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. I’m thrilled you’re here.

Steve: 00:33 Increasing teacher and student success with goals. I’ve had the opportunity to join today’s guest on her podcast, and today we’re switching roles. Cory Camp is the Director of Professional Development for Sibme and the host of the Sibme Coach Replay show. Cory has been an educator for 16 years, worked as a teacher and an instructional coach. She’s had leadership roles at the campus, district, regional, and state level. Her work today with Sibme provides opportunities for her to be on the cutting edge of technology while working with innovative educators all over the globe. Welcome, Cory.

Cory: 01:19 Hi, Steve. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be in the other seat this time around. It’s kinda fun.

Steve: 01:26 I’m thinking the same thing. So, I wonder for starters on our topic here, if you’d share some of the experiences you’ve had as a teacher using goal setting with your students.

Cory: 01:42 Yeah, so the ultimate experience, Steve, I am a former special educator. So, our work with the students that we support and special education is all about goals. We create those individualized goals for their IEPs, they are measurable and time-bound and objective and all of those pieces. I realized though, pretty quickly, that even though I could craft a great goal that met all of the parameters for an IEP goal expectations, standards-based, and all of those pieces, that I really still struggled with making progress towards those goals because it wasn’t me, it was the students’ goal. It wasn’t my goal, it was the students’ goal. And so, the biggest aha for me came when I started involving my middle schoolers. I taught middle school at the time in their own goal setting and progress monitoring. And so with my students, they would have a chart.

Cory: 02:56 We’d find a way to, how are we going to measure our progress? What evidence are we going to see? And then we together kept track of their goals. The year I began doing that, I was teaching resource, which was a pullout class for ELA for my students. Over half of the students in my classroom shifted from needing to pull out resource service to inclusion the next year because they made such tremendous progress on their goals. So goals have been a huge part of my life, not only in my profession, but in my life. As I think about, you know, making progress, the change I wanna make as an individual, as a professional, and in the individuals I support as well.

Steve: 03:46 I want to go back to the success that your students had and the statement that you made that they no longer needed to be in, in the program. And as I heard you say those words, I’m wondering to what extent that was the academic learning outcomes that they made, but I’m wondering if it was also an element of what they learned about goal setting, what they learned about tracking their own behaviors, if there’s not a connection there, that they actually took those skills forward with them.

Cory: 04:20 Yeah, I think they were still in special education, but they, they required a less intensive level of special design instruction. But I think absolutely Steve. I think it was very much this kind of snowball effect of they’re able to have more agency. My students learned self-advocacy. We talked about the particular disabilities that they had been identified with and what that means for how their brain functions and what they identified, how that’s manifesting with themselves. My background is in psychology, so I’ve always been tremendously interested in the brain and how it works and what motivates us. And I brought that into my classroom as a way to help my students find interest or understand why Mrs. Camp Is repeating that same thing again and again and again. Because the more times we hear it, the more opportunity it has to make deep neural pathways.

Cory: 05:26 And I do think that was a big part of my student’s success, is it wasn’t just me and a team who meets after hours or over our conference period to talk about that student and what we think they need to be able to do based off of what we’ve seen. But it was involving the student in their own learning, but we started connecting that to their behaviors, to the specific things. So before, I would do weekly progress monitoring with some of my students, for example, on fluency. And so before we would take that fluency assessment, we would look at, okay, how did you perform last week? What are some things you need to remember, right? To breathe, to pause, to take a second to look at the word if you’re not sure. Whatever it was that that particular student needed based off of their patterns of behavior. And then they would do the assessment. And that just like little bit of, let’s pause and think about where we left off last time and what we wanna accomplish today, breaking it into smaller chunks, really did seem to be the kind of secret sauce that worked for a lot of my students.

Steve: 06:35 So I’m wondering then, when you moved from a classroom teacher to working as an instructional coach, how did you carry the goal setting and use of goals into that role?

Cory: 06:50 So coaching is such an interesting role to take on and I’m still learning so much as a coach, I definitely made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. I wasn’t formally trained as a coach. I had a lot of misconceptions as to what a coach is or is supposed to do. But I did catch on pretty early that just like my middle school students, my teachers needed a level of agency in the work that we were doing. It wasn’t a great fruitful experience for me to come in and observe whether that was planned or not planned, and then say, here are some things that I saw that you know, you might do differently. Which of these do you wanna pick? And let’s work on it. I didn’t get a lot of engagement that way. But when I was able to sit down with my teachers and talk about the things that they wanted to work on, and then how do we get them to that point, it was all about goal setting.

Cory: 07:49 So not all of my coaching involves goal setting. Some of the lighter coaching activities where I’m just needed for a quick moment, or they’re reaching out for a resource, when I’m diving into those coaching cycles, that is the driving force. That’s kind of our roadmap for the entire cycle. It identifies what stages of the cycle we’re in, where we’re moving forward where we need to step back just a little bit and reevaluate. It’s definitely a big part of that. And I am big, just the same way that I taught my students to think about their behaviors and to help identify how we’re gonna know we’re making progress, how we’re gonna know we’re getting there? I do the same thing with the teachers that I work with as well.

Steve: 08:32 So it really clicks that the students owned the goal, not you, the teacher. So now in your coaching role, the teacher owns the goal and not you, the coach.

