Jim Knight joins Steve to highlight the seven factors for success in his most recent book on instructional coaching. Jim and Steve’s coaching experiences over the past two plus decades highlight a look at who coaches are, the work coaches do, and where they work. A great resources for coaches, the leaders who support them, and the administrators who partner in building a culture of coaching in schools.
Find Jim’s book, “The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching: Seven Factors for Success,” here.
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Steve [Intro]: 00:00 Hello and welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. Instructional coaches and leaders create the environment that supports teachers to continually imagine, grow and achieve. They model an excitement for learning that teachers in turn model for students. This podcast is dedicated to promoting the important aspects of instructional leadership. Thanks for listening.
Steve: 00:28 Jim Knight’s definitive guide to instructional coaching. I always value every opportunity I have to think and learn more about coaching with Jim and as I wrote that line down for myself, I realized I should extend it to learn more about life as I interact with Jim. We’ve had many conversations across the years and I’m especially excited to have Jim join us today to provide an introduction to his new book, The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching: Seven Factors for Success. Welcome, Jim. Great to have you here.
Jim: 01:10 It’s great to be here. When I wrote instructional coaching in 2006, I think it says 2007, but I think I released it in 2006, there were very few books on coaching and one of the first ones I read was your book on creating a culture for coaching. So I must have been reading that about – when did it come out? 2000? something like that? 2002?
Steve: 01:32 Yeah, right in there.
Jim: 01:34 So you and I – this is gonna be the 17th teaching learning coaching conference and you were there like the first, second one. Maybe not the first, but the one of the very first ones. So we’ve known each other, it’s getting on close to two decades. Pretty remarkable.
Steve: 01:54 Well, laughingly love to tell the story about you, Joellen Killion and I appearing in that first video on instructional coaching, but no realizing we had never met each other because they filmed each of us in isolation and then put it together in that clip. So Jim, why don’t you start us off with a little bit about what led you to to writing this book.
Jim: 02:19 Well, I’ve written a lot of different books over the years about, first off, the book instructional coaching, which is kind of obsolete now because I’ve been doing a lot of research since then. So the partnership principles remain, but a lot of it is different. And so there’s, “High Impact Instruction,” was a book I put out about teaching practices. And then I’ve talked about of data in a lot of different places and better conversations about communication. Then, “The Impact Cycle is the Coaching Process.” So I thought we need a book that puts it all together in one place. And then I kind of hubristically chose the title, “The Definitive Guide,” but I chose that title sort of as a focus. I said, I really wanna be able to give people our way of understanding coaching based on our work over the last couple decades. This is kind of the way I would put it together. So I wanted to make it pretty short so not it’s not too difficult to read. So it’s shorter than some of my other books and yet it’s kind of covering the whole thing. So that’s what I was trying to do is come up with a book that summarizes everything in one place and if you want to go deeper, you can look up the other stuff or look at other people’s versions of the same thing.
Steve: 03:34 I have to say that as I read through it, you really done exactly what you just said. I found myself at spots, kind of historically revisiting, and then at other spots, looking forward to where you were shining the light. So great job and listeners, I want to highly recommend it. I thought the way we might jump into this, Jim, is you laid the book out in in three sections and I was thinking we could take a look at each of those three sections. You titled the first section “who you are” and in that section, you lay out three of the seven factors of the book. So how about we jump in and take a look at that?
Jim: 04:29 Sure. I will say the book was not easy to write. I had it in my mind, well, I’ve done all this stuff, it should be really easy to just do it. And that old saying, I think it’s Mark Twain or somebody who says, “sorry it’s such a long letter, I didn’t have time enough to write a short one” was born out by this book because at one point, I had probably over a hundred thousand words and it eventually was 65,000 words. So it was hard to do, but it’s great to have it done. So yeah, as I thought about all the work we’ve done, I thought, well, part of it is the person you are that you bring to coaching. And then there’s what you do and then there’s where you work. Those are kind of the things.
