How do instructional coaches address the mentoring concerns and needs of new teachers? Joellen Killion, senior advisor to LearningForward and international consultant to educational leaders addressing professional learning for student success, joins Steve to explore the mentoring elements of instructional coaching. They examine how instructional coaches and administrators can plan for novice teachers’ transitions from learning the “ways of the school through mentoring” to seeking “personal growth for increased student success” through coaching.

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Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.300] – 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.

[00:00:29.990] – Steve

Coaching New Teachers. I’m delighted to welcome a long-term colleague in the field of coaching and teacher professional learning to the podcast. Joellen Killion champions educator learning as the primary pathway to student success. She serves school systems, schools, regional state, and national agencies within the United States and abroad as a consultant and learning facilitator. She is Senior Advisor to Learning Forward, and formerly was its Deputy Executive Director. Joellen leads, facilitates, and contributes to a number of initiatives related to examining the link between professional Development and Student Learning. She has over 30 years of experience in planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of professional learning at the school system, state, and international level. Currently, Joellen and I both serve on an advisory board to the Association for the advancement of Instructional Coaching in International Schools. Joellen is a prolific author, having published articles and books, helpful to all of us, focused on educator growth for increased student learning.

[00:01:53.830] – Steve

She is returning to this podcast, having joined us a few times over the years. I I had the opportunity recently to participate in presentations Joellen provided at the recent ESC 13 Coaching Conference in Austin, Texas. In a breakout session on Coaching New teachers, she shared several insights that I wanted her to share with all of you. So welcome, Joellen and thank you so much for joining us.

[00:02:25.000] – Joellen

Thank you, Steve. It’s always a pleasure to be with you. I learn with you, I learn from you, and I’m eager to talk about coaching new teachers.

[00:02:35.450] – Steve

Well, certainly the same in every experience I’ve had with you. I’m wondering if you’d start with a description of some of the similarities and differences in providing mentoring versus providing instructional coaching.

[00:02:51.380] – Joellen

Steve, that’s a great beginning for us. And I think about it because so many instructional coaches have asked me over the years, how do I work with new teachers who don’t have an experience base and sometimes lean on me as a coach too often to be a consultant rather than a coach. And so I grew up with this in my own experience. And what I’ve learned is that mentoring and coaching have many similarities. We’re there to build relationships, we’re there to build comfort and capacity of our clients, our primary purpose is to help people feel and build their professional expertise. But there’s a difference in how we go about it. I talk about mentors as one of the 10 roles instructional coaches can serve in, and primarily in that role, the job of a mentor is to acculturate and acclimate a new teacher or new to the school staff member to the culture within that school, to learn and understand the norms and the agreements that exist, the relationship, how things are done. And that’s not something new teachers or a new to a school staff member can figure out on their own unless we let them falter into it through a number of mistakes they might make.

[00:04:30.250] – Joellen

It’s easier to just help build their understanding of that by being pretty forthright and sharing outright how things are done here. Who talks to whom, when, when do you go to the principal with an issue? When do you talk to your teammates with an issue? Where do you find your supplies? When is it okay to ask questions in meetings? These are things that are natural experience experiences for mentors to share with new teachers. What we find coaches are doing more often is really concentrating deeply on capacity building and truly drawing out that professional expertise, focusing on professional growth goals, setting those goals with their client teachers, helping them find the appropriate pathway to to achieve those goals, provide opportunities for them to engage in continuous feedback processes through coaching cycles. And that’s a different practice, different from sharing rules, regulations, procedures. So while I might use effective communications strategies in both cases, the work I’m doing and my expectations of my clients vary.

[00:06:03.010] – Steve

So I’m trying to think about a building where I’m an instructional coach, and the building has a mentor program for new teachers. So there’s people in the building or people across the district who are assigned to be the mentor. You got thoughts on how the instructional coach would interact with those folks?

[00:06:28.750] – Joellen

Probably building on something I’ve heard you say a number of times, Steve, and that is to have the coach, coach the mentors, help the new mentors or mentors develop their capacity to be engaged in that peer interaction with those new teachers who need deeper support and perhaps more frequent support than an instructional coach might be able to provide. So coaching those mentors, helping them understand how to use processes that can help mentor teachers figure out their strengths and where their areas of development are, help the mentors learn ways to support new teachers. So I think one of the chief responsibilities of a coach in a building with a mentoring program is to be responsible either for training mentors or coaching mentors to provide the support their new teachers need.