Cory: 08:45 Yeah, absolutely. And then the other part of it is again, remembering from my special education work, goals need to be measurable, challenging, but attainable. So thinking about, alright, is this a manageable goal? And maybe the end goal isn’t manageable, but there’s a small step towards progress that we could make that is more manageable. Helping the teacher kind of break it down as well is a big part of that kind of goal setting process.

Steve: 09:18 Yeah, I’m real big on that progress word. If I can get the teacher to define what progress would look like and sound like – I know where you wanna go, now what will progress look like and sound like? So that rewards us just the way it rewards the kids when they see their making their progress.

Cory: 09:37 And you and I have talked about progress before in kind of the idea of how we think about goals in that they aren’t just kind of this hard fast thing. Like, you’re gonna do this and we’re gonna identify the next best thing that you can do to get there, and it’s gonna work. But really thinking about goals as a hypothesis. What is our hypothesis? What do we think if we introduce this variable, what impact do we think that will have? And that is a whole mindset shift. I mean, you and I have talked about that before in our previous conversations and how that just kind of helps, one, make it feel more manageable. But two, it also helps us think about it as an iterative process. The path towards a goal. There’s many pathways, and some are going to work, some are gonna be the right path, some are gonna be more treacherous, some are gonna not feel as good. And while we’ve set a goal, how we get to that goal might take some thinking and rethinking and iteration along the way.

Steve: 10:46 That’s part of my description of why I’m big on pushing defining teaching as a profession. Because when you work in professions, you work in an area that is in effect, partly experimental. So a doctor’s experimenting with patients, an attorney is experimenting with a case, and a teacher’s experimenting with learners. Knowing all the best practice research is where you want to start. But it actually is partly a hypothesis until I see what happens with it.

Cory: 11:21 In this profession of ours, it’s so high stakes. There’s so much urgency there that it’s difficult sometimes for our educators to accept that, to give themselves permission to experiment. And so I think that kind of progress over perfection, the idea of the hypothesis and that we’re gonna try some things and some of them may not be the right thing. Maybe they’re the right thing, but not right now for us. I think that’s huge.

Steve: 11:58 Yeah. So in the past, I found this this piece of writing by Reggie Rivers, and he was a a previous NFL player, and now he’s a motivational speaker. And he was on a YouTube, and it caught my eye because the title of his piece was, “If You Want to Achieve Your Goal, Don’t Pay Attention To It.” And that kind of rocked me from what you’re usually used to seeing. And he went on to to explain what he meant by that. And that was that, if you focus on the goal, you may not be carrying out the behaviors you need to achieve the goal. But if you focus on the behaviors that you need, it’s very likely that you will reach the goal. So his terms are that goals can be outside of our control, but the behaviors are inside of our control. And I’m wondering as I lay that out, if you see connections there to a coach working with a teacher.

Cory: 13:09 Absolutely. I’ll take your Reggie quote and give you James Clear, who’s one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite books, “Atomic Habits,” and he says, “you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” The goals is your desired outcome but the system, your daily habits, is how you get there. And he kind of points that much of the failure people find in their goal setting, like this time of this time of year, it’s January, we’ve got all these New Year’s resolutions once again, here we go. Who’s gonna make it? Who’s not, who’s already quit? Who’s already changed that goal maybe? And he points out something really good – we’re great at setting goals and saying, here’s what I want, but we’re not really good at looking at how are we going to do that.

Cory: 14:09 What behaviors need to change or stop or start in order for us to do that? And that’s exactly what a coach is there to help a teacher do. They’re there to help them not just provide resources and co-teaching model, but also to kind of help them think systematically about for their students and for them as an individual in this profession, what’s your system and what changes to that system can we begin to make as we move forward? I like to use a Likert scale a lot for when we’re kind of thinking about how we’re feeling about student engagement. I like to look at evidence with teachers, but I also know that there’s very much this kind of sense of, well, here’s how I feel it’s going. I’ve got this gut feeling. So I like to put a number to that with the teacher.

Cory: 15:02 And then in addition to the evidence that we collect, we’re also going back to this overall number. So I do a lot of video-based coaching in my line of work, and so we watch a video and so, alright, on a scale of one to seven, how engaged do you feel the students were? And what evidence do we have to support this number you’re about to give? And so let’s say they identify it as a four. It was pretty good. Seven is the most ideal, best lesson, most engaged students ever. One is not at all close. But now we’ve got something that we can start to look at, alright, we know seven is ideal, but how do we get from a four to a five? What’s one thing we can change in our system to get from a four to a five?

Cory: 15:51 Again, taking the hypothesis approach to that, what might make a difference? And then we try it, we record it, we look back to that scale and say, on that scale, did we make a change or not? Why or why not? What evidence do we have for that? I think breaking it down with that teacher and helping them identify what behaviors or strategies are making a difference and which ones aren’t, which ones have the potential, but maybe just need more consistency and which ones aren’t kinda worthwhile for that particular group of students, or that individual, it’s a really helpful process and not one that an individual often has the time or the cognitive space to do on their own. And I think, again, that’s where the the coach’s job is really – we really shine in that messy middle with our teachers where they’re trying to get from point A to point B. Not necessarily that we help them set the goal, but it’s that we help them get to that goal along the way.

