Coaching Cut #3 Wrap-around success criteria
Coaching cuts: bite-sized tips for better coaching
Today's tip: Use wrap-around success criteria so your teacher knows what to change in their practice and why.
Today's cut: Adam is coaching me on a problem I’m having: I want to check everyone’s understanding using mini whiteboards (good idea), but students’ responses were so varied, and sometimes too long, for me to scan them quickly (think ‘sea of scribble’). Coach Adam models how to give instructions that standardise the format (Lemov, 2021) of students’ responses so they are one word only.
Watch how coach Adam -
primes me to see the success criteria before he models and
prompts me to tell him where I saw the success criteria after he models.
This is what we mean by wrap-around success criteria.
Why might wrap-around success criteria useful?
Models can help change teacher practice (Sims et al., 2023). They show a teacher what you mean by a technique. And success criteria make it even more obvious.
Success criteria are the most important bits of the model - they make it work. Priming, then prompting, discussion of success criteria before and after the model make them unmissable and allow the coach to check the teacher understands why they are important.
When would and wouldn’t you use wrap-around success criteria?
Use models and wrap-around success criteria whenever you want to show a teacher a technique and help them get what makes it work. This is usually once you've agreed on their goal and want to show them what it looks like.
And also…
You may need to re-model parts of a technique when they rehearse it. Let's say I rehearsed it and got a bit wrong, Adam might re-model that part to help me get it next go. He might prime and prompt me to see and analyse the success criteria again.
Wrap-around success criteria are a scaffold for your coachee to understand the new technique and what makes it work. Like all scaffolds, they aren't always necessary.
This means…
Don't use wrap-around success criteria if your teacher clearly knows what to do to change their practice. For example, you agree the goal and the teacher tells you themselves what the success criteria are and says they are ready to rehearse. If you think they really are, you might not need to model and emphasise success criteria because they already know it! This hasn't happened to me very often but it has happened.
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References
Lemov, D. (2021). Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college. John Wiley & Sons.
Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Goodrich, J., ... & Anders, J. (2023). Effective teacher professional development: New theory and a meta-analytic test. Review of Educational Research, 00346543231217480.
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I really like the idea of a success criteria to frame this conversation. I advocate for the use of success criteria to support and stretch children's writing as it empowers them to know what they are looking for and to use as a model for their own ideas. It totally makes sense for this to be applied to coaching too. Thank you for sharing :)