Jim: 05:10 And so under the who you are, I would say, a fundamental message of our work, which may or may not be embraced in different places, but it’s that we really believe that the way forward is to treat teachers as professionals capable of making decisions for themselves and people who will flourish when they’re engaged in what I call life giving conversations. And doing something to a teacher, let me tell you we did right, let me tell you we did wrong, giving advice or, for lack of better terms, forcing them to do something, it’s a dehumanizing act and it minimizes the effect of the potential for professional growth. And it doesn’t mean a coach wouldn’t at different times say, is it okay with you if I share some ideas? And as my friend Christian Vanderberg says, if somebody shows up in their car and says to you can you tell me how to get to city hall?
Jim: 06:16 They don’t want to say, “well, when you’ve been lost before, what’s worked for you?” They just wanna know how to get there. So there’s times to deal with these things, but I think the person you are is really important. And I’ve really been taken since writing the book by this concept of a life giving conversation, a conversation where you feel more alive, more energized, when you feel like your time is really well spent. Maybe you feel closer to the person you work with, but you feel better about life as a result of that conversation. And I’m convinced that conversations are, are critical for our wellbeing and happiness and success and COVID has brought that out as we’ve been isolated and thankfully we’ve had Zoom. Imagine if this had happened in 1980 when we didn’t have Zoom. We’d have to have all these conversations on the phone, what kind of
alienation and separation we’d experience. At least zoom gives you a person to look at.
Jim: 07:15 So then I organized that around three big ideas. First off, the beliefs that guide the work, the principles that guide the work, and for us, that’s what we call the partnership principles, which is about in essence, not thinking I’m better than the other person and essentially, really seeing the dignity and the value of every individual and celebrating that. And if anybody has more power in the relationship, we would say it probably needs to be the teacher not the coach. The coach is there to help the teacher. Then the second thing would be the way we communicate. And there’s about 10 habits and better conversations but in this book, I focus on two, which is the way you listen and the way you ask questions. And I read a lot of books about listening and questioning and try to summarize it.
Jim: 08:00 And then the third part is how you lead. How you lead yourself and how you lead others. And leading yourself is really about, well, what is my purpose and how can I make time for it? And then how can I change? How can I develop habits? And in the midst of leading myself, how do I ensure that I take care of myself? Self care, self compassion. And then leading others is really about being a multiplier versus a diminisher to use Liz Wiseman’s words. To be the kind of person that helps people expand their capacities, to learn more, be more, and it’s being ambitious for change and deeply respectful of teachers at the same time. That’s a critical thing. When I sit at a table and I have some coaches that are flourishing and some aren’t really going very far, the ones who are flourishing, they’ve got their act together.
Jim: 08:50 They’re on time, they’re organized. They’re ot pushy, but they’re ambitious for change, they won’t let it rest and they’re deeply respectful of teachers. And the ones who are struggling, one of those two things or maybe both is missing. But if I’m ambitious but not respectful of teachers, teachers are gonna push back. And if I’m respectful, but I’m not ambitious for change, I’m a little disorganized, nobody wants to waste time. So you need those two things. So that’s the who I am part. What are my beliefs? How do I communicate? How do I lead myself? And how do I lead others?
Steve: 09:23 That piece that you just labeled there, sounds to me, very similar to the teacher in the classroom. It’s the high expectation for the student and the push, but at the same time, the tremendous respect for who the student is and where he or she is at.
Jim: 09:48 Well, that’s certainly gonna be a teacher we wanna study with or we wanna work with. Often, it’s that they see more than us. This is what teachers tell me hen I ask them the question about the teacher who had the biggest influence. They saw something in me I didn’t know was there. That’s the message I hear all the time.
Steve: 10:05 Which is similar then to the great coach.
Steve: 10:11 Something in the teacher that I maybe didn’t see in myself.