Steve: 16:54 Give me more of a description of the messy middle.

Cory: 16:57 The messy middle. Yeah. It’s that part where we see, let’s just use, for example, a partner first strategy, a think, pair, share strategy. I’m gonna show you an example. I’m gonna show you this great video from teaching channel. I used to pull a video from the teaching channel all the time whenever I was talking about partner first activity. We’re gonna talk about how it’s gonna go. We got a great plan, plan A, the teacher does it and it does not feel right. It feels like they’re a fish out of water. Their students are kind of all over the place. It was messy, it was chaotic because the teacher’s trying it for the first time, but also they’re leading all these students in it, right? And they’ve gotta try and try again and that’s the messy part. I think about the holidays. I host a lot of our family holiday gatherings, and I’m very in particular about when family can arrive because it’s gonna look beautiful when they get here. I love to host, so it’s gonna taste great, look great, but if you show up an
hour early, you’re gonna find me and your food looking pretty rough in that kitchen.

Steve: 18:09 The messy middle.

Cory: 18:11 That’s the messy middle. Yeah. I don’t want someone with me in the middle of the messy middle when I’m about to host a party. But that’s where a teacher, that’s where they need that support, is someone to go, you got this, we’ve got time. It’s okay. You can do this. That’s that part that I think where we can build really strong relationships that are not only productive, but also kind of build up that individual as a human, as someone who’s accomplished something great.

Steve: 18:41 As as I listen to that, it really pushes the need for coaching because the likelihood of when you are focused on consciously carrying out a teaching strategy, to have the space to do all the observation about what’s happening is like next impossible. So whether it goes well or it didn’t go well, you end up not having the the evidence or the data or the feedback to help you figure out why. And so that value of the coach who’s just observing and it’s on video now, you’ve made it even easier for the teacher to watch and see it him or he herself as well. That’s critical to the learning process.

Cory: 19:38 So two things with that. Video, I would say more so than a coach, video first, because as you said, it allows the teacher to then go back and reflect and see it. So many times, thinking about that messy middle, at the early stages of the messy middle, I have a teacher who tried something, they’re like, no, that’s not for me. It’s not gonna work. That it was rough. I didn’t like it, it didn’t feel good. But if we have the video of that rough example, I can then, as a coach, help them see, okay, yeah, I know that didn’t feel great. It didn’t look at like, that teaching channel example from earlier, that teacher who, that camera’s always in her classroom and she’s been the teacher of the year for eight years in a row. But let’s think about how it looked different from the first time.

Cory: 20:30 Like, do we still feel like students were more engaged? Helping them kind of identify like, no, it’s okay. It’s gonna work out. Let’s maybe try it again. Big part of professional development, I think about Tom Guskey. He had a research that came out around coaching, and he talked about kind of this chain of sequence of events that needs to happen for a behavior to change from the start of a professional development and the value of coaching all the way along that cycle. We have to have the professional development, whether that’s, I see an article, I watch a video, I notice something’s different, and I’m looking for something different. Or my principal or someone in my district says, we’re gonna start doing this, this new practice. And so here we are, I have to change something in my practice, I have to make a change, a change in the behavior, and then I have to see student outcomes in that. And honestly, for many of our teachers, if the effort to change the practice the first time is greater than the perceived student outcome, they’re not likely to go forward in changing their behavior. And so that’s again, that messy middle, where the coach can go, okay, wait a second. Like, I know that didn’t feel manageable or sustainable, but as we move forward, if we practice, or if we change this, or if we do this differently, maybe that would work. Or, you’re right. That’s not gonna be sustainable. Let’s look for another strategy

Steve: 22:05 That reinforces for me, back to the importance of the goal.

Cory: 22:09 Yeah.

Steve: 22:10 If this is messy, why would I stay with messy. The reason I’d stay with messy is the goal is important enough.

Cory: 22:19 And that’s why it’s so important that the teachers own that goal and they’re part of creating that goal, because if it’s my goal, if it’s the coach’s goal, why am I gonna do all this work for you, for your goal? It has to be a part of what they value. And for some teachers, depending on where they are in their profession or in their life, depending on the circumstances, sometimes that goal needs to be – I mean, we all know absolutely it should be about the students. But there are times in our lives as individuals that I need to protect my sanity. I need to protect myself, or I can’t be there for my students. So that might be part of our motivation for our goal. It doesn’t always go back to the student immediately. And as a coach, that’s one thing that we can also help do is make sure that the goal that we have that might be more teacher-centered, also has fruits towards our students.

Steve: 23:22 Well Cory, I know that at at Sibme you’ve developed some tools to help teachers with with goals. So let me give you a chance to kind of talk about that a little bit.

Cory: 23:34 Yeah. So Sibme, the wonderful company I work for, I found them – I was a customer of theirs when I was an instructional coach and a specialist at a regional level in Texas. And then when I moved here to Central Ohio, we got to become a part of their team. Sibme stands for “seeing is believing me.” And that’s at the core of what we believe. We want to really change the way people learn at work. And so the heart of the application that we have, we have a mobile and web-based platform that teachers can use to record instruction, collect different types of artifacts for reflection, is the kind of heart of what we do, but also to share that with a coach, a peer, a team, another individual to receive feedback, have collegial conversations.

