Ashley Yazarlou is an educational technology specialist and instructional coach for Hemet Unified School District. She supports several teachers at at a time, and has integrated TeachFX into her coaching practice.

"When I was a classroom teacher several years ago, I had a coaching experience that was revelatory for me.

"I had conducted a lesson that was supposed to be centered around student academic discussion.

"After conducting a close read of a text which included annotation and question generation tasks, I gave students an opportunity to discuss the text with each other.

"My coach at the time was observing the lesson and during our debrief afterwards, he asked me about how much time I thought I gave my students to participate in their discussion.

"I said, I don't know, maybe five minutes.

"That's when he showed me the timer on his phone. It showed about 30 seconds.

"That's when I realized that during that entire 50-minute class period, I had only given my students an opportunity to engage in academic discourse for a mere 30 seconds.

"That one reflective coaching experience drastically changed the way that I planned and implemented academic discussions in my classroom going forward.

"So flash forward...Now, I am in the role of an instructional coach, and I use that same coaching method to help teachers I'm coaching reflect on the amount of teacher talk time versus student talk time in their classrooms.

"But when I discovered the TeachFX app, I realized that I could use this tool and the data it produces to enhance my coaching conversations and guide teachers to an even deeper reflection on their teaching practices.

"So currently, I'm actively coaching eight teachers who are trying to clear their teaching credentials. To clear their credentials, they must engage in cycles of inquiry in which they examine elements of their teaching practice that they want to try to improve.

"For teachers who recognize that they are struggling with student engagement, particularly when it comes to student academic discussions, I've been able to recommend the use of the TeachFX app.

"So the teachers will plan a lesson in which students are engaged in some sort of academic discussion activity, and then they'll use the TeachFX app to record the class period.

"Then afterwards, they'll analyze and reflect on the data that the app produces. The data will clearly show if there is a balance between teacher versus student talk time, which types of questions generated engagement among their students, and if this teacher utilized the right amount of wait time for student responses.

"Because of my coaching relationship with the teachers, they feel comfortable sharing the data with me, and therefore I am able to lead reflective conversations with them and provide recommendations about tools or strategies that they can implement the next time they do an academic discussion activity with students.

"The teachers are not only able to use the data from the TeachFX app as evidence in their inquiry cycles, but the data is truly informative for them for how they need to move forward with their students.

"TeachFX has been an invaluable tool for my coaching conversations this year. And I'm so glad that I found it."