[00:07:35.490] – Steve

When I get a chance to do mentor training, one of the pieces I like to lay out to the mentors is that I encourage them to invite the instructional coach to coach the mentor as a teacher and let the mentee sit in and observe it so that the mentor has the opportunity to model in effect for the new teacher. Of all the other things you label that you should know about the culture, here’s a great chance to model what the coaching culture looks like. Here’s how you can work with an instructional coach and the mentor gets to model that, which then also makes it easier for the beginning teacher to be open to the mentor’s input because the mentor has shown that that’s part of the profession.

[00:08:31.100] – Joellen

Absolutely. I always said, if I could be in charge of the world for a day, one of the things I would do is to choose the school in which all new teachers taught. Because that culture that you mentioned, Steve, shapes what happens in that ongoing career-long development of new teachers. And when we can build coachability, when we can model what it means to be continuously learning, when we can model that everyone is coached, not just some are coached, we have the opportunity to really create environments in which learning is our primary purpose, learning for everyone, adults and students.

[00:09:29.280] – Steve

I’m almost interpreting, and this hit me when I listened to you in the presentation at the conference, that there’s a balancing act that the instructional coach gets involved in. There’s a piece of this that’s mentoring, but too far down that road, and now I’m losing the time to be the instructional coach role that I need to be in. I’m pretty sure I’ve worked in some places where I think administrators are sending that mentoring role over to the instructional coach, in which case there’s no option, but it has to come off of other things that I’m now not doing because that’s been on the prioritization list.

[00:10:12.790] – Joellen

I agree with you. I understand that in some schools, it is just simply out of necessity that the instructional coach assumes the role of mentor, in which case the coach is really focused, maybe maybe for the first month, maybe for the first six weeks, on making sure the new teacher understands processes, procedures, has supplies, resources, has the curriculum knowledge to be able to be an effective teacher, to have that intensive support, to be effective day to day, and to really feel a part of a community. But at some point, that needs to shift. It’s not going to go away. We’re always going to be working on that inclusivity in that, belonging in that, psychological safety. But the focus has to move from that being our primary purpose to continuous professional growth and development as our purpose so that we can make sure that students are receiving the best teaching and learning experiences every day. Without that That conscious shift in what a coach does, a coach can be focusing too much on what I’ve always called coaching light, making the person feel happy and content.

[00:11:43.680] – Steve

[laughter] I’m sorry I’m laughing because that’s where my mind went as I heard you start that sentence, that that was the mistake we made way back when.

[00:11:55.260] – Joellen

Yeah. Coaching light versus coaching heavy.

[00:11:58.070] – Steve

Go ahead and spell that out for folks. It’s so powerful.

[00:12:02.240] – Joellen

Coaching light is about making people happy. It’s about the coach feeling as if he or she’s contributing by sharing my story, my expertise, telling you how I do things, and really being that degree of support that helps a person feel comfortable. And unwilling, what happens in coaching light is that the coach is unwilling to cause the dissonance that will later lead to deeper growth. It’s when the coach holds the intention of creating that dissonance and really digging in and helping a client discover the right answer, discover his or her own potential, make decisions through a facilitative process. It’s in that work where we build competence, courage, we build expertise, and we build the capacity of a client to continue to learn and grow without the coach. And that’s what we are striving to be able to accomplish. We want to get to a point where the coach is not necessary. The coaches are always going to find work to do. That’s never a question. But we want a person to be able to be self-coaching, to learn the strategies of how to ask the questions, how to pause in reflection, how to hold them, create an experiment, test things out, gather data, and make decisions.

[00:13:49.360] – Joellen

So coaching light is really about making people happy. It’s about building that culture of everybody feeling good. But it’s not necessarily leading to feeling that I’m growing and learning and building that sense of maybe discomfort that causes me to continue questioning and investigating my practice. So it’s a topic I think that merits consideration. I’d say mentors’ primary job is to coach light for a period of time. And if that’s what instructional coaches are doing with new teachers the building, let’s get them comfortable. Let’s build a relationship that will allow us to shift from comfort to perhaps productive and constructive at a little later date. But let’s always make that transition.