Cory: 24:35 We try to make all of that easier. But in that work we know that there’s a lot of power that comes with video enhanced reflection. There’s so much power that comes from collaboration, but often there needs to be kind of this north star, this guiding light for those individuals to continue to make progress. And so goal setting is an important part of the profession. And so we have some amazing new tools. We’ve come out with them first about a year and a half, maybe two years ago. I feel like the world keeps spinning faster the older I get but we’ve made some exciting new developments along the way, listening to our customers and our goals module is really a powerful tool. It’s evidence-based. So it’s more than just kind of this checklist, but we really do fall on, okay, you’ve got a goal, but what’s the evidence gonna be that might support where you are in making progress towards that goal? Whether that’s a reflection, a measurement, or actual artifacts.

Cory: 25:41 So it makes it really easy for teachers or coaches who are guiding teachers through the process to be able to set those, make them kind of time bound so we can say, okay, by next week we’re gonna try this and it’ll send a reminder to the teacher, which is huge for me as a coach who’s not tied to a specific campus. I work virtually with everyone. It really has been a powerful, powerful process. And I’ll tell you, it’s right where people are. We had a new release with our goals on January 1st of this year, and I just need to look at my notes – we were looking yesterday in our system, and we’ve already had, I think, 219 goals created, which is a lot in just 12 days where we are right now. So it’s been really powerful. It’s also a really good way for me as a coach to kind of see where all of my teachers are as I’m working with many individuals in their goal setting process or in their goal work, how far along they’ve moved.

Steve: 26:48 Well, Cory, I appreciate you taking the time to have the conversation with me and you want tell listeners the easiest way they can follow up to get more information from you?

Cory: 27:00 Yeah. I would send you straight to Sibme. So again, it’s “seeing is believing me,” Sibme.com. That’s where you’re gonna be able to find my information as well as more about the fabulous platform, or if you’re looking for instructional coaches to help your teachers through the messy middle, we have an amazing team of virtual coaches as well that can work with teachers, coach the coach, work with your administrators. We
really are kind of a full service solution for many, many schools. So yeah, that’s how you can find us.

Steve: 27:39 Well, thanks. Have a great start on your new year with the teachers with those those new goals.

Cory: 27:49 Yeah they’ve it got a lot of them.

Steve: 27:50 Take care.

Cory: 27:51 Thanks, you too.

Steve [Outro]: 27:55 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.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

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 Mindsets to Explore For the Start of School – Part one. I was invited to join Cory Camp from SIBME Coach rRplay podcast to discuss mindsets that we might explore as we return to school. I always appreciate the way Cory invites and extends my thinking and shares her own. Enjoy
listening, and consider sending me your thoughts and questions.

Cory : 01:01 And welcome to another episode and a whole new season of the SIBME Coach Replay Show. I’m your host Cory Camp, and we’ve taken about a month and a half or so off and here we are back again with one of my favorite guests, Steve Barkley. And I love our topic for today, Steve, because I know a big conversation last year, last semester, and especially as we’ve gotten – I actually just got my kiddo’s state test results in the mail yesterday. And is this idea of, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us as we come back in to the schools, a lot of folks are going back in person this year. We are returning to normal if there is such a thing and I know you and I are going to talk a little bit about that, but really it is a stressful return I feel, for a lot of our educators.

Cory : 02:00 We’re excited. We can’t wait to get back into our classrooms and be with our students, but we also have this stress of this idea of, the learning loss, the COVID slide, and how do we overcome that? How do we get right into that? And so, as we think about our return into schools and thinking about maybe moving from a problem-focused mindset and reframing the problems, reframing the mindset. You wrote an amazing blog on this, which we’ll make sure folks get access to the full blog, but you got a couple of big ideas around it, four big ideas for thinking about reframing the problem and reframing our mindsets. And so let’s start with this first one, especially around this idea of kind of coming back to school and thinking about the learning loss. So I’ll kind of let you take it from there.

Steve: 02:57 Thanks for having me Cory, it’s always always great to be with you. So a little bit as a jump in here. As soon as we were looking at coming out of COVID, which who knows when that is now, but as soon as that was raised I was sure we didn’t want to go back to normal. And in many ways for me, what COVID did was, it shined a light on strengths that we had and it shined a light on problems. I don’t know to what extent it really created new ones. They just kind of stood out there.

Cory : 03:42 Push them to the forefront, right? Like social-emotional learning –

Steve: 03:50 Yea it was always important.

Cory : 03:50 It was always there. Really shine a light on it.

Steve: 03:53 The inequity in technology and you know, it’s not like that problem didn’t exist, so it kinda shined the light on it. So I really
had been thinking about this. How do we refocus? How do we have have the different mindset? So the first one of the four ideas that I pulled up was focusing on love versus fear. And very interesting, this is the one that triggered me to write the blog. And it came from a friend of mine Adam Fishman, who is leading a group on climate change. And he sent out this this rather lengthy blog that he realized he had to change his mindset and that his mindset had been getting people to hate the bad things about the climate.

Steve: 04:50 And he realized instead, he needed to switch to get people, to focus on the things that they love and they’re going to lose.

Cory : 05:00 Right.

