engaging in student-led academic talk?

Ashley was stunned to see that, by her coach’s measurements, her students had only engaged in 30 seconds of student-led academic talk. 

From this experience, Ashley reached an epiphany. She understood that effective coaching was necessary to help her address her blindspots to see where her teaching practice could evolve. She also understood that students need to talk if they’re going to learn and develop confidence in their ability to own and articulate ideas. 

Personalized coaching is vital, but often impossible to provide to every teacher

Ashley’s experience should not be the exception to the rule. Unfortunately, the demands placed on administrators and instructional coaches often create an impasse to progress. 

Following COVID-inflected testing drops and a burgeoning teacher shortage, educational leaders often feel overworked and ill-equipped to fully develop their teachers’ skill sets. TeachFX was born out of these crisis points and developed with today’s challenges in mind. 

With TeachFX, every teacher can have access to insights that can expand on coaching or help them grow their own teaching practice, without relying on classroom observation by a coach or other instructional leader.

TeachFX provided Ashley’s teachers with more in-depth and frequent feedback than she could provide on her own

Because her teachers were already engaged in cycles of inquiry and self-reflection, using TeachFX felt like a natural fit for many seeking additional insight into their classroom culture. 

Some first-year middle school teachers, for example, spoke openly about wanting to increase or improve student engagement. For some, while their students were eager to speak, dialogue wasn’t always related to the lesson at hand or academically-oriented. For others, the challenge was identifying what could create more conversation in the classroom.

Eight teachers volunteered to use TeachFX to record class sessions and receive real-time insight into their instructional practice. By simply pressing record and letting TeachFX’s AI technology collect and sort data, teachers received nearly instant feedback on their classroom’s inner workings. 

The results were eye-opening for each teacher, in their own ways. Some found that students were not getting the opportunity to speak that teachers had assumed – with teachers occupying as much as 40 minutes of a 45-minute class speaking to their students, leaving meager time for students to engage in meaningful dialogue. It was clear that something needed to change. 

With classroom-level insights, each teacher focuses on the specific teaching practices that best fit them and their classrooms

Guided by the individualized feedback afforded by the TeachFX app, Ashley’s teacher mentees studied how much time they allotted for student “think time.” Many were discouraged to find that they hadn’t prioritized this opportunity in their classrooms.

Yet after restructuring their lesson plans and incorporating active pauses to stimulate thinking, many teachers saw improved response quality and a greater diversity of participation. 

And each time they recorded a lesson with TeachFX, the teachers were able to see how their use of “think time” improved, as well as how this practice determined which students spoke and how they contributed. 

Within a few weeks, teachers who had allotted 40 minutes to their own commentary had actively decreased their talk time to 20 minutes – a 50% decrease in teacher talk time. 

Empowering teachers with autonomy over their own continuous cycles of improvement

Feeling empowered by their data and witnessing tangible classroom results, instructors gained greater ownership of their practice and were able to adjust their methods to respond to individual student needs and classroom dynamics.

As the school year continued, teachers developed an incredible amount of data that gave them insight into when students were and were not engaged, what type of conversations inspired conversation, what in their lesson plans and teaching styles worked or didn’t work to activate student-talk.

What’s more, teachers moved along a spectrum from becoming aware of their practice to becoming more aware in their practice. From seeing the reality of their own teaching with their first class report, to becoming more aware in the moment of how and when to effectively utilize direct instruction, open-ended questioning, think time, and more, to facilitate deeper learning and more productive academic discussions.

Teachers have the autonomy to dive into their own instruction and reflect on their own practices to see how they were presenting information to students and how students were receiving information. As teachers engaged with the app, they were forced to reassess their practice and move away from lecture style courses and instead provide opportunities of think-time.

Ashley’s teachers began to use TeachFX as the central reflection tool for teacher growth and gained real-time insight into their classroom systems and dynamics. 

Meet Hannah, a middle school English teacher coached by Ashley using TeachFX to grow her practice

Hannah, a middle school English teacher, worked with Ashley during her California credentialing process. As she sought to align her classroom with state standards and engage with cycles of inquiry, Hannah chose to center her practice around increasing student engagement through meaningful conversations and scaffolded discourse.

With this priority in mind, Hannah fostered strong connections with her students and promoted a classroom culture where everyone felt comfortable speaking. Although she was pleased with the volume of student dialogue, she also found that conversations were not always academically centered. Therefore, when Ashley pitched Hannah the idea of using TeachFX to analyze her classroom dynamic, she happily volunteered.

Immediately, Hannah was astonished by the tool’s functionality and insight. In addition to its intuitive recording function, TeachFX’s app provided an important wake-up call: after reviewing its real-time recording data and teacher-to-student talk-time ratios, Hannah realized that she was lecturing 60 to 70 percent of class without affording students the opportunity to speak. The think-time data also revealed that she was giving students less than five seconds to reflect on questions before being asked to respond. Unsurprisingly, this was preventing shy students or those in need of further think-time from volunteering their voices and opinions.

While these findings were important in their own right, TeachFX allowed Hannah to experiment with data-driven decisions and practices. She began integrating planned talk-time and increased the amount of think-time in her classes – techniques that produced an uptick in student-led academic discourse and increased the diversity of voices in the classroom. 

Even as students engaged with class content with greater depth and frequency, Hannah also found that they were volunteering higher-quality responses. This improvement prompted Hannah to investigate the  questions inspired student-talk and those that required additional refinement. She discovered, for example, that her students loved open-ended questions.

These insights – among many others afforded by TeachFX – empowered Hannah to take ownership of her pedagogical practice and gave her the tools she needed to change classroom learning dynamics, employ new teaching strategies, and make class as engaging and productive as possible for learners. 

Learning involves seeing reality as it is, not as it is wished to be. 

Just like Ashley’s coach, TeachFX founder Jamie Poskin believes that discourse steered by a skilled teacher is the key to unlocking deeper learner and advancing classroom equity. For this to take place, however, teachers require objective, frequent, and personalized feedback providing insights including specific teaching practices, classroom conversation patterns, and academic vocabulary. 

TeachFX’s recordings and insight into teacher practice and student engagement is rocket fuel for both teacher learning and student learning because it provides a clear picture of reality and the support necessary for teachers to deliver high quality educational experiences. 

The use of TeachFX has allowed these new teachers to own their own development and lead the change in their classrooms that most directly impacts students’ success through engagement. These teachers are still working on their credentials and using TeachFX as the tool they need to grow and train them as expert teachers

We envision a world where every teacher has access to the feedback, insights, and self-reflection that can empower them to grow into the teachers they most want to be. Will you join us on that mission?