[00:14:47.230] – Steve

I stole the line from a school years ago. They were having a discussion of how long they thought mentoring should be available to incoming teachers. And they landed at the spot that when the new teacher threw open the doors of her classroom and said, “You may all come in,” that was the end of the mentor program. So the job of the mentor was to build your self-confidence, to build your collegiality, your understanding of the profession to where you were ready to now, in effect, take on being a learning professional.

[00:15:28.540] – Joellen

That’s a beautiful, beautiful line. I love it.

[00:15:31.830] – Steve

When you throw open the doors and say, you all come in.

[00:15:37.900] – Joellen

Transparency of our professional practice becomes the norm. That’s awesome.

[00:15:46.420] – Steve

So I’m big on the coach-principle partnership in reaching an agreement. I describe it, if you’re an effective coach, the thing you’re going to have to say quite frequently is no. You’re going to have more request than you can possibly handle. So you’ve got to have a prioritization protocol, almost, to work from. So I’m big on that coach-principle partnership, helping a coach establish that so they can be in that decision-making. So if we were looking at novice teachers in a building and the need for mentoring, what do you think the conversation might be between the principal and the instructional coach as they work out a plan?

[00:16:31.730] – Joellen

Well, first of all, I want to share with you that that’s a big issue for me, too. And one of the areas that I think often goes unaddressed, that partnership. We call them Cindy Harrison, my co-author in “Taking the Lead,” we call them partnership agreements. And sometimes we forget how important it is not only to have a partnership agreement with the teacher I’m working with, but also with the supervisor, my own supervisor, and the supervisor of the teacher. In the case of new teachers, I would first and foremost have a conversation with the principal about whether or not the principal expects me, as the coach, to be reporting on performance. I have mixed feelings about whether that should be included in an agreement, whether it should be one way or the other, I definitely believe it needs to be discussed and a decision made, but I can see advantages both ways. When a teacher is brand new to a building and brand new to a profession, there is an advantage of having a third perspective on how things are going and the support that might be needed to increase success or continue success or promote success.

[00:18:01.770] – Joellen

So sometimes if the instructional coach can go to the principal and say, this is a teacher who really could benefit from having an opportunity to visit classrooms, where classroom management is really strong, and I’d love for you to grant a half a day or a day of observing time for the teacher to make that happen, then I think that should occur. I do think there’s a line of holding coaches as a supervisor or reporting any evaluative information, meaning that I wouldn’t expect a principal to hold a coach accountable for contributing to the evaluation of a new teacher unless, and I’ve seen this happen successfully, that is how it is done. I’ve seen that in many school districts across the US, where mentors do sit as a part of a supervisory team. But I think this is something that needs to be discussed so that it is clear, known to both the new teacher and mentor and instructional coach and principal. We have our expectations on the table. There are other things I think need to go into that agreement. One is how often there needs to be meetings between the instructional coach and the principal.

[00:19:27.910] – Joellen

What gets included in those meetings meetings or what doesn’t get included. I think particularly new coaches are unwilling to ask principals for support when they need it, to find opportunities for their own coaching. And I hope that principals in these conversations can make that a part of the conversation. Here are two or three people you could go to and you want to have a coaching conversation. If you don’t come to me about that, where do coaches get their own development if there isn’t a designated coach champion to support them? So essentially, confidentiality, reporting meetings, these are really big areas to include in that coach and principal conversation. And certainly, any expectation about evaluation supervision needs to be included.

[00:20:28.140] – Steve

I’m almost seeing the coaches being able to provide some coaching to the administrator.

[00:20:32.630] – Joellen

[laughter] I would love it.

[00:20:34.700] – Steve

The administrator has this responsibility, let’s call it at a minimum, supervisory. Certainly, I would hope an administrator sees his or her role as being responsible for the growth and success of a new teacher. And so a coach who maybe is getting to spend more time with that teacher than the principal gets to spend can be in a great role in that conversation with the principal to highlight almost like what you said about arranging the time for the teacher to observe in other classrooms, help the administrator step into positive roles. I think the coach could be in a spot to do that. So if I could encourage administrators listening to this to lay the guidelines for that, make it easy as possible for a coach to speak up and make those suggestions to an administrator.