Steve: 05:01 We don’t focus on these things that they love. So it was a lot easier to get energy out of people by focusing on nature, focusing on who are the people that grow the crops and how do we get the crops in that approach rather than the fear approach. And I’m sitting there reading this piece and I’m going, wow, that that’s the issue we’ve got for teachers. If everybody’s putting learning loss in front of the teacher, the last thing I want to do on an opening day of school, when kids are finally back and I’m looking to build all this excitement is to have this picture in my mind of just how far behind are these kids? Are we going to get caught up? And communicating that to the kids.

Steve: 05:45 And so my issue was, let’s fall in love with the fact that we’ve been waiting to have kids here in the room with us. We’re finally here. We’ve been waiting to do all exciting things with kids. We’re tired of all the kids who were on Zoom and not clicking on the camera. So what are all the things and how does that change your mindset if you walk into the school excited about all the things we can do and all the things we can accomplish in moving ahead.

Cory : 06:21 And I think that’s so valuable. And as we think about our role as instructional leaders, we really are the leaders in this reframing. That message comes from us. Our teachers look to us to support and then reinforce and walk the walk. We can’t say, “oh, don’t worry about the learning loss” and then shove data and all kinds of things in front of their face and say, how are we going to fix it? We really do have to come from that place of love over fear.

Steve: 06:52 Where are we and where do we want to go?

Cory : 06:56 Yep.

Steve: 06:56 And let’s go, let’s be excited about going there rather than shining this light backwards. It has pushed me to get teachers thinking
that it’s about speeding things up and not remediating. And the more that I’m focused on loss, on what kids didn’t get last year, the more likely I am to take that remedial approach and that’s not going to put anybody in the right mindset for moving ahead.

Cory : 07:27 And I were just talking backstage about this this big idea around acceleration rather than remediation and the importance of that and the questions that are coming around from that. But I also think there’s something also here in this point, this love versus fear. My nephew and niece are visiting here this afternoon, they’re all outside having pizza for lunch right now. And when they came in, I said, “hey, you guys excited for school to start?” They start a day before my kids do and they’re just a town over. And I was really surprised because my nephew has not necessarily been one for school, was like, “I can’t wait. I’m excited.” And I was like, “are you sick? Are you okay?”

Steve: 08:10 [laughter]

Steve: 08:10 But I think our students are also leaning into that excitement. They’re excited to be in a school to have some space away from their
parents or their siblings.

Cory : 08:20 And, to kind of just move back into the school is now a little bit more exciting for them qnd I think we’ve got to lean-in to that too. Lean-in to the strengths and the things that they’ve learned over the past 20 some months and you know, build upon that. So I definitely love that. So let’s think differently about learning losses that I’m hearing here. What else, because I know that that was just kind of the snowball, that was the tip of the iceberg.

Steve: 08:56 And then, I found an article that said we needed to think about schools as an ecosystem in an acorn. So when I dug into the
ecosystem piece, and this came from as a Sam Chaltain and in my blog, I give all the links to all of their original stuff. And he was talking about seeing an ecosystem rather than an assembly line. And I have always been big on the ecosystem. I’m a big Margaret Wheatley fan and Wheatley always talks about the way a system works as is much more like the way a school system should work. The way a school should work is much more like an ecosystem than it is an assembly line, but it has way too many assembly line pieces in it. And this has always spoken to me because I paid my way through college, on the assembly line.

Steve: 09:51 I worked in the cardboard factory and it was a machine three blocks long. And at one end of the machine, giant rolls of paper were fed in and three blocks away, it spit out piles of cardboard. And my job was to catcher pile and stack it. And one day I saw a piece of cardboard jammed under a belt that I thought it might knock a belt off and I wasn’t running over and shut down the system. And a little while later, very shortly later, a supervisor was screaming and yelling, “what did you do?” And I said, “I thought,” and that’s as far as I got. And he informed me that catchers don’t think they catch. This is your job, this is your piece. And and it dawned on me when I when I began teaching, there was kind of this feeling.

Steve: 10:35 I started my student teaching and I watched the teacher for two days and then I tapped her on the shoulder and she stepped out and I stepped in. It was like, oh my God, I’m back to being a catcher. And so it really hit me now if go back to the learning loss, are we worried about a learning loss because we’re really thinking that a fifth grade teacher can’t take the kids from where they are when they come into our classroom and move ahead? I mean, are we really thinking that she can only handle the assembly line delivery of here’s where kids are supposed to be in order to in order to start your program? I’ve been a big proponent of the only way to serve kids today is as a team and ecosystems are teams. It’s all interconnected. And I think coaches need to dedicate a major chunk of time to building the team relations of the school. And I’ve often said if I were an administrator, when I had my coach partnership meeting with with my coach, that would be one of my expectations, that the sense of team across the school will increase because the work that the coach is doing,

Cory : 11:56 And it’s so interesting because I’ve also always thought that our work should be more of an ecosystem and that was really because I came into education as a special educator and I didn’t feel connected. And I felt like I was – you worry about the boxes on your assembly line, I’ll focus on them on mine. And it doesn’t really work, right? We’re not building boxes. We are growing children, humans who are going to build into our society and grow our society. And so love this idea of thinking about our ecosystem and thinking about the implications of that assembley line. So how do we start to move away from that mindset and into this ecosystem? And I also love what you say about coaches having a secondary focus or maybe maybe a primary focus on the team aspect.

