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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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Often when I ask educators how they're feeling, the most common phrases I hear are, "I'm overwhelmed" and "I'm so stressed." I'm pretty certain you've experienced these, too, and so let's learn a little about what it means to be overwhelmed before we consider how to coach overwhelm.
What Is "Overwhelm"? Five Tips for Coaching Overwhelm
Tired, overwhelmed, and stressed aren't specific emotions like the kind you'll find in this resource. Rather, they cross emotion families. They signify an emotional state but not necessarily an emotion. Likewise, "tired," "stressed," "fine," and "OK" also reflect emotional states-they aren't emotions themselves. These words could indicate a positive emotion or could mask distress. Overwhelm most usually crosses unpleasant emotional families so a first step in coaching someone who is overwhelmed is to help them identify which emotions are a part of their overwhelm. Let's explore the strategies to coach someone who tells you they're overwhelmed.

Describe it: The first step toward responding to overwhelm-or any intense emotional experience-is to describe and name it. Ask your coachee to circle words on the Core Emotions resource that are a part of their overwhelm. This will help you gain insight into the emotion families that are a part of their experience. You can also ask your coachee, "If your overwhelm was a color, what would it be? What shades? What textures?"

Recall previous experiences: Asking someone to rate the intensity of an emotion-on a scale of 1-10-is also helpful. You can follow this question with one asking them to remember another time when their overwhelm was equally as intense, and then asking them to remember anything that helped to reduce the overwhelm. When you ask this, it's a way of actively engaging them to do something about the way they feel-and it can be empowering. In addition, you're helping them remember that intense feelings don't stay forever-that overwhelm comes and goes.

Overwhelm can feel like paralysis-there's just so much to do! Where to start? How to manage all the pressure and demands? Asking someone to connect to their internal resources and how they managed overwhelm in the past can help them jump-start their actions. This also allows you to be a facilitator of growth and not the director of it-your client has the resources and answers to solve their problems, and you just help them remember that.

Identify one tiny next step: Once they've reflected on previous experiences with overwhelm, you can help them identify one tiny next step that might relieve the overwhelm. Sometimes your coachee will be able to come up with this step by themselves, and sometimes you may need to offer some suggestions. What's really important is that the next step is small, manageable, and do-able. Your overwhelmed client may feel disempowered, and so that first next step needs to be one that helps the client reconnect with their own agency. Small bites, small steps.

Listen: Don't rush too fast to action steps, however. Make sure that as you help your coachee identify the soup of feelings that is their overwhelm, you validate whatever they're feeling. Hold space for them to talk through whatever is going on, listen really well, don't rush to trying to solve their problems, and communicate empathy. Often when we can just talk through whatever is going on and purge all of our fears, disappointments, and frustrations from our system, the overwhelm starts to dissipate.

Plan for Action: End the session with at least one next step. This could be any of the following:

- Get a good night's sleep

- Grade three of the 30 essays within the next two days

- Ask for a parent volunteer to help clean up the classroom

- Make a comprehensive to-do list
Always Remember ...
The key is to identify the first next step that might lead to reducing the actual tasks that need to get done. While overwhelm is an emotional state that often includes many feelings, it usually includes a sense of having too much to do-having more to do than the client feels he or she is capable of doing. That can bring up feelings of sadness, fear, frustration, and shame, and so while you can hold space for an expression of those emotions, you also need to help the client address the underlying immediate challenge-which is the amount they need to do. Sometimes it's appropriate for you to be directive, especially if you know your client well and know that they trust you, and you can see some clear next steps that could be helpful. For example, you might say something like, "I think you'd feel a bit better if you could tell your principal that you're really behind on finishing your unit plans and you're going to need an extra couple of days." Or, "I want to encourage you to reach out and ask your grade-level colleagues for help with this. Do you think you could write them an email today and ask for this help?" Sometimes it can help to even nudge them, right then and there, to take that first next step.

