Notes
Date: September 17, 2026 1:00 p.m.
Name: Sara Barnes
Current Grade Level: 1st Grade
Next coaching session date/time: October 1, 2026; 8:00 a.m.
Coaching Session #1 – Verifying Perspectives
- This or That
Movie first or book first?
Fiction or non-fiction? Likes to read about history.
Handwritten notes or emails to a close friend?
- Learning about your background
Who or what influenced you to become a teacher? Sara’s son’s first grade teacher inspired her to return to school and become a teacher.
What experiences have you had as a teacher including districts, schools, grade levels? Sara was a substitute teacher in Gardner and Olathe before she became a full-time teacher. She is currently in her second year of teaching 1st grade. She received her teacher training at Emporia State University. Her current school setting in Olathe is a Title 1 school.
- Examining your professional beliefs
What is something you strongly believe in when it comes to educating children? Sara believes it takes a village to help children learn. She also believes that the community, parents, and the school are in a partnership to educate children.
What do you consider to be the single most important literacy strategy you use in your classroom? Sara mentioned phonemic awareness and the importance of blending sounds. She noted that her ELL students have difficulty hearing all of the sounds.
What do you want to gain from coaching related to literacy practices? Sara wants what she gains from coaching to be “real world” use.
How are the district’s curriculum materials helping or challenging for your students? It is Sara’s second year of teaching, and she feels she is continuing to understand the long-term view of the current curriculums she is required to use.
What are you leaning toward as far as an academic goal for your students during the coaching process? Sara said that her grade level is just identifying their MTSS groups. She is learning about her students as readers. Sara wants to deepen her literacy knowledge. We talked quite a bit about the quadrant tool that she learned about in her coursework on Tuesday evening. She will work on assessing her students throughout the next two weeks and seeing how they fall into the quadrants. This will be used as a tool to identify the goal that Sara wants to work on and which students she will identify for the process.
- Work for next coaching session
Narrated tour of your classroom
Assigned classroom video
Ideas for goals based on challenges in the classroom and problems of practice from your Canvas course
- The Foundations of the Science of Reading
- Assessments
- Oral Language
- Phonological & Phonemic Awareness
- Phonics (Encoding and Decoding)
- Fluency
Write down the challenges you might face in working on implementing your goals for discussion at our next session.