Whether you are exploring the value (return on investment) of instructional coaching from the school board, central office, school principal or teacher perspective, an increase in student success must be central. Steve shares insights from his experiences with each of these perspectives with Kim Coffino on the @coachbetter podcast.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.310] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:00:29.880] – Steve
Building Coaching with a Student Focus. I was recently invited to join Kim Coffino on the Coach Better podcast from EduroLKearning. In addition to her work with international school coaches, Kim is serving as the Executive Director of the Association for the advancement of Instructional Coaching in International Schools. I’m pleased to serve on that group’s Advisory Board. What follows is a segment of our conversation where we explored the focus of coaching being on students’ increased success, whether we are exploring it from the vantage point of the school board, the central office, the school principal, or the classroom teacher. You’ll find the link to the entire podcast that Kim and I recorded in the podcast lead-in. Please enjoy.
[00:01:36.940] – Kim
Alright, Steve, welcome back to the Coach Better podcast.
[00:01:40.790] – Steve
Thank you. Great to be back.
[00:01:42.410] – Kim
I’m excited to have you here. We’ve been having a long conversation before this about all sorts of things coaching-related, so I’m all pumped to have this conversation. Before we jump into what we’re talking about today, I would love to invite you to share any highlights or things that are going on with you right now that you’d love to share with our audience because I know everyone knows who you are. Coaching expert – your book is right here by my side.
[00:02:04.940] – Steve
I’m going to share the highlight. I thought about doing this with you. I’m pretty sure you are the first international instructional coach.
[00:02:18.020] – Kim
It’s been a long time. We’ve known each other a long time. I can actually remember when you spoke to me for the… weren’t you coming to Bangkok to Rumor Deep for something? .
[00:02:26.540] – Steve
Yeah. I think we were early in Twitter.
[00:02:29.280] – Kim
Yeah, it It’s definitely a Twitter connection.
[00:02:31.670] – Steve
And it was somebody who knew you that was in a training I did that introduced me to you.
[00:02:42.680] – Steve
What a world, Steve.
[00:02:46.650] – Kim
Yeah. Well, I’m so excited to have you on the call again. And I know we’re today going to look at systems and structures and school-wide leadership, thinking about coaching from that level. And I am super excited to just pick your brain and get your thoughts on all of these questions. Okay, so you talked about the hypothesis and having a hypothesis about, we believe by investing in this, it’s going to get us this result. What are some of the results that you have seen in terms of long term impact of instructional coaching that schools might be able to point to in conversations with the board when pitching a position? What do you see as the impact of instructional coaching, particularly in the international school environment that other schools could look to as examples? And you don’t have to name specific schools, but just conceptually?
[00:03:33.090] – Steve
There’s only one in my mind. It has to be increased student achievement, increased student growth, however you want to define that. It can be academic. It can be more students performing at a higher level. But the bottom line is that it has to be measured by by student. I make this statement, if a place is implementing instructional coaching and it’s new and I get to meet with the coach in the administration, I can make this statement – I don’t know anything about the politics of your board, but I will guarantee And in two years, you’re going to be asked the question, what did we get for our investment in instructional coaching? And you don’t want to wait for two years to start answering that question, so you should be answering it from the beginning. And what that outcome is is what you’re using to define the instruction coaches role at the start. But now you got to work backwards because student achievement isn’t a quick result. So my backwards planning process is you talk about student learning outcomes, then you identify what is it that students need to do in order to cause that outcome to happen.
[00:04:54.790] – Steve
I call it student learning production behaviors. So I’m real big on teachers don’t cause student achievements, students cause student achievements. So now I know the outcome kids should reach. I know what students need to do in order to get there. Now I’m ready to go back to what does the teacher need to do, what needs to be built into our program to make that happen. And now I’m ready to go back to all the supports. So what happens in PD, what happens in instructional coaching, what happens in professional learning community, all of that is on the bottom. So I call it planning backwards. So when you’re planning backwards, you get to leadership last. When you implement, leadership goes first and causing things to happen to come up. So if we’re clear on what our outcome is, which should be something student-connected, we then map out the process that would get us there. And now the instructional coaches role is to look at implementing that process. So I’ll give you two quick examples that I’ve played with. An administrator with an elementary staff talks about the fact that the goal for this year is to increase our student math performance and then says to the teacher, what is it that students need to do that would cause their math performance to go up?
[00:06:26.030] – Steve
And the administration gets the teachers to come up with that list of student behaviors. Then I turn to the instructional coach and I say, take that list and make a sandwich board sign so you can walk around and knock on teachers’ doors and say, Here’s what I’m selling. Do you see any student behaviors on here that you want more of in your classroom? And so my job as a coach is to assist you in getting those implemented. So I’m real big on, we didn’t hire instructional coaches to change teacher behavior. We hired instructional coaches to change student behavior because the student behavior is going to cause the learning outcome. Now, you can’t change student behavior without changing teacher behavior. But the coach is supporting the teacher in getting the student learning behaviors that the teacher wants. So to connect it, a new coach goes up to administrator and says, I want to be clear on your expectations. And the administrator says, raise those reading scores. And I encourage the coach that time to look at the administrator and say, I got it, but I’m the person who can’t wait that long for feedback. So as an administrator, tell me, when you’re going in and out of classrooms, what would you see kids and teachers doing that would cause you to think reading performance is going to go up?