Jim: 10:14 Well, I think you have to communicate faith in the person and you have to communicate that I believe in you and , a strength based
approach, our brains are wired probably for evolutionary reasons to see the negative, but a coach has to be really, really – you don’t want to go to somebody who’s gonna roll their eyes when you’re talking, you want to go to somebody who’s got your back, who believes in you and a coach has to be that person.
Steve: 10:42 Jim, when I was reading through the leadership section, you you wrote that coaches need to balance ambition with humility and I’m wondered if you’d expand on that a little bit.
Jim: 10:57 Yeah. Initially, Jim Collins wrote about that in “Good to Great,” I’m sure you read all the books I read Steve, so I’m sure you’re
very familiar with it. But we did a study in Florida where we started with a pool over 2000 coaches and we narrowed it down eventually to five. We wanted to have a representative group so we had rural coaches and urban coaches and suburban coaches. And then we called it a great coach study. We wanted to go to these coaches who are really flourishing. And we all went and we interviewed the teachers, principal, person who supervises the coach, who at that time in Florida was external to the school, and we did two interviews with the t the coach before.
Jim: 11:43 When we first got there, we interviewed the coach, and then when we were done, we interviewed the coach. Then we took all that data and we put it into a program and looked for common themes. And it came out again and again and again, that having your act together, being organized was a really, really important part of it. And the other part is that they’re really emotionally intelligent, responsible, responsive to teachers, good listeners. I don’t know if I like the finding too much because I would hear these great coaches were ones who would just do whatever it took to make it happen. So one principal, the principal in school I interviewed, he said he said, when I leave the school, there’s only one other car in the parking lot and that’s the coaches. So these coaches were so dedicated and committed to the work and to making it happen.
Jim: 12:34 They might have been over-dedicated because I really do think we have to prioritize self care. But that’s what we heard. So for example, a coach might go to a teacher and just look at the teacher and go, “do you need a break today? I know we’re supposed to meet today, but is there anything I can do for you?” But then when they leave the room, they’re like, but I’m gonna get back tomorrow. They’re on it all the time, they don’t let it go for two weeks. They don’t let anything slide. And they’re always thinking, how can I get this teacher to work, like, they’re always thinking about how to make the change happen, but all also driven from a place of my job is not to do a thing to the teacher, but to help the teacher realize their own potential. I’m not forcing myself in any way, but I’m also ambitious.
Steve: 13:26 I’m hearing a sense of urgency for what you wanna have happen for kids, but at the same time, having the understanding of the humanness of the teacher.
Jim: 13:42 Yeah. I know people talk about urgency. What worries me about urgency is I don’t want people to feel stressed. I don’t want hurry. I don’t want it to feel like, oh, I’m behind, I gotta keep up. I think it’s more like really efficient maybe is a way to put it. Efficient, but a kind of calm efficiency that that gets things done.
Steve: 14:10 So it’s important more than urgent.
Jim: 14:14 Yeah. I mean the danger of urgent, it can force you to do quick fixes.
Steve: 14:23 That’s exactly it. Bingo.
Jim: 14:26 So that term worries me. I know that Potter I think is the one who uses the idea of urgency, but I worry about hurry.
Steve: 14:35 Yeah. I’m kind of looking at it now with COVID impact, that urgency for student growth doesn’t mean hurrying student growth, but it’s the importance long term of the really important pieces.
Jim: 14:54 Right.
Steve: 14:56 Let’s go onto the second section of the book, Jim. You described that as what you do and you offer up three more of the seven factors there.
Jim: 15:07 Right. So we’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what coaches do. Like, what’s the process they follow. And in instructional coaching, I had like an eight stage thing where it’s kind of linear and it was really about learning a teaching strategy. So we’re gonna use this eight stage model for learning how to do concept diagram for teaching concepts or whatever it might be.
