From Teacher To Coach: The Study of Encouraging Your Students

It is a very interesting idea to think about teachers as coaches. I have always found myself wanting to be an encourager to my students, but to call myself a coach? Well, I've never thought of that before.

But the more I read Kathleen F. Clark's article, What Can I say Besides, "Sound it out"? Coaching word recognition in beginning reading, this idea is becoming more of a reality. Clark distinguishes what she believes to be successful techniques to coaching students into using previously learned knowledge to read. By crafting instructional cues for students to pick up, Clark believes every student will have the capacity to excel in reading. By 'coaching' readers, teachers help students reach the five steps that Classrooms That Work by Cunningham and Allington describes. A successful coach helps readers achieve:

1. Recognizing that a word is unfamiliar, one looks at all the letters in order.
2. Searching mental word banks for similar letter patterns andy eh sounds associated with them.
3. Producing pronunciation that matches that of the real world the student knows.
4. Reread the sentence to cross-check the students possible pronunciation with meaning, and if the meaning confirms pronunciation, keep reading. (If not, try again!)
5. Lastly, if the word is unfamiliar, the student would look for familiar morphemes, and chunk the word by putting letters together that usually go together in the words the student knows.

One can achieve these steps as a teacher by applying a coaching technique. In order to complete these steps, a coach provides general cues to promote thought and cues to promote a specific action like producing a pronunciation or searching one's mental word bank.

Overall, one tip for helping students read that I found most helpful through the coaching technique was detecting a smaller word within a large unknown word. This helps students accomplish some ground, and makes the word not as intimidating, and from there, they can begin to use cues and coaching tips. One way to help encourage readers to discover new words, is by speaking them out loud. A great idea of how to do this, yet still manage your classroom volume level, is a whisper phone, pictured to the right and below. This allows students to hear themselves as they read, yet is quieter to their surrounding peers. These can be homemade out of pipes, or store bought, and is a great way to incorporate interactive reading!