Podcast: Coaching Teacher Leaders

Instructional Coaches and school administrators should be continuously mapping out how they support teacher leaders in their schools. Teacher leaders at grade levels or department chairs for curriculum, along with teachers leading programs or projects and those serving as mentors to new staff are all key to a school reaching its mission and vision of maximizing student success. Too often, there is no plan for the development of critical leadership skills and mindsets that are necessary for teacher leaders to support continuous teacher growth for a school staff. That lack of planning and process, I believe, also communicates a lack of value for the commitment and risk-taking teacher leaders assume.

Dr. Philhower – School as a Joyful Place podcast episode.

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

Which Model of Coaching Is The Right Choice?

This past week I was asked this question in two different settings. A possible future client was interviewing me on a phone call to explore “the fit” for me to be a trainer/coach for administrators and teacher leaders who would work in coaching roles to increase student success by increasing teachers’ skills. I was told that the district had held cognitive coaching training and he wanted to know if my model might contradict the previous training. (Arthur Costa and Robert Garmston created Cognitive Coaching in 1984.)

Later in the week in a district where I have been consulting and providing coaching training for over a year, a central office administrator said that some people had requested clarity on what was “our model of coaching.”

In the first case, I responded to the interviewer that in my training for coaching I focused on exploring the complexity of teaching and learning and the verbal skills of coaching. I was comfortable that someone taking a strong cognitive approach to their coaching would find much in the training to be applicable. At the same time I was offering skills that might allow a change in the coach’s approach when they weren’t feeling successful. He responded that was interesting as some administrators and coaches were raising concerns about their effectiveness.

I approach many models on a continuum rather than one or the other.

Technical____________________Cognitive

At the far left the coach provides specific, sometimes corrective feedback on a skill the teacher has chosen to focus upon. (I just completed a day of media training and was coached on answering reporters’ questions…highly technical feedback on the strategies in the training which I was consciously practicing.)

At the far right the coach uses mostly questions and specific observed data that the teacher has requested…. little or maybe no approval from the coach or suggestions from the coach. (At lunch after the training the media consultant’s coaching became much more cognitive having staff explore our thinking about what might be best strategies for us.)

In the second case I presented the principals and coaches with several coaching scenarios which were present in the training they have had and the practices the district had implemented. In addition to the technical—–cognitive continuum we explored:

Supervisors___Instructional Coaches____Mentors____Peers

(All of these positions are being asked to take on increasing coaching roles.)

Expert______________________Eyes, Ears, Skin

(Sometimes a teacher wants a coach with expertise: someone who can tell and show me how to do it. Other times a teacher wants someone who records what is happening and lets her figure out the meaning and direction.)

The purpose of coaching could be technical, collegial, or challenge.(Garmston; How Administrators Support Peer Coaching) Explored in an earlier blog…

Consider technical coaching most commonly connected to staff development. This is the follow up coaching that is needed when teachers take new skills back to the classroom to integrate into their existing practice. We are all familiar with how our best intentions to implement new learning can be lost without coaching support, reinforcement and celebrations of persistence.

I connect collegial coaching to the development of teacher relationships. In other words, what we are coaching may be less critical than the fact that staff are getting to know each other and our programs through peer observation and conversation and establishing a reflective coaching culture within the team and school.

Peer coaching in Switzerland

Challenge Coaching is helpful when teachers want to work together to create a new opportunity or solve a problem. Grade level or department teachers can use challenge coaching to tackle a standard that is troubling a number of students or create a plan for a disruptive student that they share….observing in each other’s classrooms and reflecting and problem solving. (A natural extension of PLCs)

Peer coaching in Maryland

Coaching is a culture….. a process we use to accomplish important things.

How about a non-model of coaching? How about the coach being skilled to detect the type of coaching being sought by the teacher and respectfully delivering? As coaches’ skills grow they can often assist the teacher in identifying what type of coaching is most likely to support the teacher growth need to support student achievement.

Teacher Learning with a Purpose

I am often caught by the incongruity when leaders (including myself) miss the opportunity to model the model….when we forget to “walk the talk” ….when our behavior with staff doesn’t mirror the behaviors we are recommending they use with students.

(The administrators who give a lecture on why lecturing is an ineffective instructional process. The school that requires all 100 staff to complete the same course on the value of differentiating instruction.)

Staff development is an area where I often find an incongruity between what educators say is important with what they do.

Lots of districts promote teachers providing a clear understanding of what students are to learn as a valuable instructional strategy.

The Leander, Texas district’s student behaviors, discussed in earlier blogs, list this as their first behavior:

1. Learning Objective: Students articulate the learning objective/target and find meaning in their learning.

Robyn Jackson, writing in Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching , states, ”By making goals concrete for both you and your students, you make it more likely that students will understand and ultimately achieve the learning goals, and you build in mechanisms that help you track their progress towards mastery “.

So, I am quite surprised when I am asked to present a workshop to teachers or administrators and no one from the school or district provides an introduction as to the learning expectations. Teachers are left to their own decision as to whether or not to focus or engage.

In a blog post called Learning with a Purpose, Raymond A. Talke, Jr., President of Minds in Action, Inc., states, ”Many organizations have education or training functions whose purpose is to create facilitated learning activities, usually in the form of classes. Yet, it is disheartening to note that many of these organizations do not adequately incorporate the purpose of the learning into their learning activities. Unwittingly, these organizations are creating “Learning without a Purpose.”

Talke lists a set of symptoms that indicate a training department will miss the mark in providing “learning with a purpose”. One of the symptoms often appears in systems where I consult. (I’d encourage staff developers to check his entire list.)

The training department’s success is measured by number of students, number of class days, student reactions, or anything other than the measurable contribution the training provides in meeting the goals of the business.

Recently I have worked with several district-wide and building leadership teams, planning professional development aligned with increasing student achievement. I have suggested that we share with teachers at the outset, the connection between the professional development and the desired student outcome.

We can communicate that by illustrating the change in teacher behaviors that the training is designed to initiate, the change in student behavior that would be generated by the teachers’ changes, and finally the learning outcome being sought. These changes may be simplistic in early stages and then grow in complexity.

As an example, a leadership team shared that they were offering “thinking map training” to their staff to increase students’ strategies for learning to improve achievement as measured by district assessments.

Here are some questions I explored as I facilitated their discussion:

What would teacher practice with thinking maps (TMs) look like in early stages? How would it change as teachers and students learned the strategies?

What would student behaviors with TMs look like in early and later implementation? Moving from teacher guided use, to teacher suggested use, to independent use?

When and with what assessments would we use to look for improvement in student achievement?

By what date should teachers invite an observer to provide feedback on their initial work with TMs? What dates would you be looking for more complex use to be demonstrated and student behaviors to be occurring? At what date would we predict that uninvited observations could appropriately be looking for teacher and student use of TMs?

I believe all of the above should be shared with staff before the professional development and coaching activities around TMs begin. Some staff already using their own version of TMs may request an observation with feedback before they attend the training.

Knowing the expectations (the accountability) before the learning activities begin can provide motivation and understanding for increased teacher learning.