Jim: 15:35 And as we kept working with coaches, we used a little process of research called lean design research, which is a kind of a combination of the lean startup and traditional kinds of design research. So it’s a fancy way of saying the coaches would try it out, we’d ask some what roadblocks they were hitting, and then we’d interview people and look at the literature and they would help us problem solve and then we would go at it again. I don’t know if you remember this, but before Learning Forward was Learning Forward, you and I sat down in a Starbucks at the conference, national staff development conference in St. Louis, and we were in the midst of that process and we realized that our questions weren’t working. And so I sought out you and for example, you gave me the question that now is at the heart of what we do.
Jim: 16:29 “On a scale of one to 10, how close was that class to your ideal?” And some other questions you gave me were like, “how’s this practice working for you?” Or, “if the practice was working, what would it look like?” And then we talked to other people, Susan Scott, I went to her workshop at that conference. I interviewed Joellen Killion and Bruce Wellman and that’s how we revised it. So one of the things we we changed is the way we ask questions. Another thing we changed is the way we do modeling in the classroom, if we do modeling at all. And the use of video became a thing that we figured out how to do it more effectively. And you and I actually, as we sat at that Starbucks, we talked a little bit about videos, because I was starting to see the power of video. And so for example, goal setting, they came up with this acronym peers goals, but that came from reading several books about goal setting and looking at how they summarized the literature.
Jim: 17:25 And each time we would make an iteration, we would do some change. First we tried smart goals and we went to peers goals and then we
had a list long list of questions and then we kind of filtered the list of questions into ones that were highest impact. And ultimately, we came up with this idea of the impact cycle, which is the identify part of the cycle is let’s get a clear picture of reality based on that clear picture reality, let’s get a goal and then let’s pick a strategy to hit the goal. So at the end of the identify stage, a teacher has a goal they really care about and they’re ready to go. They’ve got a pathway to the goal. In the learning stage, we do a number of things to help the teacher get ready to implement.
Jim: 18:08 Often we just describe a strategy, maybe we watch a video or go see another teacher. But at the end of the learning stage, the second part of the cycle, the teacher’s ready to go. They’ve learned what they need to be able to implement. Then in the improvement stage, the teacher implements and it rarely works. You know, the first attempt, kids aren’t that interested or it’s distracting in some way. And so then, we make adjustments until we hit the goal. So it could be we change the goal or we change how we measure progress towards the goal or we change how we teach the strategy or we change the strategy. Or sometimes we just wait, hasn’t happened yet, but it’s gonna happen, but we make modifications. So the goal the teacher cares about they’re ready to implement and then we make adjustments.
Jim: 18:50 So to do that cycle, the impact cycle, there’s two things that we need and that’s the other part of what I do. One of them is we need to know how to set goals. So we believe it’s really important to gather data on achievement and it’s really important to gather data on engagement. Engagement’s important because the main reason kids drop about is because of lack of engagement. And so, if we don’t make engagement a priority, we’re gonna lose some kids from the school. And if equity is important, then engagement should be important. Especially emotional engagement, kids feel they belong, they feel safe. And then for achievement, same thing were there’s ways we basically, if it’s knowledge, we’re gonna use a test or a quiz, and if it’s a skill, we’re probably gonna use a rubric. And so instructional coaches need to gather data and then they need to have what we call an instructional playbook, a set of teaching practices that they don’t always use those practices.
Jim: 19:44 And they start by asking the teacher, how do you wanna tackle this issue you’re focused on? And if a teacher has something to do the coach, doesn’t say, oh wait, I’ve got this other thing, they run with what the teacher wants to do. But if the teacher’s like, you’re the coach you’re supposed to tell me, then we have this set of practices. And the playbook is a summary of sort of 18 high impact teaching strategies that the school feels are important and it’s a living document And so it’s a place for recording organizational learning about practices. So if a coach works with a teacher and the teacher says, I think it’s important for the kids to do no opt out when they do this activity and they try it out and they find it to be a thing that works, then they add it into their playbook.