When coaching someone experiencing strong emotions, it's important to know the signs and indicators of depression and anxiety disorders. Emotions can turn into moods, and if moods hang around long enough, they may become depression or an anxiety disorder. People who feel overwhelmed a great deal may be experiencing depression, whereas those who are "stressed" a lot may be experiencing anxiety. This resource, AppD Depression_Anxiety.pdf, can be offered to your coachees or used to consider whether someone may need professional help.
This blog is part of a series called, "How to Coach the ____ Teacher." Check out How to Coach the Cranky Teacher, and let me know what you'd like me to write about!

When coaching any strong emotion, it's useful to remember that emotions can be guides to self-understanding. They are a normal part of being a human being, and strong emotions show up to get us to pay attention to what's going on. We can welcome strong emotions-in ourselves and in our coachees-and explore them to gain insight into ourselves and humans and educators.

* Image by Masimba Tinashe Madondo, downloaded from Pixabay.

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Often when I ask educators how they're feeling, the most common phrases I hear are, "I'm overwhelmed" and "I'm so stressed." I'm pretty certain you've experienced these, too, and so let's learn a little about what it means to be overwhelmed before we consider how to coach overwhelm. What Is "Overwhelm"?

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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I know: No matter how positive you are when you walk into her classroom, she bristles and snaps, rejects your overtures, and squashes your subtle suggestions. If you're coaching a teacher you've decided is just cranky, I have five strategies for you to try.

One: Coach from a place of humility and empathy. Humble yourself. Put yourself in his or her shoes. Try to imagine what their day has been like. And remember--we've ALL been cranky at some point.

Two: Unpack cranky. Cranky isn't a feeling. Here is a list of feelings. What do you think they might be truly feeling? Sad? Unappreciated? Afraid? Frustrated? Angry? If you labeled her as cranky, consider other descriptors of this behavior. Is she uncomfortable around you? Does he feel anxious about revealing his teaching practice with you? And unpack "cranky" with him. Ask how he's feeling. This can sound like, "I'm aware that you're experiencing some strong emotions right now. I'd really like to understand what's going on with you so that I can best support you. What are you feeling?" I know, you're reading this and thinking, that sounds scripted and awkward and that's not me and I don't talk like that and if I said that, my cranky teacher would probably hurl a stapler at my head ... I know. But you can change these words a bit so that they feel like you and they might be received, and also it's all about tone of voice and pitch, pace and volume. And your cranky teacher might be really grateful if you actually ask him or her how they're feeling.

Three: Don't take another person's behavior personally. Ninety-seven percent of the time, it's not about you. So, best to not take it personally. This doesn't let you off the hook from paying close attention to your coaching. Three percent of the time it could be about you--it could be your way of being and the way you're coaching. This is a hard thing to share, but it's true. And I've been there--I can now see with painful accuracy how the way I showed up with some teachers early in my coaching career was so judgmental and self-righteous that they shut down out of healthy self-defense. However, I've also coached people who at times have been cranky--and when I ask them about what's going on, I see that it has nothing to do with me. Often, just because I ask about what's going on, their crankiness melts in front of me and reveals something else--something we can do something about.

Four: Coach with compassion and curiosity. Get really, really curious about this teacher. Empty your mind of what they should be doing and how they should teach. Be a fanatical observer of what's going well, of his or her strengths and assets, of their passions and interests. Draw those out. Share what you observe with the teacher. Search and search and ask good questions to elicit the teacher's interests--even if they are buried beneath exhaustion and burnout and despair--uncover the bright spots. Be gentle. Remember that saying (that's attributed to different people): Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Five: Be persistent, but not annoyingly persistent. As a novice coach, I tried that with one cranky teacher. I kept showing up in her classroom. I kept asking her to meet. I kept sitting through tense and unproductive conversations. But here's the truth: I wasn't showing up as someone who really truly wanted to support her--I was engaged in a power struggle with her. I wanted to prove to her that even though she was pushing me away, I would keep coming back and that eventually one day I would win. I was working from a stance of control, authority, and oppression. And it didn't work. We spent a year in a battle which left me exhausted and demoralized, and I was completely ineffective at changing her practice or having a positive impact on kids.

