Urban Teachers believes that excellent teachers develop over time through engagement in quality coaching. The three-year coaching program at Urban Teachers provides repeated opportunities for participants to: 

• Acquire and continuously improve their teaching practices
• Demonstrate responsiveness to feedback for growth
• Engage in goal-setting and reflective practices
• Articulate the specific ways in which their relationships with PreK-12 students impacts the life-outcomes of the children that they serve
• Intentionally cultivate the asset-based, bias-free mindset necessary for implementing inclusive, culturally relevant, and racist-free teaching  
• Develop professionalism habits of productive dispositions which are befitting of their profession

The Urban Teachers coaching program is designed to support participants’ ability to become effective urban educators. This requires considerable intentionality on the part of the coach and the participant. Coaching is not an act done to someone but one that is done with someone. 

Since mastering these classroom skills and abilities is necessary to becoming a highly skilled classroom teacher, Urban Teachers evaluates the demonstrated teaching practice performance of all participants across the first three program years. Participants are accountable for meeting an averaged teaching practice score at the end of each year, called an end-of-year expectation. Failure to meet the end-of-year teaching practice expectation may result in dismissal from the program. (Refer to the Program Requirements and Expectations Overview for the end-of-year teaching practice expectation for each program year.)

OBSERVING, EVALUATING, & GIVING FEEDBACK

Urban Teachers coaches are skilled at teacher support, development, and evaluation. The work that is common to both coaching support and evaluation falls into three main activities: 

OBSERVATION

Observation is the act of carefully noticing something or someone in order to gain information. Excellent coaches carefully attend to the participant and the context surrounding the participant. Every coaching interaction with a participant is an opportunity to learn more about them through careful observation.

EVALUATION

Evaluation is the act of considering information and making a judgment about that information. Excellent coaches take all the information that they have gathered from an observation and use the Teacher Practice Rubric to assess the quality, frequency, or effectiveness of the participant’s teaching practice. Effective evaluation is influenced by the coach’s ability to carefully observe and their depth of knowledge about the teaching practices of the Teacher Practice Rubric. 

FEEDBACK

The third essential act is giving the participant effective verbal or written feedback. Careful observation, deep knowledge of the teaching practices, and effective evaluation are all pre-requisites for the type of feedback that coaches provide to participants in order to:

1. Increase the participants’ awareness of their current level of teaching practice, and 
2. Increase the participants’ ability to demonstrate the desired level of teaching practice. 

The Urban Teachers feedback protocol typically includes engaging the participant with their areas of Glows, Grows, and Next Steps.

SchoolMint Grow:

SchoolMint Grow is the online platform that Urban Teachers uses to manage the data derived from coaching cycles. Coaches and participants log in to personal accounts to: 

• Set appointments for pre-conferences, classroom observations, and post-conferences.
• Upload lesson plans and supporting documentation.
• Tie lessons and feedback to specific strands of the Teacher Practice Rubric.
• Provide ratings on the Accountable Teaching Practices (ATPs) for every Observation and feedback to improve practice.

Participants are expected to: 

• Receive and acknowledge SchoolMint Grow calendar invites (scheduling coaching visits).
• Access SchoolMint Grow to review coaching data (e.g., qualitative data, numerical ratings, next steps, etc.)
• Upload lesson plans, student work, and videos of teaching practice (for comprehensive coaching cycles and independent observations).
• Share data with coach(es) and peer-based coaching communities.