One of the challenges instructional coaches face is deciding when to make a suggestion to a teacher. On the surface, offering suggestions seems like a straightforward way to support growth. However, knowing when to step in and how to approach these moments can significantly impact the effectiveness of the coaching relationship and the teacher’s professional growth. (I explored this topic in an earlier podcast, Should I make a suggestion?)

This blog explores the decision-making process, drawing from my podcast episode on the topic and insights shared by Daniel Pink in his Pinkcast episode, Stop Asking for Feedback, Start Asking for Advice. Together, these perspectives offer practical strategies for determining when and how to offer input to teachers.Daniel Pink highlights a crucial distinction between advice and feedback. Advice often comes with a somewhat directive tone and reflects the advisor’s perspective: “Here’s what I think I would do.” While it can be helpful, advice can inadvertently reduce the autonomy of the person receiving it, as it implies that the advisor holds the solution. Feedback, on the other hand, is about providing information that encourages reflection and growth. Feedback is non-directive, designed to provoke thought and empower the recipient to chart their own course: “Here’s what I observed. What do you make of it?” Advice is actionable and can be just what a coachee is seeking.

For instructional coaches, understanding this spectrum is critical. Offering feedback instead of advice fosters deeper engagement and critical thinking, which can lead to more sustainable improvements in teaching practice.

Instructional coaching is about collaboration and fostering teacher agency. Feedback aligns with these goals by:

• Encouraging Reflection: When a coach provides feedback, it invites the teacher to analyze their practice and identify areas for improvement.
• Promoting Ownership: Teachers are more likely to implement and sustain changes when they have arrived at solutions through their own reflections.
• Building Trust: Feedback shows respect for the teacher’s expertise and professional judgment, strengthening the coach-teacher relationship.

While feedback is often the default approach, there are moments when offering advice is appropriate.

• When a Teacher Asks for It: If a teacher directly requests advice, it’s a sign they value your expertise. In these cases, frame your advice as one option: “One thing you might consider is…”
• In High-Stakes Situations: When a teacher faces an urgent challenge that demands immediate action, advice can provide clarity and direction. “The school policy would say that you are required to ……………………………..”
• For New Teachers: Novice educators often benefit from concrete guidance as they build their foundational skills. Even then, framing advice collaboratively can encourage ownership. “I wonder if student perseverance would increase if you……….”

Daisy Rosales offers these guidelines on giving advice:

#1 Listen carefully and expend judgement– One good way to avoid a hasty reaction is to force yourself to ask three deep questions before offering any advice.

#2 Align with their values, not yours -The worst way to share a piece of advice is to start with “If I were you, I would…” The whole point is that you are not the advice seeker.

#3 Name your own biases. If someone asks you for your “unbiased opinion,” you should immediately decline. You will always be biased— your bias comes from experience and your experience is what the advice seeker is after.

#4 Ask for feedback. Request advice on your advice.  This adds to your learning and understanding and communicates your commitment to the coachee.

The art of coaching lies in balancing these approaches. Here are strategies to help:

Start with Questions: When observing a lesson or discussing a challenge, begin with open-ended questions that invite reflection:

“Where did student responses in the activity align with your expectations?”

“Were there challenges you noticed that you predicted? Any challenges that surprised you?

“What decisions did you make during the activity?

Share Observations: Offer objective observations to guide the conversation. For example, “I noticed several students who didn’t speak during their small group activity. What do you think was happening?”

Frame Suggestions Collaboratively: If you sense the need to offer advice, frame it as a possibility, not a directive: “One idea might be to try………” or “What do you think might happen if you…………?”

Encourage Experimentation: Remind teachers that improvement is an iterative process. Suggestions can serve as starting points for exploration, not fixed solutions.             (Teaching is a profession. We study a lot, learn a lot and conduct experiments with our learners. We learn from the experiment and decide what to do next) Advise is usually an experiment, not a solution.

Deciding whether to offer advice or feedback requires careful consideration of the teacher’s needs and the context of the situation. While advice has its place, feedback should be the cornerstone of coaching conversations. By fostering reflection and ownership, feedback helps teachers develop the skills and confidence to continuously improve their practice.

“Focusing on autonomy, mastery, and purpose helps my classroom be a place where both my students and I want to be. And that makes all the difference.” reported Mary Davenport, a high school English teacher. She shares her insights and examples as she is guided by the concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose from Daniel Pink’s writing in “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.”

Ready Mary’s article, “Boosting High School Students’ Sense of Agency and Motivation” here.

