“One July day a couple of years ago, I found a local tennis club and asked if there was anyone who wanted to play. There wasn’t. But I could pay for a lesson and hit with [the club pro].

 I served a few points, and the tennis coach in him came out. You know, he said, you could get more power from your serve.

I was dubious. My serve had always been the best part of my game. But I listened. With a few minutes of tinkering, he’d added at least ten miles an hour to my serve. I was serving harder than I ever had in my life.

Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel. The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

But doctors don’t. I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?”
(Excerpted from Dr. Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, “Personal Best”)

Since our founding in 1956, our core commitment at Singapore American School has been to great learning and academic excellence. But this doesn’t just happen by chance—great learning and academic excellence are the results of great teaching. Research is clear that the biggest impact on a student's academic progress at school is the quality of their teachers, and we are fortunate at SAS to have such talented, dedicated teachers.

Our most important long-term priorities at SAS are to recruit and retain talented educators and do all we can to help them learn and further grow in the extraordinarily complex profession of teaching. We know that generally, the most effective way to grow in a very complex profession like teaching is by practicing it, receiving thoughtful and trusted feedback, and then having a chance to reflect and adjust—and to do that on a regular basis. As highlighted in the excerpt from Dr. Gawande’s article above, everyone, including top-performing professionals, benefits from regular, actionable feedback to further develop their professional practice.

In order to deliver on our vision of cultivating exceptional thinkers prepared for the future, we must continue to prioritize recruiting, retaining, and most importantly, developing, the best teachers in the world. 

Ten years ago, SAS adopted the professional learning community (PLC) model as one way to improve the student learning experience. PLCs are small groups of teachers who teach similar grade level/content and meet together regularly to align the curriculum and assessments they deliver in their classrooms. This collaboration not only increases consistency across student learning but also gives educators the opportunity to share with each other what’s working and not working in their own classrooms. Education has traditionally been a very individual field and the introduction of the PLC model was a significant shift in practice across the entire industry. SAS was an early adopter of this approach and is now an exemplar in this work. 
 

In 2020, SAS announced the next step in teacher development and growth—the PLC coach. PLC coaches spend half their day teaching and the other half coaching teachers on their teams and leading team-based learning. The PLC coach role is designed to give teachers consistent and meaningful feedback from a trusted peer who deeply understands their responsibilities as an educator. PLC coaches are uniquely positioned to facilitate these professional learning opportunities because they have one foot firmly in the classroom, experiencing the same challenges as those they are leading, while providing coaching amongst team members (including peer-to-peer, coach-teammate, and/or in lab sites). These individuals have fostered trust within their teams and have the subject-matter expertise relevant to the work their teams do. 

This is our first year piloting the PLC coach model at SAS. We received two dozen applicants and selected the 10 educators below to pilot this work:

• Ying Chu - Chinese immersion
• Omar Rachid - Elementary and middle school Spanish
• Mary Bellone - Second grade
• Simon Gustafson - Elementary school music
• Jennifer Yang - Elementary school Chinese daily language
• Kim Williams- Middle school math
• Latham Cameron - Middle school interdisciplinary team
• Ashley Quark - High school learning support
• Jessica Applewhite - High school science (multiple subjects)
• David Knuffke - High school science (multiple subjects)

To ensure our PLC coaches are equipped to coach and lead, they have undergone their own rigorous training. We began regular training sessions with our coaches last year to help build a foundation of understanding before they began in their new roles. We currently hold monthly training meetings and the coaches receive additional feedback from school leaders as they participate in joint classroom observations. Each PLC coach also has their own professional coach as a resource to provide tailored support to their individual needs.

We are excited about the work that has been accomplished in our first semester. Many of the educators in these PLCs have highlighted the value of implementing the coaching model in their PLC.

Based on the positive feedback we have heard from teachers, PLC coaches, and school leaders, we will be expanding this model next year. Our goal is to ensure that more teachers get high-quality, regular feedback on their teaching and that the teaching teams in our PLCs work very closely together to provide high-quality learning experiences and aligned expectations and assessments across classrooms.  

We are excited to work with these new PLC coaches to continue to learn and to provide a coaching and support approach best suited for SAS. 

“No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.”
—Atul Gawande