Math Coach Reflections: Calendar and Meetings

As I wrap up the school year I am required to complete my 2014-2015 evaluation.  This year I am on a non-traditional evaluation plan, which basically means that I get to pick my own objectives and work with my administrator and a team to reflect on progress.  I will be writing a couple of blogposts about my goal setting and reflection because I believe it can be valuable for both myself and other math coaches.  Also, if you are considering applying for a math coach position or just getting started I have a lot of information to share. 

Several of my goals involved meeting with course teams and individual teachers, and doing demo lessons.  As I wrote out my reflections I became curious about how often I actually did any of these things over the course of the year.  Below is a chart categorizing all of the meetings that I found on my Outlook Calendar for this school year, and the percent of total meetings that fell into each category.  It took about one hour to go through my calendar and categorize (in case you are interested in doing the same).

This does not represent the percentage of time spent on each item.  Some events, such as workshops and other professional development, might last an entire day but are only counted as one meeting.

I'm still figuring out the best way to make sense of this data.  I may have too many categories here to be useful.  Some initial thoughts:

• I was happy to find that top categories all included either meeting with teachers or demo lessons.  
• I was surprised to find that less than 15% of my appointments were for demo lessons.  I've really made a big effort to get into classrooms more this year, so I expected that number to be higher.  
• I didn't do much this year in terms of leading professional development workshops or sessions. I am okay with this because one on one and course team work along with demo lessons seems to be a lot more effective than one shot PD.  Even in terms of introducing ideas and technology, it has been more effective to do so with a course team or individual teacher plus demo lesson.
• I attended very few department meetings this year.  I would like to attend more of these meetings, but they tend to overlap with other course team meetings that I could attend.  Since I don't work with all course teams, this is the only way for me to see some of the math teachers. 
• I need more professional development, and especially some sort of network for math instructional coaches.  

I'm really looking forward to thinking about this more with the other instructional coaches in my district.  I can imagine re-categorizing to make more sense of time spent, and also using this information to plan goals for next year.