Find Mary on Twitter: @eternitymod

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

I was introduced to the term Intellectual Humility listening to a Daniel Pink podcast. He defines it as being less certain about one’s views and more intellectually humble about what one knows and understands. It is a willingness to recognize that what you think and what you believe might be wrong. Pink suggests it not an easy thing to do. He recommends some questions from the work of Warren Berger, author of “The Book of Beautiful Questions”.

As I considered Pink’s comments, they struck me as having an application to coaching and to learning in a PLC. I’ll share my thoughts connected with four questions from Warren Berger that Pink targeted:

Question #1 – “Do I think more like a soldier or a scout?”

Soldiers defend a position while Scouts explore new territory. That creates a great image of coaching for me. Scouting for possibilities, for opportunities, scouting for unidentified problems. John Hattie states that 80% of what’s happening in the classroom is unobserved by the teacher. It is definitely valuable to have a scout around. I found a definition for scouting that said, “To go and look in various places for something you want.” That’s the verb scouting. As a teacher, I’m constantly looking for what it is I want that generates student learning and how I might use a coach in my classroom to assist me in finding it. In my pre-conferences as a coach, I’m often asking the teacher, “What are the learning production behaviors you want? What do you want students to do that will cause the learning?”

The coach is scouting to see when that is happening and when and where it isn’t. In post conferencing with the teacher, the scouting report is shared and opportunities to get more of the desired student learning behaviors are explored.

In PLCs, we’re exploring student work and assessments (scouting). Looking for patterns that might provide a new understanding for us. Rather than defending the instructional process that we used, the PLC is on the lookout for new opportunities, perhaps a new learning pathway that goes faster, deeper, further, maybe finding a view that we have been missing.

Question #2 – “Would I rather be right or would I rather understand?”

I can see exploring with a coach or as a PLC, what is it that as a teacher I’m currently not understanding; what is it that I should be questioning? My favorite PLC question when looking at student learning outcomes is – what do our students need us to learn? Whenever we desire a different learning outcome than the one we’ve just received from our students, it means that we have to engage in learning as educators to get our students closer to the desired outcome.

As COVID-19 moved teaching and learning into a virtual process, it created challenges to some of our long-held understandings. Teachers were surprised by some students who showed independence and responsibility as learners. How will we use that new understanding? As educators were forced to change their usual instructional practices, they engaged in experiences that frequently challenged what they thought they knew. We now need to engage in reflection on the insights that are emerging and make decisions about how we move ahead. How we use new understandings about teaching and learning?

Question #3 – “Do I solicit and seek out opposing points of view?”

That’s powerful; how do I seek out opposing points of view? When I’m coaching in a post-conference and a teacher identifies a new plan or strategy or idea that she’s considering implementing, I like to encourage her to predict the positive and possible negative outcomes that could occur from moving ahead. In examining what I sometimes call, “worst case scenario,” the teacher is often encouraged to proceed with an action because she’s identified that the worst case really isn’t much of a risk, or she has modified the idea to counter the worst thing happening and therefore has confidence to plow ahead with her idea. Making the choice to go ahead with implementation or to modify the strategy often creates “look fors” that the teacher may engage a coach to collect. Assisting her in finding information that is reinforcing or questioning her current thinking.

Opposing views are important in a PLC. Zachary Herman, in “Cooperate and Collaborate,”  differentiates cooperative teams from collaborative teams. “Cooperative teams are those that aim to achieve goals more efficiently and effectively while collaborative teams explore and solve problems that individuals alone cannot.” Herman shares that while cooperating, teachers are sharing resources that may benefit their work, they are not likely to delve deep enough into issues of difficult learning experiences. Thus, not getting to deal with the students with whom teachers are struggling the most or figuring out how to build stronger relationships with students. These issues require deeper inquiry and more extensive problem solving. Collaborative teams value conflict. Differences fuel the team’s collaborative efforts. Solving complex problems requires learning and we stand to learn the most from those who are different than us, seeking opposing points of view.

Question #4 – “Do I enjoy the pleasant surprise of discovering I am mistaken?”

Being wrong isn’t a failure; being wrong is a success. You have just learned something new. This concept of a mistake being a pleasant surprise is illustrated in an MIT Sloan article by Jean Ross, Why Hypotheses Beat Goals.  Ross suggests that companies should focus organizational energy on hypothesis generation and testing. A failure then exposes an incorrect hypothesis, which we can more reliably convert into organizational learning. Doesn’t that seem exactly where we should be in our PLCs? Forming a hypothesis about student learning production behaviors and the actions we as teachers are going to engage in to make that happen. Then we use our Scouts — instructional coaches and members of our PLC — to gather evidence that assists us in learning whether or not our hypothesis is well founded. When it’s not, when we find out we’re wrong, it has actually increased our understanding.

