During a recent podcast conversation with Mitch Weisburgh, the author of “Mindshifting: Stop Your Brain from Sabotaging Your Happiness and Success,”, I found myself connecting his ideas to a challenge instructional coaches and school leaders frequently encounter. At times, teachers come to a coach asking, “What can I do?” while simultaneously believing there is little they can do. They have already concluded that the situation is unlikely to change, that the causes are beyond their control, or that there simply isn’t a workable solution. Before they can consider new strategies or a different approach, they frequently need to rethink how they are understanding the challenge.
- Students aren’t engaged.
- A lesson didn’t go as planned.
- A new instructional strategy isn’t producing the desired results.
- PLC members are not collaborating
Weisburgh described mindshifting as recognizing when our thinking has become trapped in habitual patterns, assumptions, or automatic reactions that limit our options. Rather than immediately searching for an answer, mindshifting invites us to step back, examine the lens through which we are viewing the situation, and consider alternative perspectives. When the lens changes, new possibilities often emerge.
As coaches, we frequently recognize possible next steps because our experience has provided us with ideas, strategies, and examples that might help. The temptation is to move quickly toward offering a solution to the problem. But our coaching experience has reinforced an important coaching adage: go slow to go fast. The quality of coaching is often determined less by the coach’s knowledge of how to solve a teacher’s problem and more by the coach’s ability to generate reflection that leads to possibilities.
Effective coaching questions slow down thinking. They create space between an automatic conclusion and a thoughtful examination of what might actually be occurring.
Consider a teacher who states, “My students just aren’t engaged.” A coach offering strategies to increase engagement is assuming that the teacher’s diagnosis is accurate and complete. If it isn’t, the teacher is ill-prepared to effectively assess a coach’s suggestion.
A coach seeking to promote a mindshift might instead ask:
What are students doing that leads you to conclude they are disengaged?
Are all students demonstrating the same behaviors?
When during the lesson did you notice the greatest engagement?
What might students say was happening for them during that time?
What else might explain what you observed?
Notice that none of these questions provide a solution. Instead, they encourage the teacher to examine assumptions, consider additional evidence, and explore alternative interpretations. That shift in perspective is what opens the door to new possibilities.
The conversation might sound something like this. The coach does not begin by offering engagement strategies. The coach first helps the teacher examine the assumptions embedded in the statement, “My students just aren’t engaged.”
Coach: What are you seeing that leads you to describe students as not engaged?
Teacher: Many aren’t participating. When I ask questions, only a few students offer to respond.
Coach: Are all students demonstrating the same behaviors?
Teacher: No. There are always a handful who participate, but more of the class doesn’t.
Coach: Tell me about the students who are participating. What are they doing?
Teacher: They’re answering questions, talking with their partners, and volunteering ideas.
Coach: During the lesson, was there a point when more students seemed involved?
Teacher: When students were discussing examples with partners, there was more energy in the room.
Coach: What was different about that part of the lesson?
Teacher: They were doing the talking instead of listening to me explain.
Coach: If I asked students what was happening for them during that portion of the lesson, what might they say?
Teacher: They’d probably say they had something to figure out and someone to talk with about it.
Coach: What do you make of that?
Teacher: It could be that they’re less engaged during the parts of the lesson when I’m doing most of the talking. They need the information, but maybe I’ve been thinking too narrowly about how they get it. I’m wondering how I could involve them more while they’re learning it.
Coach: How does that shift the question you’re trying to answer?
Teacher: I’m wondering how I might redesign parts of the lesson so students are doing more of the thinking and processing.
Coach: What possibilities come to mind?
Teacher: I could shorten my explanations and have students discuss key ideas with a partner before moving on. I might also have students generate examples rather than providing them myself.
Coach: Both of those ideas seem connected to what you noticed about students being more engaged when they had something to figure out together. I wonder what might happen if students encountered an example first and worked in pairs to identify patterns before your explanation.
Teacher: That could be interesting. They’d be doing some of the thinking before I introduced the concept.
Coach: Is that a possibility worth testing? What would you want to watch for if you tried it?
Teacher: I’d want to see whether more students participate in the discussion and whether they ask different kinds of questions during the explanation.
At this point, the coach is no longer helping the teacher reframe the challenge. The coach has joined the teacher in exploring possibilities. The possibilities emerge from the teacher’s observations and thinking rather than from the coach’s expertise. The conversation has shifted from solving a problem to designing an experiment.
Notice the mindshift that occurred. The teacher began with the conclusion, “My students just aren’t engaged.” Through reflection, that conclusion became a new question: “How might I redesign parts of the lesson, so students are doing more of the thinking and processing?”
When conclusions become questions, possibilities emerge.
By slowing down, examining assumptions, and creating space for reflection, coaches help teachers move beyond habitual thinking and discover new questions worth exploring. Those mindshifts often become the starting point for meaningful learning and change.