Jim: 20:28 And if other practices aren’t working and they can find something better, maybe the coaching director goes off to ASCD or Learning Forward and learns some new practice. But the playbook – these are the go-to core things. And then there’s tools that you create to help you communicate. Checklists and one pagers. And to create the playbook, you have to understand the practice. So it’s creating a playbook kind of compels the coach to understand the practices and then you create these tools that aid with communication. So under that what the coach does, we have a cycle and to make the cycle happen, we say the coach needs to understand data and then the coach also has to have a set of teaching practices. And that’s kind of what that section of the book’s all about.
Steve: 21:19 So Jim, I’m really hearing across the board and in reading the book, the reinforcement of the teacher in the driver’s seat.
Jim: 21:34 Right,
Steve: 21:39 Increasingly would you say? Across your work over the years, would you stay gone deeper in that direction?
Jim: 21:47 Well, I don’t know. We haven’t gone backwards that’s for sure.
Steve: 21:55
Jim: 21:55 I mean, as you look at the research on human motivation and you just talk to people, DC and Ryan or Miller’s Motivational
Interviewing or Solution Focused Coaching or Appreciative Inquiry, the person is always at the heart of the change initiative.
Jim: 22:11 Now that’s not to say you couldn’t have an initiative across a whole system and you’re helping people learn the system. I always say choice doesn’t mean that you can be unprofessional. You can’t say I teach a little better after I drink some wine and gonna put a little cooler in my classroom. That’s probably not gonna work.
Steve: 22:37
Jim: 22:39 And you know, you can’t choose to be unprofessional. If you’re using microaggressions in the classroom, you’re a toxic force on teams that has to change. That’s not a choice that’s dealt with by the administrator and it’s dealt with directly.
Steve: 22:53 Yeah. Agreed.
Jim: 22:56 And there are just times when you have to step in if you’re the leader because the behavior is unprofessional. But most of the time, coaches are working with professionals who are acting in a professional way. They may be overwhelmed and they may be frustrated by the lack of choice they’ve had historically. And so this is about unleashing the potential of a person, because I have always found that if you treat teachers with respect and you put them together with others and they know that what they’re doing is gonna matter, then nobody’s gonna come along and change it. They’ll stay late. They’ll blow you away. The teachers are so committed. This is a holiday today in a lot of parts of the United States – I bet you a lot of the teachers, unless they’re prioritizing self-care, they’re probably saying I’m gonna go to office Depot. Maybe I can get this thing for my…
Jim: 23:49 There are very few careers where people are more committed. But if you tell people this is what you have to do, it sucks the life right out of them. They don’t want to do it. So when you start with putting the teacher at the center of the change, I think you’ve got a greater likelihood of having a person who’s excited about the change and to do the change you really need to do, the kind of deep change that comes with coaching that has an unmistakably positive impact on kids, it’s not gonna come from compliance. It’s gonna come from commitment and commitment means you need a choice. That’s kind of how I’ve come to see it.
Steve: 24:29 I’ve historically used the number plucked out of the sky, but across all of my time in schools, that percentage of teachers who really don’t want what’s best for kids is so tiny. Now some teachers are at spots in their current state that it doesn’t show right away and part of your coaching time is uncovering that. But it’s almost always there. I always describe that coaches should start with the belief that it’s there, because the number of times that it’s not there are gonna be so small, keep looking for it.
Jim: 25:11 Yeah. And I would say we run the risk of doing the same thing we don’t want teachers to do, which is to blame the kids. If our school is filled with resentful teachers who are resistant to change and who aren’t interested in growing, maybe we need to look to school instead of blaming the teachers.
Steve: 25:29 For sure.
Jim: 25:29 Maybe we need to think about what’s our model for professional development and how are we creating this resistance? As William Miller says, who wrote Motivational Interviewing, it takes two people for there to be resistance. And we always focus on the other and never focus on ourselves. But if I’m really coaching, there shouldn’t be resistance, I should be helping that teacher do what they wanna do.
Steve: 25:54 Let’s go to the last section, Jim of where you work. There were so many issues that I saw in that section for a whole lot of other
people, besides coaches to understand the important roles that they play.