So what does it mean to be productively persistent? Consistently communicate your belief that your cranky teacher is truly a beautiful person and a committed teacher (maybe deep down inside) and that you truly believe that they can change and grow. Because everyone can. Be persistent in your curiosity about this teacher. Be unwaveringly kind and gentle. This is a very hard world in which to be a human being, and being a teacher is really, really hard. There's a lot to be cranky (sad, angry, disappointed, hurt, fearful) about. Stand with someone persistently. Help them see other ways of being and help them see how they can take other actions in the classroom).

In sum, remember this: The skills needed to coach a cranky teacher are a subset of skills to coach emotions and ways of being. These skills and approaches are not technical, and they're often not taught or practiced in many coaching programs--but knowing how to coach emotions and ways of being is critical.
What do you need?
This blog is the first in a new series called, "How to Coach a ____ Teacher." Next week, I'll share "How to a Coach a Perfectionist Teacher." Tell me what word you'd like to fill in that blank - Anxious? Arrogant? Share your needs in the comments or with me on social media.

(Photo courtesy of Pixabay; no attribution required)

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I know: No matter how positive you are when you walk into her classroom, she bristles and snaps, rejects your overtures, and squashes your subtle suggestions. If you're coaching a teacher you've decided is just cranky, I have five strategies for you to try. One: Coach from a place of humility and empathy.

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One of the most thought-provoking articles I've read in a long time was just published by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall as the lead article in this month's Harvard Business Review. The article, The Feedback Fallacy, convincingly makes the case that most leaders' understanding of feedback is completely backwards. "Feedback," according to Buckingham and Goodall, "is about telling people what we think of their performance and how they should do it better." But, they go on to explain, "the research is clear: Telling people what we think of their performance doesn't help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning."

Buckingham and Goodall identify three fundamental flaws in the prevailing way of providing feedback. First, we are not very good at rating others' performance. The authors maintain that our evaluations of other people have more to do with ourselves than with those we are observing. "This phenomenon is called the idiosyncratic rater effect, and it's large (more than half of your rating of someone else reflects your characteristics, not hers) and resilient (no training can lessen it)."

Second, according to Buckingham and Goodall, research is clear that telling others how they fall short actually inhibits, rather than encourages, learning. The authors present compelling research showing that hearing criticism shifts people into survival mode, thereby "impairing" learning. "Learning," the authors write, "rests on our grasp of what we're doing well, not on what we're doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else's sense of what we're doing poorly."

Third, excellence is not reducible to universal and simple explanations. As the authors explain, "Since excellence is idiosyncratic and cannot be learned by studying failure, we can never help another person succeed by holding her performance up against a prefabricated model of excellence, giving her feedback on where she misses the model, and telling her to plug the gaps."

What does this mean for coaches? As I read the article, I couldn't shake my conviction that Buckingham and Goodall offer significant evidence for three strategies that lie at the heart of the Impact Cycle.

First, rather than telling teachers what they like and dislike about a lesson, to be effective, coaches should structure conversations with teachers as dialogues between two equal partners. A dialogue is a conversation in which both partners share ideas equally, a conversation in which people strive to do what is right, not to be right. A dialogue isn't about positions, it's about partnership. (You can watch my five-minute talk about dialogue here.)

Second, authors such as Bill Sommers, Parker Palmer, and Bob Garmston have pointed out that dialogue is often enabled through a third point for conversation that takes the focus off of the coach and teacher and directs it toward whatever the two are exploring together. For example, two powerful "third points" are student work and video recordings of teachers' lessons. (You can watch videos and download forms for making video a part of professional learning here.)

Third, coaching conversations are more effective when they are nonjudgmental. This doesn't mean that coaches shouldn't share what they are thinking; instead, they should share their thoughts provisionally, and with the humility that is appropriate for any conversation about what happens in a classroom. (You can watch a video about the dangers of judgment [and gossip] here.)