Consider meeting with your leadership team to explore this concept of intellectual humility. Here are questions that you might use to start the conversation and then decide how to expand the conversation to the whole school staff.

• As a leadership team when should we be more scout-like in our approach? What would that sound like and look like?
• Are there times that we, as leaders are too focused on being right and not focused enough on understanding?
• How and when should we be soliciting opposing views on the topics we’re discussing?
• When we discover that we have been mistaken, how do we respond?

 I recently read three pieces addressing student motivation by authors that I follow because they each trigger my thinking with their insights and examples:

In an Education Week article , Alfie Kohn commented on the current interest in the “Marshmallow Studies” (past blog) and “Grit” (past blog ). He raised the concern that the enthusiasm for teaching self-discipline and persistence might be driven by a desire to have students be more compliant and thus successful at whatever we tell them to do.

“The more effort we devote to getting students to pay “attention to a teacher rather than daydreaming” and persist “on long-term assignments despite boredom and frustration” (in the words of “grit” proponent Angela Duckworth), the less likely we are to ask whether those assignments are actually worth doing, or to rethink an arrangement where teachers mostly talk and students mostly listen”.

Kohn poses a challenging question for instructional leaders to consider. Are our energies focused on trying to fix the system (so it meets kids’ needs better) or by trying to fix the kids (so they’re more compliant and successful at whatever they’re told to do)?

That’s a great question to ponder as you hold coaching conferences with teachers and facilitate PLC conversations. How much should the teacher focus on getting the student to complete the task versus personalizing the task to something the student wants to do?

ASCD published an interview with Daniel Pink where he highlighted how “if-then” motivators, as in “If you do this, then you get that” are pretty effective for simple, short-term, algorithmic tasks: but far less effective for more complex, creative tasks.

Pink discussed the difference between compliant behavior where you’re doing what someone told you to do the way they told you to do it and engagement, where you’re doing something because you truly want to do it, because you see the virtues of doing it.

He describes compliance as being the easier outcome to reach and as the goal of management. Pink challenges us instead to lead:

“We need leaders, both in organizations and in schools, who create an atmosphere in which people have a sufficient degree of freedom; can move toward mastery on something that matters; and know why they’re doing something, not just how to do it.”

 Consider sharing that quote with staff and encouraging them to invite you to observe a learning activity in their classroom where they are working to get Pink’s description of engagement. Offer to record what you see students do and what you hear them say. (Great for reflection) How about challenging a PLC to design such a learning experience and collect the students’ observable behaviors by visiting each other’s classrooms?

Dan Meyer’s blog explores real and fake learning tasks.

He describes how assignments might connect to the real world but not be the kind of real work that people do.

“Real work – interesting work, the sort of work students might like to do later in life – involves problem formulation and question development.”

Meyer illustrates this example in another blog , Can Sports Save Math?

I’d suggest that as an instructional leader if you found these author’s thoughts triggered your thinking, the next step might be a visit to 5-10 classrooms for 10 minutes each and record just what you see the students doing and your assessment as to their levels of engagement. Consider having each member of your leadership team conduct the same task. Then convene and compare your findings. What current practices are reinforced or challenged by what you find?

This week I was working with teacher leaders from a GA district who were studying with instructional coaches and administrators from their buildings. We examined teacher leaders’ roles in facilitating PLCs, building team cultures, and promoting a culture of coaching. One of the areas that emerged from our conversations was how to assist teachers in responding to students the teachers had labeled as unmotivated.

I shared some activities I have conducted with teachers to examine ways to approach understanding student motivation.

Ask teachers to list three or four things they ENJOY doing. Items don’t need to be connected to school but okay if they are. List might include things like reading, camping, gardening, dancing etc. (I suggest that if there is anything on the list they’d be uncomfortable sharing, they go further down the list. :)) Then list three or four things they would like to AVOID doing. List might include grading papers, housework, disciplining students, grocery shopping, etc.

In groups I ask that the teachers share the items on their lists and identify common reasons for liking the ENJOY list and wanting to AVOID the other list. Here is a common analysis of responses that I can usually pull from a group:

Click slide to enlarge.

When doing the activities on the enjoy list we are often choosing to take part in something where we will experience a reward or finished product. We usually have skill in the area and therefore predict success or we are self- evaluating our performance and are comfortable with the result. (Singing in the shower)

On the avoid list are items we “have to do”. Sometimes we lack skill in this area and predict failure. Or the item is never-ending… no finished product. (Think laundry.) We are often evaluated by others which can add stress.

