Victor Boulanger

I organized my post-observation meeting around a short list of open-ended questions taken from the Cognitive Coaching method (I found the first couple of questions in the Coaching Initiative Packet shared by the Minnesota Low Incidence Projects) which I supplemented with long-range questions stemming from this forum: What were some of the things that you felt went well? What did you find most difficult about teaching this lesson? What are some skills you would like reinforce in your students? What is next for you? What would you like to try? These allowed me to establish a progression similar to the GROW model which Jocelyn described. We were able to start our meeting by recognizing Lulu’s strengths before looking at improvements to be made and future initiatives to be taken. Sharing Lulu felt that the sharing portion of the sandboxing activity went very well. Except for a couple of students, they all learned from each other and demonstrated helpfulness and respect which ar...

I will be perfectly honest: my time in Lulu’s classroom was not a victory lap by any means. It was not a complete checkmate either. They were some failures in a sense that I have recently begun to love: First Attempt In Learning. They were also some victories. I consider this first attempt a great learning success . I co-taught a lesson with Lulu to kick start her students presentation on Cultural Fridays. Lulu’s outcomes for this project are to raise her students awareness of other cultures in a fun, entertaining way, and to use technology to help each group work collaboratively. Lesson Planning When we prepared this lesson, Lulu wanted me to start by showing the students how to change their school issued password. She mentioned they had unsuccessfully tried before and this is where I made my first and largest mistake: I was so eager to get to the good stuff, the presentation, that I said yes without asking any question. We set aside 10 min. for this (5 min. to talk about creatin...

Instead of one pre-observation meeting, Lulu and I had two. One reason for this was to find enough time to talk through the various aspects of the task. The second reason, just as important, was to give me enough time to reflect on the ideas that we shared during our first meeting. It allowed me to sleep on it (I value that process a lot), and query Natalie, our librarian and Tom, our learning technology coach (present in this course) for their suggestions. Team work! With her Cultural Fridays, Lulu had the perfect nucleus of a project for us. In teams of 3, her grade 4 students research and present on 3 aspects of a country, one team each month. This is a new project which Lulu is trying out this year and for which she has only given little oral guidance to her students so far. She was looking at ways to improve it while keeping this extra-credit activity fun and engaging. ISTE White Paper on Coaching The ISTE White Paper on Technology, Coaching and Community  was instrume...

The first goal I have is to understand what makes a good coach. This may come as an all-too-obvious goal for anyone taking this course, especially considering the wealth of excellent advice already provided in this course to make us better coaches, but I am very keen on connecting this knowledge to my personal experiences of some of the best coaches I have met. In fact, the best teachers I know relate to their students in a way I can only describe as personal coaches . This is particularly visible with middle school teachers. They follow students’ individual actions, distillate meaning from these actions and explore the achievements attained or improvements required by the student. The wisdom they are able to impart by asking simple questions leading to  deep soul-searching answers within a short conversation is never lost on the students who are almost always grateful and eager to return to them and share more. Guidance from a Coach When Jim Knight asks “ how did you f...

On September 1st, Tom Hammerlund and I are starting the course "Coaching: From Theory to Practice" taught by Kim Cofino via Eduro Learning . Eduro Learning: Empower, Leverage, Build, Learn We are both very excited about this course for two main reasons: Kim was my wife's instructor when she took her  COETAIL class. We have grown to know and respect Kim as an amazing educator and leader in her field via her initiatives with COETAIL at Yokohama International School , and now at NIST in Bangkok and of course Eduro. Tom and I both work at Kaohsiung American School  where Tom started on August 1st, 2015 as our first Learning Technology Coach, a momentous position which I have patiently waited for ever since I joined KAS as the Director of Learning Technology back in August 2012. You can follow my writings for this course on this website.

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