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The Feedback Fallacy - Instructional Coaching

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One of the most thought-provoking articles I've read in a long time was just published by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall as the lead article in this month's Harvard Business Review. The article, The Feedback Fallacy, convincingly makes the case that most leaders' understanding of feedback is completely backwards.

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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In order to successfully do something, like coach a perfectionist teacher, you need knowledge and skill-and your own emotional intelligence. I've written about this concept (the Gaps) here and here. So in order to coach a perfectionist teacher, you've got to know what perfectionism is, and then you need some skills to respond to this tendency, and then you need awareness of your own emotional experience in coaching a perfectionist. Therefore, because this is a big topic to unpack, this is the first of three blogs on coaching the perfectionist teacher. The next two blogs will come out this week!
What Is Perfectionism?
At the heart of perfectionism is a belief that, in order to be loved and accepted, we must strive to act and be the best all the time. Our very worth as a human being is tied to our perfection. The pursuit of perfection consumes a great deal of time and energy because every time we feel shame, blame, or criticism, our response is, I wasn't perfect enough. So let me be more perfect next time.

Perfectionists:
Is Perfectionism an Emotion?

Get upset when someone else or life in general doesn't measure up to how they think things "should" be

Have uncompromising rules about how things should or must be

Blame themselves and others for things that aren't under their control or the control of others

Think in black-and-white terms

Quickly discount positives

Are relentlessly hard on others and on themselves and hold rigidly high and unrealistic standards

Use the word should a lot

Claim they're "not a perfectionist"-they just have high standards

Perfectionism is not actually considered to be an emotion but, rather, a dysfunctional emotional tendency. It is one of the most challenging emotional tendencies to confront, but, left unchecked, it can be physically and emotionally damaging. Perfectionism has been associated with increased stress, physical health problems, mental-health issues, and a high risk of burnout.
The Dangers of Perfectionism
If you suspect you're a perfectionist, it's worth getting some professional support to uncover the roots of this tendency. Perfectionism is about self-worth, and many perfectionists had childhood experiences that led them to doubt their self-worth.

Here is why perfectionism is so dangerous: There is no such thing as perfect, at least among humans. We make mistakes, and without mistakes, we would have little chance to learn or grow or adapt to new situations. So perfectionists are always striving for the impossible, and when they inevitably fail, they experience a surge of difficult emotions-shame, inadequacy, fear, anger. These hurt the perfectionists as well as those around them.

Perfectionism shouldn't be confused with a commitment to excellence and a strong work ethic. You can have tremendous energy, conscientiousness, and persistence and not be a perfectionist. Perfectionism is about seeking external validation, whereas healthy striving is all about internal drive. A healthy striver has high expectations and commits to a task while also making mistakes and knowing that those mistakes don't indicate a personal flaw. A perfectionist's sense of self-worth is overly tied to external praise and accomplishments.

Perfectionism is not a protective shield; rather, it stops someone from being seen. Brené Brown is an expert on perfectionism, and I highly recommend her TED Talk, books, and speeches.
* Image by xusenru on Pixabay, free for commercial use.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series: Eleven Strategies to Coach the Perfectionist Teacher! Coming tomorrow.

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How to Coach the Perfectionist Teacher: Understanding Perfectionism (Part 1)

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At the heart of perfectionism is a belief that, in order to be loved and accepted, we must strive to act and be the best all the time. Our very worth as a human being is tied to our perfection.

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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Coaching a perfectionist teacher requires an expansive set of tools-they are a complicated type to coach. What follows are 11 strategies that I've found are useful with most perfectionists, but perfectionism can also intersect with other coaching challenges. So the perfectionist-new teacher or the perfectionist-resistant teacher require some unique and additional approaches. Let's dive in, however, to 11 strategies that work well with most perfectionist-type teachers. (And if you haven't yet read Part 1 of this series, start there!)