Jim: 26:12 Yeah. So there’s, I think, sort of six or seven key issues there, but if I was gonna prioritize a few, one thing would be role clarity. And for the coach and administrators, have an understanding of what the job entails. You’ve written a lot about this and I’ve learned from you on this, but the danger is the coach is kind of like, well, I don’t know what she does, so I’m gonna give her this and I’m gonna give her this, and I’m gonna give him this. And then pretty quickly, it is not uncommon, when I ask maybe a hundred coaches to calculate how much time they spend on coaching, the average score is less than 25%, sometimes less than 10% spent on coaching. It’s everything under the sun. And then every time the coach has something dumped on them, they lose their momentum in working with the teacher.
Jim: 27:03 And then there’s some things that are bandages, solutions. Like, the coaches have to do walkthroughs because the principals don’t have time. Coaches have to go in and watch the PLC because the PLC won’t function without somebody there watching what happens. Well, make time for the principal to do the walkthrough and develop PLCs that could run themselves that don’t need a coach there. I mean the coach should be there when they can be a resource, but they shouldn’t be babysitters. That’s kind of silly. I think if the coach is asked to do a million different things, it’s harder for them to ever really engage cycles. I think it attacks their efficacy becuase they know this isn’t really what I signed up for, but I’m doing all this other stuff.
Jim: 27:53 So that’s one thing, role clarity. And then just things like how the principal and the coach are gonna communicate and what the policy is around confidentiality. I think it’s important to be really clear with everybody, this is our policy and then live by it. And then I have this concept in there of a learning architecture, which is that if a teacher learns something from her students, that teacher should be able to tell the coach and the coach should be able to tell everybody in the system. And so within a matter of minutes, certainly within a matter of less than a week, a cool idea is spread across the whole system. So you have coaches in the schools, they’re learning from each other. And then similarly, you know the administrators understand what coaching is and ideally the administrators learn how to do at least a coaching approach. They understand the concept of coaching and there’s a widespread recognition because coaching should actually be fun. It should be a good thing. This person believes in me, encourages me, is gonna help me do more of what I want to do, take some stuff off my shoulders so I can do this. How cool is that? I mean, there should be a recognition that the coach is not some burden. The coach is actually a very, very good thing and that requires widespread understanding across the system.
Steve: 29:19 A few weeks back, I posted on Twitter that peer coaching or instructional coaching was not putting something else on teachers plates.
Steve: 29:34 And I got more responses than I have in a while. But the fact that that thought is out there tells us that the messages that you’ve
just described about roles has been missing.
Jim: 29:53 Yeah. I would say if the coach doesn’t make the teacher’s life easier, doesn’t have the teacher reach more kids, teachers are right to resist. And that’s a bad use of a resource, a coach who understands the seven success factors should actually help teachers have a much bigger impact and actually make the teachers life easier. Another part of this system that’s important is the idea of psychological safety, creating a place where people feel open and comfortable sharing ideas, and they’re willing to be a little bit vulnerable.
Steve: 30:31 I was gonna label it as trust. Everything that you described in that, in that section as to what needs to happen within the system, it’s very difficult for a coach to develop the trust with teachers that’s that’s necessary when those when those things are missing.
Jim: 30:51 Yeah. I think we’re, I don’t know if wired is the right word, but we have a tendency to be defensive. So if I have a workshop and the evaluations aren’t very good, my first reaction isn’t usually, oh, I wonder what I need to change. It’s like, well, no wonder the room was so cold and you know, the superintendent talked for 20 minutes.
Steve: 31:13 Been there.
Steve: 31:17 Yeah.
Jim: 31:18 And actually, that’s what they say about feedback, is you have this initial negative reaction.
Jim: 31:25 And I think the same thing can happen in systems is that we look for somebody to blame and then people feel ashamed. I’ve been in some meetings where the scores for assessments have been shared with the staff and there’ll be a statement like “people, we need to do better.” And those people are doing all they can. All they do is they go home feeling ashamed. Like I should do better, but I don’t know what to do. And they feel diminished, you know, and we need the opposite. We need workplaces that help us expand our capacities and help us grow. And data is important, but the data ideally, that’s iterative and weekly, helping the teacher see their progress towards things, not something that just happens every once in a while.