When teachers are comfortable with the list, I then ask, ”Which list looks most like a student’s day in school?” Can you see the reasons some students would enjoy school and others not? How can we increase the amount of “ENJOYS”?

To increase enjoys, I suggest considering William Glasser’s work in Choice Theory;

Choice theory states that:

*all we do is behave,

*that almost all behavior is chosen, and

*that we are driven by our genes to satisfy five basic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom and fun.

Considering how to increase belonging, power, freedom, and fun creates a starting point for teacher brainstorming and experimentation. Daniel Pink’s focus on increasing autonomy, purposefulness, and mastery also aligns well.

The teacher leaders examined Eric Jenson’s article from Educational Leadership (May 2013) How Poverty Affects Classroom Engagement. After stressing the importance of teachers knowing, respecting, and connecting with their students, Jensen identified seven differences existing between students from low income and middle class. He included “what we can do”.

Difference #1– Health and Nutrition— physical activity can counter some issues associate with poor nutrition and can build health. PE and recess are important.

Difference #2- Limited Vocabulary – building vocabulary must be a daily classroom ritual.

Difference #3- Effort– sell high goals and convince kids of their chances to attain them. Provide daily feedback to reinforce that effort matters.

Difference #4- Hope and Growth Mindset.-use optimistic and encouraging feedback… You can do this!

Difference #5-Cognition-teach students how to organize, study, take notes, and prioritize. Teach problem solving skills.

Difference #6-Relationships-the more teachers care the better the foundation for interventions.

Difference #7 Distress– Give students more control over their lives at school and encourage responsibility and leadership with choices, projects, and teamwork.

I believe leaders working with these activities can tap teacher autonomy, mastery and purposefulness.

In my use of backwards planning to gain student motivation, I am continually asking teachers to identify what student behaviors are needed to reach the student achievement that has been set as a goal. Very often they identify intrinsic motivation. When we take the next step in backwards planning, we have to examine “what teacher behaviors are needed to get the desired student behavior”. At this point people are ready to describe teaching strategies and classroom environment that support intrinsic motivation.  But what if intrinsic motivation isn’t present? I am discovering that in many cases when we identify the needed student behaviors we uncover behaviors that students must first learn.

So the needed behavior becomes a desired outcome. When the student has the behavior or strategy, it can then be used to produce a new outcome- “achievement”.

“Intrinsic motivation has to be taught.. retaught, and emphasized from the first day of school until the last,”  writes Mark Barnes in Role Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student Centered Classroom. “You may think that teaching something to be intrinsic is a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, even though intrinsic motivation comes from within, young people need a little coaching to find it.”

Barnes is guided by Daniel Pink’s focus on autonomy, mastery, and purpose. He suggests projects to help build intrinsic motivation and recommends at least one year-long project. His students do a Reading All Year project aimed at each middle school student completing at least 25 books. He encourages “fanning” intrinsic motivation by setting goals, celebrating successes, and stating the value of a learning activity.

“I constantly remind them that reading and writing will improve their lives in every way,” writes Barnes.

Moving away from grades and providing quality feedback are also critical in his plan.

On the website for Educational World,  I found an interview with Carol Dweck, who I often quote in my workshops on student effort. Notice how her comments match with Barnes:

Education World: What can teachers do to help develop mastery-oriented students — students who will face a challenge rather than be overwhelmed by it?

Dweck: Students who are mastery-oriented think about learning, not about proving how smart they are. When they experience a setback, they focus on effort and strategies instead of worrying that they are incompetent.

This leads directly to what teachers can do to help students become more master-oriented:

 Teachers should focus on students’ efforts and not on their abilities. When students succeed, teachers should praise their efforts or their strategies, not their intelligence.

When students fail, teachers should also give feedback about effort or strategies — what the student did wrong and what he or she could do now.

In other words, teachers should help students value effort. Too many students think effort is only for the inept. Yet sustained effort over time is the key to outstanding achievement.

In a related vein, teachers should teach students to relish a challenge. Rather than praising students for doing well on easy tasks, they should convey that doing easy tasks is a waste of time. They should transmit the joy of confronting a challenge and of struggling to find strategies that work.

Finally, teachers can help students focus on and value learning. Too many students are hung up on grades and on proving their worth through grades. Grades are important, but learning is more important.

You can get a quick summary of Barnes’ Results Only Learning Environment here. He states that the payoff is, ”Students develop a thirst for learning” (Intrinsic Motivation).

See another example of building motivation by reading, How A School Gets Students Excited To Learn Outside The Classroom.