Use Facilitative Coaching. This is the most important and key tip: Use facilitative coaching. A perfectionist lives in a state of disempowerment-disempowerment that comes from within. This means that you need to help them discover their internal power. If you try to do this through directive coaching (which can be tempting), you may be shoring up their perfectionism. You cannot fix a perfectionist teacher. They have to take care of themselves. You can guide, support, and facilitate a process, and so be mindful of your tendency to lean on directive approaches.

Coach Toward Emotional Awareness: We can all benefit from coaching that helps us become more aware of the emotions that we're experiencing, but perfectionists can really benefit from this kind of coaching. Coaches aren't therapists, but we can help our clients recognize when they are experiencing emotions (often those manifest in our bodies), learn to describe and put words to those emotions ( this is a useful tool for that), and then practice exploring those emotions.

Guide Your Client to Identify Indicators of Success: Your perfectionist teacher most likely has a lengthy list of what would make a class, unit, project, or school year successful. It's that long and unattainable list of success markers that contributes to a constant sense of never-enoughness. Help your coachee identify a few indicators of success that are attainable, and meaningful, and help them reach for those few rather than the exhaustive list. For example: This unit will be successful if Carlos finishes the final project and gets a grade of at least a B, or this lesson will be successful if we complete the guided practice and 95 percent of kids are engaged throughout. Attainable, realistic goals help a perfectionist feel successful.

Offer Praise With Caution: Perfectionists want endless amounts of reassuring and praise, but no matter how much you offer it, it won't truly sink in-because at the root of perfectionism is a fragile sense of self-worth. Be very cautious about offering a lot of praise. A perfectionist won't actually feel any better from it and may feel unsatisfied with your coaching, or feel that your praise wasn't enough, or wasn't authentic, or wasn't the right kind of praise. Ultimately, there's nothing you can say or do that will be enough to fill the void of self-worth.

However, a perfectionist teacher will also want some praise from you-or else, they may not feel like they can trust you or that you care about them. Offer genuine praise in bite-size pieces and make sure it's praise about things that truly matter in education. It can sound like any of these:

It was great to see you redirecting Janice so calmly today. I know that you've gotten triggered by her, and she was so responsive to you and just settled down right away. Congratulations!

I was reviewing the interim assessment data and I saw that your kids have made a 40 percent increase in their reading scores in just a few months. That's fantastic!

I am so glad to hear that you took the whole weekend off and rested. I know you've been working really hard, and self-care is so critical.

I observed your interaction with our principal earlier and thought that you responded to his questions really clearly. I know that sometimes you've felt anxious around him, but you seemed confident.

Guide Your Client to Identify Strengths: The perfectionist needs to hone their ability to see their own skills and to praise themselves. Here's what this can sound like:

Coach: Let's debrief the lesson, and I want to ask you first to name three things you did well in this lesson. We'll look at the challenges later, but first we'll focus on what went well. OK?

Teacher: OK, but it really didn't go well. I mean did you see...

Coach: (Cutting the teacher off) Hold up. Before you go there, we're going to talk about what you did well. You need to do this step, OK?

Teacher: OK. I guess I had all my materials prepared.

Coach: Great! What does that say about you? What does that mean about you?

Teacher: I am on top of things. I was organized.

Coach: (Nodding). Yes, and what else did you do well?

Teacher: I don't know. I mean things got so chaotic when they went into labs...

Coach: Hold up. We're focusing on what went well.

Teacher: I guess the kids were really engaged in the lesson.

Coach: Tell me how you came to that conclusion, and also, what was your part in making that happen ...

As I've attempted to show here, you may need to wrangle your perfectionist teacher to stay away from their struggles and flaws and to see what they did well. That's the place to be authoritative-in your holding of the conversation. And then let them do the work of finding their bright spots.