Cory : 12:54 That’s something I’ve been talking a lot with my coaches is yes, your work is one-on-one and when we think about our coaching cycles, we’re typically thinking about that, but then you should also be looking for opportunities to support the collaboration of that one teacher with the rest of their peers and help them peer coach and build their capacity so that way you aren’t having as the coach to be the only instructional support for each teacher as an individual, but you can really maximize your efforts. Create tiered systems of support for your teachers, where they’ve got team support and peer support and coach support. And that’s all aligned with the support from the administrator.

Steve: 13:36 Years ago, I worked with a district designing a mentor program for new teachers, and they were trying to decide how long the mentor program should last. is mentoring a sort of one-year program or an 18 month program? And they finally decided when the new teacher threw open the doors of her classroom and said, “you may all come in.” That was the end of mentoring. And the job of the mentor was to grow the teacher into that level of confidence and professionalism that they could actually enter in to that peer coaching relationship with everyone. And that is that is an ecosystem that needs to be built.

Cory : 14:19 Yeah, absolutely. We do need to focus on our own small part of the environment, but it is serving the larger environment there.

Steve: 14:31 And I have to know how my part fits in.

Steve: 14:34 Right. Exactly.

Steve: 14:35 I’ve always been big on a teacher has to have at least a three-year commitment to kids. A three-year commitment means, you’re engaged with the teachers and the kids the year before you’re working with them. The year you’re working with them, you’re engaged with the other staff who are working with kids. So if I’m teaching freshmen English, I’m working with teachers who are teaching other freshmen courses and then I have to follow up because it’s not until I get engaged with that person next year that I really understand what happened in the year that the kids are with me. If you want to know how successful you were, go talk to next year’s teacher.

Steve: 15:14 That tells you a lot more than any test you gave during the year they were with you.

Cory : 15:19 Absolutely. And reminds me of my friend Amy McNair and she always talks about designing learning experiences rather than lesson
plans, because experiences stick with you. And so if you really want to see if you did a good job, yes, looking at how much did that student retain into the next year, how do they continue to grow? I think that is – I love this idea of this three year commitment piece.

Steve: 15:44 Rhere’s another word you used that I wanted to connect back. You used the term growing and growing really connects you to the term ecosystem, and it really connects you to the term environment. And I just recently found a a quote from Ken Robinson that I that I put into a slide, but he says that teaching is like being a gardener. You can’t force the plants to grow. The best you can do is to create that environment.

Steve: 16:24 As a teacher, I’ve got to create that environment for the kids. So let’s click back. The love part becomes critical and then as a coach, I need to create that environment for the teachers. So that’s another reason I promote the team is that team helps the coach create that environment just the way the teacher would want the kids in the classroom to help create the learning environment you want.

Cory : 16:50 And think for coaches, as we are celebrating the small wins and successes with an individual you might be working with, how are you also shouting that from the rooftops? Building that collective efficacy, connecting them with other people who might benefit then from my small win because they’re struggling to get that same win. I’m a little closer in my mental model to where that teacher is so I might be a better support than maybe a coach. And so just as a instructional leader and as a coach, thinking about how am I connecting the individual systems across the ecosystem together through team learning through multiple means of sharing and communication and collaborating. And I think, I mean, tell me if you think I’m wrong, Steve, I think with all the technology that everyone was kind of forced into learn last year, I think we’ve got quite a few great tools to help people do that.

Steve: 17:54 Absolutely. Increase that whole communication and connected piece and teaming piece.

Cory : 18:01 Absolutely. And I want to go back to what you said about the teacher being committed for kind of the full three years at minimum, because I think that leads us into your next tip for reframing and that’s long-term versus short-term. This is that ACORN conversation which was really interesting to me. I was like, oh, I’ve got to learn more about this ACORN idea.

Steve: 18:28 We’ll pick up exploring the ACORN concept in part two of this podcast series. The link to the blog that Cory mentions concerning reframing the problems is found in the lead-in to this podcast. A big thank you to Cory for sharing her insights around coaches supporting reframing. Remember to consider sending me your thoughts. Thanks for listening.

Steve [Outro]: 19:00 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

Steve [Intro]: 00:00 Hello and welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. For over three decades, I’ve had the opportunity to learn with educators at all levels, both nationally and internationally. I invite you to listen as I explore my thoughts and learning on a variety of topics connected to teaching, learning, and leading with some of the best and brightest educators from around the globe. Thanks for listening in.

Steve: 00:28 Challenging teacher growth in the upcoming spring semester. I was delighted to join Cory Camp on “The Coach Replay Show” to explore coaches, engaging with teachers. We both share our thinking and our experiences in the following.

Cory: 00:50 So today we’re talking about how do we, you know, everybody is, if they’re not already off for winter break, they’re going to be within a couple of hours probably. And they’re going to be hopefully resting and rejuvenating and reenergizing. So when we come back after winter break and come back together and we’re back in our classrooms, whether those are in-person or virtual, how do we make the most of our spring semesters, finish out the school year really strong? How do we maximize that energy that those teachers are coming back with after having the break and really grow our teachers and, and our students?

