How coaching has helped

(upbeat music) - My name is Rachel Wendt and I am going to be starting a new TREK program at Needville Elementary. TREK is transition Ready with Essential Knowledge. When we first received the autism grant, I was the life skills teacher at Needville Elementary. And what that entailed for us is having some funding for our classroom as well as having weekly coaching to kind of guide us in the right direction or help us improve on areas of need or give suggestions on student behaviors or help us with goal writing, PLAAFP writing. I mean they were there basically to walk us through every step of the process, whether we had a bunch of background knowledge or we were brand new to it. At first I thought it would be, 'cause I'd never had somebody come into my room once a week and you know, it's overwhelming when your administrators come in and just sit there and watch you while you're teaching. So I kind of had that mindset of this is exactly what I'm looking for and that's what I'm gonna be graded on 'cause that's what we're graded on as a teacher, right? And so that was kind of the expectation that I had. But from the minute they walked in the room, it was so breezy, is the best way for me to put it. They sat and just watched and communicated with us during the time that they were coaching. It wasn't them just sitting in the corner. So if we had an immediate question or if they had an immediate suggestion, hey, try this. And so it was the first 10 minutes everyone relaxed and realized that it was gonna be a great year with 'em in there. We sat down and talked to them about what we were struggling with and we kind of really wrote our own goals on what we wanted to improve on and they just guided us in that process. And then from there it went into, if they saw things that we were really maybe unsure of, they would give us those goals for us to work on to help with the kids or even ourselves. They were extremely constructive in a positive manner. It was never, you're doing this wrong, this is what you need to fix. And you know, it kind of kind of goes back to us sitting down and talking about those goals of, well, what do you feel like you need to improve on? So I was able to give that input and that's where we worked from. It wasn't ever, this is what you're doing wrong, you need to fix it. So it was always positive. It was never a negative situation. Yeah, some of my personal goals. I wasn't real big on schedules with all of my kids, so enforcing schedules with all of my kids, but that really went throughout the year for me because we went from picture schedules to students having a checklist with their pictures to even just looking at words for a checklist. So that was a huge goal that I had as well as working on like some behavior data for some of my kiddos, trying to figure out some functions. I had a specific kid that we couldn't figure out the function, would hit a lot and never really could figure it out because it happened sporadically during the day. And what we figured out was it was when something ended that he didn't want to end, or if he didn't like something that was going on. So if we were playing a song that he didn't want to hear, he got up and hit another student. Or if we were at the end of the day and he wasn't ready to go home, he got up and hit another student. So it was pretty interesting trying to pinpoint that down 'cause I could never figure it out until working through that goal of, this is the data you need to take, and this is work on it this way, look at it this way. So it really helped to understand that. I think that the school year would've been different if we didn't have the coaching because we wouldn't have been as structured as we were and we wouldn't have maybe necessarily found some of the behaviors that were there, even worked on fixing them or how to work with the gen ed teachers, or how to handle our pairs in the classroom if something isn't working right or you know, it was so much better for us because we grew as teachers in order to help the student and the others around us. I would absolutely take weekly coaching every year that I taught because I know that there's always room for me to grow and I know that I will always have a student that I can't figure out. And so weekly coaching is something that if I could have for the rest of my teaching career, I would for sure do. (bright whistling music)