Normalize Struggle and Imperfection: This can be hard to do using facilitative strategies, because you might just want to scream at your client and say, "It's NORMAL to mess up sometimes!!!" (At least I have that desire.) But you can use a light tone, and a sense of humor at times, and remind your teacher that they are human, and humans make mistakes, and it's a learning opportunity. It can sound like this:

Teacher: The kids were engaged in the lab, but then the group at the back got too excited, and they spilled the experiment, and then JR got angry and smashed a vile, and so I had to send him to the office and I knew I should have spent more time going over directions and rules and I should have moved JR to a different group, and then the whole lesson wouldn't have been ruined.

Coach: It seems like JR has been doing better recently and hasn't been to the office in weeks.

Teacher: He has, and so I thought he'd be OK with that group but I wasn't paying close enough attention and I shouldn't have tried such an ambitious lab.

Coach: Of the 32 kids in your class, how many do you think learned something in that lab?

Teacher: I don't know. That lesson was a disaster.

Coach: You collected an exit ticket, right? What did that data say?

Teacher: Well, almost everyone answered the question on the exit ticket correctly.

Coach: So they learned something?

Teacher: I guess so. Except for JR, and I'm committed to every single kid learning.

Coach: I know. And that's a powerful commitment. How do you know he didn't learn anything?

Teacher: He didn't do the exit ticket because he was in the office.

Coach: How do you know he didn't learn?

Teacher: I see where you're going with this. I don't know. Maybe he learned. But ugh. That whole day just left me with an awful feeling, and I am seriously questioning whether I should be a teacher.

Coach: Next time you do a lab, what might you do differently?

Teacher: So much. I don't even know where to start.

Coach: Just pick one thing. Each time you deliver a lesson-even those that go well-it can be helpful to identify just one little change you'd make next time.

Teacher: I guess I'd model the directions and procedures and ensure that they understood those.

Coach: That's great! Definitely important.

Teacher: But I'd also probably do the whole unit differently ...

Coach: Wait a second, let's just unpack that first thing a bit more ...

Keep your teacher focused on a few bite-size actions that they can refine and improve and direct them away from global statements and major declarations. Just steer them away and don't let their fears hijack the conversation.

Coach Around Spheres of Control: Perfectionists blame themselves and others for things that aren't under their control or the control of others. The Spheres of Influence and Control (which I wrote about here) is an invaluable framework to use with a client to help them home in on where they can have the greatest impact. I often carry copies of this graphic, Spheres.pdf, which I'll pull out and reference in coaching conversations to remind a client of what is and isn't within their sphere of control

Coach to Awareness of Shades of Gray: Perfectionists see things in black and white terms. Things are often either a "total failure" or "amazing." Help your client see the nuances, gray zones, and complexity in every situation. Guide them to unpack "total failure" so that they can see the 1 percent of the lesson that was neutral, or even strong. Help them break down that mental model that things are black and white.

Cultivate Self-Compassion: When I'm coaching someone who is superhard on themselves, I sometimes challenge them by saying something like: Would you talk to your best friend/little sister/child/student the way you talk to yourself? Yes, perfectionists are hard on other people around them, but often when they think about the people they love the most in the world, they soften a little. They recognize that those people aren't and can't be perfect, and they can extend grace and love to them. I ask, "What would it take for you to treat yourself the way you treat those you love the most in the world?" And that's an entry point to talking about self-compassion.

Teach Relaxation Strategies: Perfectionists are anxious and live with a lot of fear. Direct your client to resources that can help them learn to relax and become more aware of their emotions and thoughts. Mindfulness is an invaluable tool in this area.

Suggest a Mantra: Recovering perfectionists need to rewire their brain. They've spent decades, most likely, telling themselves they aren't doing a good enough job. As they become aware that their self-talk is unhelpful, they need to reach for new language. Repeating a phrase like, I am enough, I do enough, or This is good enough, and good enough is great, can help to rewire neural pathways.
Part 3 of this series is out tomorrow! Image by StartupStockPhotos on Pixabay, free for commercial use.

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How to Coach the Perfectionist Teacher: Strategies that Work (Part 2)

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Coaching a perfectionist teacher requires an expansive set of tools-they are a complicated type to coach. What follows are 11 strategies that I've found are useful with most perfectionists, but perfectionism can also intersect with other coaching challenges. So the perfectionist-new teacher or the perfectionist-resistant teacher require some unique and additional approaches.