Steve: 01:37 So I’m going to jump into this with what might seem a little bit strange to the energy piece, but I’ve been I’ve been sharing it with people and I’ve gotten quite a few head nods from it. When Jim Collins wrote the “Good to Great” book, he had a piece in there of an interview with Admiral Stockdale and it it’s been labeled the Stockdale paradox. And Stockdale was a prisoner of war during the during the Vietnam war. Top ranking officer there a long time. And when Collins interviewed him, one of the things you asked him was who are the people that did not do well
with the crisis of being in the prisoner of war camp? And Stockdale’s response was well, that’s easy to answer. It was the optimist.

Steve: 02:36 When I read that the first time, it it like totally threw me because I would have had the opposite belief. But he described the optimists as those people who said “well, we’ll be out by Christmas.” And then Christmas would come and go and they’d say, “okay, well, we’ll be out by Easter.” And then Easter would come and go. And with enough of those repetitions, a piece of depression fit it. So Stockdale described you needed two things. One was an ultimate belief that you will succeed, okay? Combined with a brutal acceptance of the reality of what you’re dealing with. And that connected with me because I had done quite a bit of work with optimism and I – favorite book of it by Alan Loy McGinnis called, “The power of Optimism.” And he describes that that one of the behaviors of optimists is that they aren’t surprised by trouble.

Steve: 03:43 And I thought that really connected back to Stockdale’s issues. And so, as I look back, I think in last spring, when COVID hit, as educators, we said, “oh, okay, well, we can survive this. We’ll get to June, the summer’s going to be here and then fall, we’ll be back in school.” And then fall came and it wasn’t there. And now I’m afraid that that that the vaccine being present may put another group of people into that mode of everything’s going to be here quickly. And I think instead, we need to put those two pieces together. What’s the belief? I believe that I can teach students better next week than I taught them this week. And next month, better than I taught them last month. And next year, better than I taught them this year. I’m going to combine that with the brutal reality that some kids are still having trouble making connections, some kids aren’t having the supports that they need. Those are all the realities I’ll work with, but with all of those issues I can learn and get better. So that’s why to me the whole piece coming out of this is learning.

Cory: 04:58 Yeah. And it’s so funny that you bring that that lens to this conversation because I was just having this exact conversation with my team right before this call. We were talking about how we’ve, you know, we’ve been interacting with some of those folks who are like you know, this is temporary. And I mean, in last spring I was like that. I was like, we’re going to be out for a month or so, but then we’ll come back. Everyone will finish the school year, teachers wholeheartedly believed they were going to finish out the school year, go into summer vacation, having seen their students. And that was a really hard hit when that didn’t happen. And then it was, well, kind of starting back, everything will settle out over summer and we won’t have that remote instruction starting in the school year.

Cory: 05:46 Well, then that didn’t happen. And we continually – we equate it being from Texas to, a place in Texas called Enchanted Rock, where it’s like, you go up the hill and it doesn’t look so bad and then you get to the top of that crest and realize there’s another hill. More to go. And you get to top of that and you’re like, there’s still more. Like, when am I going to hit the peak? I did this and then smooth sailing down. Enchanted Rock is a beautiful place. It’s sounds like a great idea, especially on a nice summary day. And it’s the worst idea ever, especially on a nice summary day. But I mean, yeah, that’s exactly it. And that starts to chip away at our teachers, especially those that makes so much sense about our optimists.

Cory: 06:34 As an optimist, I can definitely see that. And really, I love that you, you know, you take that reality and that belief and make sure that we’re kind of pinning it to that learning. And it really is all about the learning. And that’s been the hard thing that’s been – I know a lot of the coaches I’ve been working with are, you know, their teachers absolutely need their support. And in some cases they’re asking for them, in some cases they’re asking to be left alone. But the support is not at the deeper level that they’ve done in the past. I myself have been doing a lot of micro-coaching and creating a lot of micro-learning content rather than, you know, bigger sessions or more kind of, I’m trying to cover a lot in some time I’m trying to cover just a little bit in as little time as possible so they can grab it and go with it. And it makes me think about, you know, how do we get teachers to get back into that learner mode instead of that survival mode, which is where they’ve been?

Steve: 07:37 I think the key phrase is reflection. I’ve been doing some work for folks in in resilience and I found a COVID continuum that says, there’s this phase of being in fear. And then if you can move out of fear, you move into learning and then with learning, you move into an area they called growth. And as I looked at that, I realized the key to move from fear into learning was reflection. So it’s identifying your emotions, identifying what’s important, identifying what you have control over and what you don’t have control over. And once you’ve done that, you can begin to see your, your way into into growth. I’ve shared my personal example of it was being being quarantined here in Switzerland. The one thing they didn’t close when they quarantine was the forest. And there’s forest everywhere, and everybody’s supposed to be out in the forest. It’s part of the culture.

Steve: 08:49 So I built into my quarantine time, a good 90 minute walk in the woods every day. And when I starteded it, the purpose of my walk was exercise. But I then began to realize that’s my reflection time. And once I could identify how angry I am that I can’t see my grandkids, realizing I don’t have control over that, what do I have control over? So my granddaughter is studying German in middle school for the first time and so am I, so we’re texting each other back and forth in German that we have to translate. I don’t think if it were for the quarantine and I was visiting her the way I usually am, I don’t think we’d be doing that. So I think we’ve actually grown. I know that my work has become much more personalized during the quarantine and I know that I’m going to keep that.

