Coaching Teachers Through Delivering Challenging Content
Recently, I received a bat signal for help from my fourth grade team during one of their planning sessions. They were coming up on a very sensitive subject in Social Studies and weren’t sure what direction to take. By the time the meeting ended, we had established a plan that they were comfortable with and confident in their ability to deliver. If you find yourself in a similar situation, these guiding questions may help coach your teachers through preparing to deliver challenging or sensitive content.
Build background:
What is the content?
How is it connected to the unit or standard?
Have the students been exposed to this content before this lesson?
What are the teachers’ feelings about delivering the content?
Consider the audience:
What is the enduring understanding we want students to come away with?
What do we already know about the students’ cultural and familial backgrounds?
How might the classroom culture impact the delivery of this lesson?
Examine the content:
Is the text appropriate for the grade/age? (In our case, although it was factual, it was too graphic for our 4th grade learners. We decided to nix the passage from the text and start from scratch.)
Are the graphics appropriate for the grade/age? (In our case, they were not.)
Are all voices represented in the content?
Plan for delivery:
What tools can we use to ascertain background knowledge? (Click this link for a copy of a schema/new learning/misconceptions Jamboard you can use!)
What methods or teaching strategies will be most appropriate?
What might we do in the case of student misconceptions?
How might we handle push-back from parents or community? (This lesson took place when our district was operating in the full-remote model.)
Follow-up
Offer to sit in on the lesson as an extra pair of hands/ears/eyes
Post-lesson, meet with teachers to debrief and take notes for next year.
How have you guided your staff through delivering challenging content?