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.

  1. 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?

  2. 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?

  3. 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?

  4. 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.)

  5. 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?