Steve: 09:48 I’m on three or four new projects now and every one of them I’ve built into the beginning of it, a one-on-one interview with each of the participants before I start the program. When I was flying in and doing my workshop, that didn’t happen. Yeah. But that’s a piece I think that is going to have to carry over. So I really think the job of coaches and administrators who are looking to support teachers right now is engaging that teacher in the reflection and getting the teacher to decide that the there’s a piece they could do tomorrow that would make their instruction and their student learning stronger than it was today.

Cory: 10:31 I want to hit on a couple of things that you said. First is as you shared your own practice of reflection being in your walks through the woods, I think that sometimes, as we’re – and I study – that’s the work I do is all about reflection and I’ve studied it a lot. And there are specific methods, some that work better than others depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. There’s a whole cycle of reflection. And so I have the science of reflection down that I used to share, but me as well, I’ve been finding just small moments of reflection. It doesn’t have to be this big thing. You don’t have to have this, go buy a journal and, you know, do a reflective…it’s just making sure that you are taking time to reflect. And it doesn’t have to be sitting alone in a room meditating or something. It can be as you’re doing other things or as your chatting. My sister-in-law and I chat frequently, more frequently when I was in Texas and on the road all the time. But that was my key reflection time was just in conversation with her. I was thinking out loud and we both kind of reflected on our practices as educators and coaches. And so I think that’s really important.

Steve: 11:42 Yeah. Label that as the coach’s role and create that reflection moment for the teacher. I was just working with a district office person today looking at administrators who are doing walk-throughs virtually now and they’re sending teachers notes. And I said, if I could make one suggestion, stop the notes and buzz the teacher. And if you brought the teacher up on Zoom or you grab the phone and call the teacher and you said, “here’s when I was there today. What did you see during that time that pleased you? And what did you see during that time that if you could get it to go up one notch, it’d be cool to get it to go up one notch? Tell me about that thing.” And that 10 minute conversation got a whole lot further than anything you’re going to write up or questions you’re going to send out to that teacher. And that the reflection will live on beyond your 10 minute conversation.

Cory: 12:54 Yeah. If you’re still doing all the heavy lifting, right? And we want to take that off, whatever we can off of our teachers right now, but now’s not the time to do all the reflecting for them or they won’t learn from that, right? It’ll be something – okay, I’ll remember that the next time I do this, hopefully I don’t do it again because I’m not going to be in pandemic teaching next year, right? If we can really, yeah, just those just simple reflective questions just to open up a conversation, doesn’t have to be anything big, informal. This is where, like this year, if I’m able to Zoom through and observe instruction, whether it’s in person or online, I’m trying to record those moments so that they can look back at that and hey, I’m gonna give you a call in 10 minutes, take a look at this video real quick, and then let’s just chat about it. Just to get them to look back, not at the whole lesson, but just to kind of be that great artifact for that reflection. So what other factors do you think to create that space for reflection and start that conversation for us as leaders can we do? What are some crucial things for us to think about?

Steve: 14:07 Well, I’ve been writing about the leaders need to create the environment. And Simon Sinek has a great statement that leaders
aren’t responsible for the results, they’re responsible for the people who are responsible for the results. Now, I like that because that’s where the teacher has to be right now, too. As a teacher, you aren’t responsible for the learning that happens. You’re responsible for the kids who are responsible to make the learning happen. We’ve got to create, you’ve got to create that environment. So the role of the administrator having empathy, of having a a high expectation that the teachers can cause an ever increasing amount of learning to happen. I’ve been big on taking things off teachers’ plates, but recognizing that the reason you took something off the plate is so that more energy could be focused on something that was on the plate. So it’s not just backing off, but it’s having that – again, it’s the reflection time to prioritize that there’s something really important that I want to that I want to make happen for my students and for my learners.

Cory: 15:40 Yeah. And I know one of the things that you kind of talk about in a few of your blogs is the use of pre-conferencing as a way to set up some of those coaching conferences, set up the stage for teacher kind of openness and reflective practice, right?

Steve: 16:01 Yeah. Well, my favorite is the pre-conference is the one that people want to skip when they’re short on time. And so I’m recommending that if you’re short on time, just do the pre-conference, right? Even if you can’t do the observation and you don’t have time for the post-conference, at least do the pre-conference.

Cory: 16:22 Well, and that’s so much more proactive, right? If we think about it.

Steve: 16:28 If we have the pre-conference, the teacher now goes into the lesson with focused consciousness that came out of the pre-conference and you’ve set the stage for a piece that they can actually coach themselves. Now, I’ve been working with some coaches right now working virtually do the pre and the post without doing the observation.

Cory: 16:52 Yes. I’ve been doing a lot of that, too. Yeah.

Steve: 16:56 And then after the lesson is over, now you’re gonna have the post and the observations you’re working from are the teacher’s. So now
you use the post-conference to increase the teacher’s reflection on what happened, even though you didn’t observe it and collect any data.

Steve: 17:15 Thanks for listening. I hope the coming weeks and months provide reflection for your growth and the growth of those whom you are coaching.

Steve [Outro]: 17:26 Thanks again 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.