[00:07:55.670] – Steve
Now I know that as an instructional coach, I’m working on the same things that the principal believes will get us there. And if the principal and I don’t agree on that on the front-end, then that’s where we got to spend our time and energy. That’s got to be part of the coach-principle partnership is that you’ve got an agreement on That’s back to my hypothesis, not again. We believe that if teachers did this, getting kids to do this, that’s what get us to the outcome. So we can measure progress along the way.
[00:08:29.260] – Kim
Okay, so many good things there. I really appreciate your step-by-step, start with the outcomes, and we get planning backward. Love that. I really like the way you took the description of what teachers would see in the classroom as indicators of students growing. And then the coach is using that language to essentially sell their services, because that’s something I talk about all the time is you need to communicate in a language that teachers are using. You might have a lot of fancy language for what you describe that you do and you can offer as a coach. But if you’re not using the language of teachers, it’s going to be hard for them to make the connection between what they really want and what you’re offering because you’re talking about two different things, even if it’s the same thing, just fancy jargon. So that’s such a beautiful way for coaches to be involved in a process that puts student learning at the center but aligns it so closely with what the school or division or principal goals are.
[00:09:26.890] – Steve
If I can give you a connector on that, I push that with coaches when they’re modeling. So if a coach is going in to model something for a teacher, I suggest that the first time you model, the teacher places all of her attention on the students. So what did the coach get the students to do? And now the conversation with the teacher is, is that what you want to get kids to do? If it is, come back and model again. And this time when I model, you can watch me and look for connections between what I’m doing and what the students are doing. But too often, coaches go in to model, the teacher watches the coach, tries to mirror it or copy it without having an understanding of why the coach is making the decision she’s making, both in the planning and in the execution. If we can get crystal clear, this is what we’re working to get kids to do. And now as a coach, I’m your partner with the teacher. Our goal is to get kids to do this.
[00:10:36.890] – Kim
And that connects totally for me. I often reference Looking for learning, which is a model of peer observation for out-of-field work. They talk about looking for learning for what the students are doing. And a lot of times when I hear coaches struggling, the teacher doesn’t know what they want help with, but they know they want me in the classroom. And I’m like, well, can you look at what students are doing and just report that? It doesn’t even It doesn’t have to be fancy data collection, which sometimes feels intimidating for people. Just write down, what are they doing? If you can, talk to the kids about what they’re doing and just share quotes back to teachers because all they need to do is hear three or four quotes from three or four different students in the room, and immediately they’ll be like, oh, I could work on this, I could work on this, I could work on this. I didn’t know that was happening. Because you can’t be everywhere all at once. And the focus on students is what everyone’s there for and what everyone cares about. And that makes it a lot less confrontational in a very positive way.
[00:11:36.910] – Steve
So I have a pretty long history, which is another way of saying I’m getting to be an old man who’s passed retirement age and I’m excited not to leave. But that’s the biggest change that occurred across my history. If you were to look back at my work 30 years ago, I was spending time in classrooms, observing teachers and giving teachers feedback on what I saw them doing. And today, 90 plus percent of my time in a classroom, I’m observing kids and what the kids are doing. So my pre-conference is based around getting the teacher to tell me what it is she’s working to get kids to do. And then my post-conference is about reporting back to the teacher what the kids did. So where did the kids do what you wanted them to do? And why do you think they did it? That’s going to reinforce decisions you made. Where weren’t the kids doing what you wanted them to do? And now that’s a reason to change. And we don’t have to look at what you’re doing as being right or wrong. But today with these kids at this time, that wasn’t it. So what else could it be?
[00:12:50.070] – Steve
And to me, that’s the hard part of teaching, that you can figure out something else, but you’re always making your judgment as to whether or not your behavior is getting the student behavior.
[00:13:05.540] – Kim
I can always remember, I don’t know if I read it first or I heard it from you in person first, but that – what do you want the classroom to look, sound, and feel like? That’s one of your questions. It’s something you said for sure, because in my head, it’s tied to your name. I think about that all the time. That’s always a go-to question for me, because if you can describe what you want to see happening in the classroom, then you can figure out what is it that I need to do to ensure that that happens. And it takes… there’s something about that question or something about this perspective of looking at what students are doing that takes the immediate pressure off the teacher, even though ultimately they’re still deciding what they’re going to do. It’s like as soon as you say, well, I wish they’d be doing this. Okay. Well, how do we get them to do that?
[00:13:47.800] – Steve
It makes the coach a partner.
[00:13:49.480] – Kim
Yes.
[00:13:50.280] – Steve
If you’re going to have a partnership or a team, you have to have a common goal.
[00:13:54.520] – Kim
Yes.
[00:13:55.260] – Steve
So once the teacher describes what she wants to get the students to do, and I can agree with that… if my background in knowledge says that’s not going to get us where we need to go, then that’s the conversation we need to have. But as soon as I can get the teacher to describe a student learning production behavior that’s likely to get us there, I can be all in now as your partner. So if I have an idea to offer you, the reason I’m offering you that idea is because you told me what you want to make happen, and my task is to assist you in making that happen. It’s not my task to tell you what you should do.
[00:14:35.460] – Steve
Coaching as a teacher’s partner, a thinking partner. I really like when I can build that approach into my coaching work. As a thinking partner with a teacher, we’re exploring how to gain the identified student success, and that goal creates an open opportunity for both teacher and coach learning. That learning, the learning of the teacher and the coach, pays off in student learning. Again, you can find the link to the entire podcast with Kim in the show’s lead-in notes. We discussed many other topics. I’d encourage you to go back and bring that podcast up and listen to the whole thing. As always, thanks for listening. I’m always here for your questions, your thoughts, and comments at barkleypd.com.
[00:15:39.810] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
