Increasing Video Collaboration and Practice-sharing Among Coaches

As VP of Teacher, Leader and Coach Development for The Achievement Network, thoughtfully engaging in coaching conversations that are centered around evidence of practice is something Edlyn Smith needs to do on a near daily basis.

That’s why Edthena is a perfect tool for Edlyn and the instructional leadership coaches with whom she works. And considering that The Achievement Network’s coaches are located all across the country, Edthena has become particularly important to Edlyn’s process.

Since adopting Edthena last year, Edlyn has found that coaches are now leaving each other feedback that’s more personal and grounded in evidence than they were before. Additionally, she’s found that Edthena serves as an excellent platform for sharing best practices among the many coaches in the network.

How has your process of practice-sharing changed since implementing Edthena?

Before Edthena, we tried using video to share best practices and saw exciting momentum, but we had challenges when folks tried to share video once they’d taped themselves.

Edthena has enabled us to greatly increase our use of video for collaboration and practice-sharing. With an easy-to-use system in place, we’ve been more successful first at supporting collaboration, and second at identifying and sharing broadly great moments in coaching that many more coaches have benefited from seeing.

In some cases, when coaches have shared particularly strong videos, we’ve even been able to share those videos more broadly for other coaches’ learning.

How has Edthena helped improve virtual coaching conversations?

Edthena makes the process of practice-sharing more normal, more streamlined, and allows the praise and feedback our coaches leave each other to be much more personal and tied to the video itself.

Everything is grounded, objectively, in the context of the coaching, allowing coaches to more specifically pinpoint the strong moments in the video, as well as the particular opportunities for different moves.

How does using Edthena support you in your work to support and train other coaches?

Working with our coaches inside of groups on Edthena has made it so much easier to stimulate collaboration – people have been excited to use the platform and once they got started, it’s been intuitive.

Personally, Edthena also gives me an easy way to learn about strengths in practice to understand what folks are working on, and also to see how our support is playing out. It makes it easy to quickly learn from and engage with our great coaches, and vice versa.

Anything else you’d like to add that we forgot to ask?

I can’t emphasize enough what a game-changer the uploading tool and ability to comment directly into the video has been.  And, we’re starting to get more into using Explorations, and I’m excited about that!