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Coaching Verbs

For the past year I’ve spent 2.5 days per week as an Instructional Technology Coach for a building in Lincoln Public Schools. For a number of reasons I kept detailed anecdotal notes on every interaction I had with teachers in the building. I have other plan for this data set, but at the suggestion of Tim Hahn I dropped these notes into Tagxedo, a web based text analysis tool (like Wordle, but fancier.) I eliminated most of the nouns, and what I was left with seems to be a pretty good representation of what an Instructional Technology Coach does.

View this image on their website, if necessary.

What is interesting to me, and accurate I think, is how many of the verbs are some variation of talking to people. That really gets to the heart of coaching. The rest of the verbs are technical assists of some sort.

One of my next tasks is to see if I can quantify a ratio of technical to instructional use of my time. Suggestions on how to accomplish that would be welcomed!

Posted in Graphic, My Thoughts.