When you only have 44 minutes with each teacher, MirrorTalk helps us immediately dive into executing a strategy, rather than ruminating on it.
Meagan MacDonald | Barrington Middle School, Barrington School District 220
USE CASE
Real-time coaching insights, improved teacher engagement
Meagan MacDonald
Instructional Coach
School/District
Barrington Middle School, Barrington School District 220
Grade Level
Adult/Professional Development
An experiment becomes an intentional practice
Meagan Macdonald is an instructional coach at Barrington School District 220’s middle school. With a staff of 90 teachers, managing effective coaching cycles while offering meaningful reflection time seemed impossible to balance.
For Meagan, their reflection goals were centered around student outcomes. She experimented with the tool after the school’s initial success using MirrorTalk’s voice-guided reflections for students. After completing several “test” reflections, she immediately realized that MirrorTalk could bolster adult learning outcomes as it had done for students.
This breakthrough came when she reflected on a challenging coaching cycle she experienced earlier in the week. “The feedback MirrorTalk gave me was awesome! It was so intuitive and uncovered a lot of assumptions I was making about the situation,” she recalls. “The advice it gave me targeted a specific strategy I could try, helping me quickly turn things around with this teacher.”
Realizing the immense impact it could have on her teachers’ reflective practice, she invited all the teachers she works with to use MirrorTalk. Soon, coaches all over Barrington adopted it for their coaching cycles, too.
MirrorTalk made the impossible, possible
The transition from student tool to coaching asset was natural. One of the biggest challenges in Meagan’s role before had been scheduling meaningful reflection time for teachers within the constraints of everyone’s busy school day. Effective coaching cycles require precise timing for post-observation feedback, which often proved impossible to coordinate.
MirrorTalk helped Meagan and other coaches in her district navigate these complexities by enabling teachers to capture their thoughts immediately after classes when coaches can’t typically be present. Teachers reflect while teaching is fresh and they’re still in their element and MirrorTalk gives them practical advice they can apply in their lessons immediately.
For Meagan, this was a huge turning point: “Every time a teacher gets MirrorTalk feedback with different strategies, instantly they say to themselves ‘hmm, I could try that.
It’s made them so much more receptive to new ideas and strategies when we meet for 1:1 conversations.
Meagan MacDonald | Barrington Middle School, Barrington School District 220
MirrorTalk drastically improved coaching conversations
As Meagan observed, teachers had already started gathering data for themselves with MirrorTalk, which formed the foundation for deeper, more focused coaching conversations when they met with their coaches. Instead of starting from scratch during each meeting, coaches and teachers build on captured data from reflections, leading to more strategic and focused improvement plans.
As Meagan explains, “MirrorTalk instructs teachers to build reflective habits and learn from their own experiences. It helps us move everyone along in the right direction, and make better decisions, faster. When you only have 44 minutes with each teacher, MirrorTalk helps us immediately dive into executing a strategy, rather than ruminating on it.”
MirrorTalk elevated teacher collaboration
As capacity improved, Meagan and her coaches expanded MirrorTalk usage to their PLCs. As each group of teachers completes reflections with MirrorTalk, MirrorTalk automatically generates Group Lessons which provide the coaches general insights on how the group perceives the sessions and considerations for coaches when planning next steps.
These Group Lessons not only impacted 1:1 time with teachers but increased buy-in for their coaching program throughout the district.
Now every time we meet for PLCs, teachers are genuinely excited about the improvements they’re making and come to the table with curiosity about what others are trying. The feedback we get when teachers reflect on their PLCs helps us make this time together more engaging and useful for everyone. It’s a huge win for everyone!
Meagan MacDonald | Barrington Middle School, Barrington School District 220
The changes don’t stop here
By making reflection more accessible and insights more rapid and actionable, MirrorTalk has helped create a healthier professional environment throughout Barrington that bridges crucial gaps in teacher development and coaching capacity.
Best of all, their investment in a student support tool has paid off in unexpected ways: it created a culture where teachers constantly improve, which ultimately benefits the same students who inspired them to adopt the tool in the first place.
The next frontier in coaching has arrived
Meet M2 – every teachers’ intelligent co-teacher and every coach’s new best friend. MirrorTalk powers it and it helps you take your coaching to catastrophic heights. Learn more.