The Plan Step (part 1)

Hi 👋🏼 friends!

The plan step is where you take your colleague's goals, requirements, success criteria, and time frame, then add your expertise. Together you will determine what steps are going to be needed to achieve success. Finally, you need to decide what activities will be most beneficial to your colleague so they meet their goals.

Looking at the Plan quadrant of the Coaching Cycle Canvas, you see that we will need some vital information from our colleague to complete it. We need a start date and expected completion date. From there the coach and colleague will create a list of activities, determining what the coach is responsible for and what the teacher is responsible for. Finally, it needs to be decided when and where will the activity happen. There is also an area to include the coach's notes and thoughts.

To gather and organize this information, Apple provides a Planning Template in the Coaching Library. This is helpful to use with your colleague to brainstorm and gather information, which you will then transfer to the plan quadrant of the Coach Cycle Canvas.

To begin with the Planning Template we want to list the top and secondary priorities for the coaching cycle. Remember your colleague can have more, but we want to be sure to keep it reasonable.

Next, we need to plan out what steps need to be taken to achieve their goals. These are not the activities that we plan to help with the technology, but rather what general steps need to be taken to ensure that our colleague has the skills necessary to successfully cover their lesson objectives.

Here are some questions from the Planning Template, folloed by supplemental questions you may want to ask:

What resources will you need to accomplish each goal?

Will you need a lesson plan, templates, equipment,…?

As your coach, what can I do to help you reach your goals? (a lot of these will become The activities that you do to aid your colleague)

How much support are you going to need or want from me?

What type of technical help will you need, and what kind of hands-on help will you need to add creativity to the lesson?

What needs to be prepared to measure success?

Do you need to have surveys or assessments created? Do you need a rubric?

What type of support will you need when learning new technology?

With this information, you can complete the Planning Template from the Coaching Library and then move to the specific coaching activities that you and your colleague determine to be most effective.

Once all of this information is gathered or determined, you can then transfer it to the Plan quadrant of the Coaching Cycle Canvas.

Apple also provides a few additional paper-based tools to use during the Plan stage:

The Coaching Cycle Teacher Tracker, where you track your work with a specific teacher throughout the cycle.

The Coaching Cycle Schedule to help you keep track of all of your colleagues going through a coaching cycle with you.