Cognitive Coaching Foundations Seminar
This is an 8-day experience. Days 1-4 October 17-20. Days 5-8 March 5-8, 2026.
Cognitive Coaching is a research-based model that capitalizes upon and enhances teachers’ cognitive processes. Research indicates that teaching is a complex intellectual activity and that teachers who think at higher levels produce students who are higher achieving, more cooperative, and better problem solvers. It is the invisible skills of teaching, the thinking processes that underlie instructional decisions, which produce superior instruction.
Learn more at the .
Agendas for Days 1 – 4 include the Planning Conversation Map and the Reflecting Conversation Map as well as the tools of Cognitive CoachingSM.
Days 5–8 provide for skill refinement and understanding of the Problem-Resolving Map.
In the eight-day Seminars, participants learn how to:
- develop trust and rapport
- develop an identity as a mediator of thinking
- utilize conversation structures for planning, reflecting and problem resolving
- develop teachers’ autonomy and sense of community
- develop higher levels of efficacy, consciousness, craftsmanship, flexibility and interdependence
- apply four support functions: coaching, evaluating, consulting, collaborating
- utilize the coaching tools of pausing, paraphrasing, and posing questions
- distinguish among the five forms of feedback
- use data to mediate thinking
Carol Brooks Simoneau, EdD, graduated from the University of Nebraska with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in elementary education. She earned a Master of Science Degree with a Reading Specialist endorsement and an Educational Administration and Leadership endorsement from Kansas State University. Carol earned a Doctorate in Educational Administration and Leadership from Kansas State University.
Carol has over 20 years experience as a teacher and reading specialist with students of all ages. As a reading specialist, she modeled instructional strategies in the classroom and worked with students in intervention programs created to prevent reading failure. She has also chaired or served as a member on many school improvement and accreditation teams designed to develop school community and facilitate achievement. Carol has received the Kansas State Department of Education Distinguished Educator Award. She has also served on the Board of Directors for the Kansas Staff Development Council.
Carol provides Cognitive CoachingSM and Adaptive Schools training. She is the author of A Facilitator's Guide to On-line Professional Development: Establishing Communities of Learning and Cultures of Thinking.