[00:21:35.010] – Joellen

Certainly. And in every school, one of the ways we can tell that a coaching culture exists, Steve, is that every one has access to coaching, and particularly the principal is involved in coaching. Maybe not in the same way that an instructional coach is providing coaching to teachers, but certainly leadership or executive coaching is occurring. Coaching culture does not exist when some people have access to and participate in coaching. It only happens when everyone has access to and participates in coaching. And it can be different kinds of coaching. There can be peer coaching, there can be leadership and executive coaching, there can be instructional coaching. It doesn’t have to be the same. But it’s a fairly inclusive practice that tells me that the coaching culture really is valued and being attended to in a school.

[00:22:45.400] – Steve

I think I would say I’d question any chance of getting to collective teacher efficacy if you don’t build that a coaching culture. It’s a shared account ability and responsibility with each other for the success of all the kids. So we can have all different roles play in that, but that’s where the coachability piece comes in.

[00:23:13.800] – Joellen

Absolutely.

[00:23:15.690] – Steve

Well, any last thoughts you got? This podcast is going to hit at a time when the new teachers are, I guess, getting through what might be a honeymoon period, if there is one. New coaches are landing there with new teachers, with new administrators. Any last thoughts as to what people ought to keep in mind right now?

[00:23:41.050] – Joellen

I’d say my primary last thought to all of the coaches and to coach supervisors is to encourage the transition from what might be that coaching light phase, which is the start of a school year. It’s building those relationships relationships, building that sense of comfort and belonging, as I mentioned, to now make that transition to promoting excellence in professional practice. And that transition needs to it needs to be deliberate, it needs to be declared, and it needs to occur sooner in the school year than many have often thought. So I would encourage coaches to begin to think about when that transition will happen and hold themselves accountable for the job of building the professional expertise needed to ensure that every single student is successful every single day.

[00:24:48.310] – Steve

I thought of one more word as I heard you lay that whole piece out, and that is it’s actually celebrating that transition. I think if people saw that moment as a celebration of the true progress we’re making, both individually and collectively as an organization.

[00:25:11.210] – Joellen

That’s our transition to collective efficacy, as you said. We’re on the on-ramp when we’re coaching light. We’re on the on-ramp. But once we merge over onto that pathway of collective efficacy, that’s when our practice shifts.

[00:25:32.640] – Steve

Well, I knew it was going to be great to have this time with you, and it was, as always. I really appreciate it. I’m wondering an easy way that listeners might follow up with you if they have a question or keep track of the work you’re doing these days.

[00:25:48.580] – Joellen

Well, one thing I want listeners to know is that the August issue of the Learning Professional will have my latest reprise. I think it’s the reprise of the reprise on Coaching Heavy and Coaching Light. So this is like my fourth or fifth iteration. And so that’s out. And I encourage people to look forward to that. And they can always reach out to me at jpkilllion@mac.com.

[00:26:27.350] – Steve

We’ll post that in the lead-in. And since you said that, you need to know, I guess about a year back, I did a series of blogs and podcasts on bringing new coaches up to speed on what it was we were doing 30 years ago. And I built one of those sessions just around your first publication of Coaching Light and Coaching Heavy because it set the stage for countless conversations and program building for people. So I will be jumping to get that copy and read that myself.

[00:27:04.660] – Joellen

Well, and I’ve used your work, I’m coaching heavy in Coaching Life, to introduce the concept to new teachers or new coaches. Interestingly enough, I had a group of coaches not too long ago who wanted me to talk to their principles about coaching happy and coaching light, and I used your piece. So thank you, Steve. Thank you. You’ve made it easy for me.

[00:27:30.060] – Steve

It’s great. We’ll do this again.

[00:27:32.460] – Joellen

Alright.

[00:27:34.540] – Steve

Take care.

[00:27:35.370] – Joellen

Take care.

[00:27:35.520] – Steve

Have a great day.

[00:27:36.810] – Joellen

You, too.

[00:27:40.210] – 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.