Steve: 32:13 Well, Jim, as we as we look to to wrap up here, I was wondering if you got some thoughts as to where coaching heads as we’re hopefully are moving post COVID. A lot of coaches got pulled out of the coaching process side. I was just on a Zoom with a coach I’ve been been working with across the year and she just found out she’s gonna be fifth grade replacement teacher for the for the for the end of the year. Coaches end up doing a whole lot of different things, Any thoughts on how we get the focus on the role of what we wanna have happen with coaching as we, as we move ahead here?
Jim: 33:07 Well, there’s just so much going on in my head in an answer to that question. First off, there probably isn’t a widespread understanding of what the coach can do in a system if we just say the coach is gonna be the full time sub, Now I know, these are crisis times and what are you gonna do? But my line always is yes, sometimes coaches have to sub it should be the same amount of time as the principal subs. The jobs are really, really important. That’s why I wrote the book, is so people can quickly read through this is what should happen for instructional coaching to be successful. I think we need, and we’re developing this because we have a certification process, but we need excellent exemplars where people can go and see somebody who’s really doing great coaching.
Jim: 33:59 And once we have a understanding of it and a recognition of it, to me, the coach needs to be an integral part of the school. People can come to the coach and say, look, could you come and see this class? Or they can do a full on coaching cycle. And then administrators, you’re leading the charge with this, but administrators need to develop coaching skills. They need too, to be coaches because, because just take teacher evaluation. I talked to a guy in Dallas and he said to me, the new principal, assistant principal and he said, the way I look at it is if the teacher doesn’t cry or you don’t get mad it’s a good conversation. Well, that’s a pretty low bar.
Steve: 34:42
Jim: 34:43 Wouldn’t we wanna have some kind of growth come of this or person feel better about their work?
Jim: 34:49 So I think a deeper understanding of coaching, I think people can get that by professional development and by being coached. And you’ve talked about the principal showing a video of her class and then having the coach coach them right in front of the staff to say, let me show you what it looks like and I won’t ask you to do something I won’t do. So I do believe we have a tendency to stay on the surface and not go deep. And we sort of like what I call nominal implementation, whether it’s PLCs or it’s restorative justice or whatever it might be, we don’t go as deep as we need to. Well, if coaching is going to flourish, we need to understand what it’s about and we need to do it well. And then it’ll be hard to get rid of because it’s so powerful.
Steve: 35:48 Well, Jim thanks. I think this has been great. Tell folks what’s the easiest way for them to touch base with you with any questions they have or to find order a copy of of your book?
Jim: 36:03 Yeah, that’s a good question. So Twitter is @JimKnight99, in honor of the great one Wayne Gretsky. And that’s probably the easiest way to connect and you could write our little organization at hello@instructionalcoaching.com and the book is available in your favorite online vendor. And I think there’s a Kindle version of it, but if you write us at hello, we’ll get it to people too. But, there’s also on the website, instructional coaching.com, there’s a blog and we have a column summarizing the success factors and there’s just tons of resources, like over 300 things you can download for free. So you don’t have to buy the book to understand the seven success factors.
Steve: 36:52 I’ll share that I got to access the book with with Kindle and found it very doable that way for all the international folks who are listening in. Jim, we’ll be sure to put the link to your instructional coaching group in the lead-in to the podcast so folks can find it. Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it. Look forward to our next conversation.
Jim: 37:20 It’s great to see you again, and there will be another conversation. That’s just the way it rolls. So I look forward to it.
Steve: 37:24 You bet.
Jim: 37:25 Take care, Steve.
Steve: 37:26 Take care, Jim.
Steve [Outro]: 37:29 Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud on iTunes and Podbean. And please remember to rate and review us on iTunes. I also want to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter @stevebarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.