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Developing Patience & Empathy as a Coach

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Developing Patience & Empathy as a Coach

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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Katie (a pseudonym) was a teacher I coached when she was in her second and third years of teaching. She was a perfectionist who was never, ever satisfied with anything she did, or anything her kids did. I found it hard to build a relationship with her-I always felt like there was a wall between us. It took me some time to realize that I contributed to that wall with my own emotional response.

Katie was one of the most challenging teachers for me to coach because of the emotions that arose in me. I often felt frustrated with her, because I felt like her perfectionism was getting in the way of her being a good teacher, and I felt impatient with her. I offered my coaching and then wanted her to quickly change and stop being so hard on herself and adopt a growth mindset and get over her perfectionism now!

Do you see how I contributed to the wall and the problem? Can you see why Katie's trust in me was fragile? Can you see how my impact might have been limited?
Lurking Below Impatience
Here's what I've learned about impatience: Anger often lurks below it. My anger manifests as impatience when things aren't on the timeline I think they should be. When I can't control everything the way I want to.

But sometimes there's something else hiding below my impatience: fear. With Katie, I was afraid that my coaching wouldn't help her, that it wouldn't help her kids, and therefore, that I wasn't a good coach. I was firmly attached to how I thought she should change and what she should do and when, and when I didn't see the kind of evidence I wanted to see, I felt frustrated. Impatient.

I wasn't a very good coach at that point, not by my standards, because what I value most in a coach is that the coaching emerges from a place of deep compassion and curiosity. And when I coached Katie from a place of impatience and anger, I was not a good coach. I had to acknowledge my own fears, anger, sadness, and insecurities first-and engage with those and understand them-before I could be the kind of coach I wanted to be, and that Katie needed me to be.
How to Cultivate Patience
Patience is a skill and grows when we accept ourselves and the way things are. To do this, we need to slow down and think and we need to access courage, equanimity, and trust (or what some might call faith). Patience is not passivity or resignation-it's about being open to what is and truly present. I've been working on my patience for a long time and I work on it every day. I have a lot of fear, anger, and insecurity, but I'm far more conscious of it now than I once was. And, I've also become more aware of when those emotions surface in me and I have ways to engage in a healthy way with those emotions. Slowing down helps me tremendously to recognize what I'm feeling.
The Empathy Breakthrough
Now, when fear or anger surface during a coaching session, I acknowledge them and ask them to sit on the side while I'm working and I promise them we'll have a chat later. And then, once I'm in a place where I can reflect, I say, "Hello my little fearful coach-self. What happened in that session that triggered your insecurities?" And then I dig and uncover sometimes a new insight or sometimes the same old stuff.

When I coached Katie, I had a breakthrough in our work together during one session when my heart opened to her and I felt her pain and I thought about what it must be like to be in her shoes every day. This was scary, and I rallied my courage but I suspected it was what I needed to do. And then, my feet symbolically in her shoes, I felt such sadness, overwhelming sadness. And I said, "Katie, I can hear how much you're suffering, and my heart aches. I wish I could take it all away because I know how badly you want to teach and how much you want to meet the needs of your kids. I'm sorry to hear that you're having such a hard time."

This was a moment when I truly felt deep empathy. And rather than feel afraid of that empathy in myself (empathy for others can be overwhelming), I accepted it and felt it. And Katie sensed my kindness and compassion-I was genuinely with her in that moment. And she said, "Thank you." And she sighed so deeply (I remember that sigh vividly) and said, "I just don't know what to do. I don't know how to stop my mind from telling me that I suck." I nodded and said, "Tell me more about what it's like to be you." And she talked. And I listened. The wall crumbled.
Reflect
Empathy goes a very, very long way. But sometimes to get to a place where we can experience empathy in ourselves, we have to recognize our own emotional responses to someone else.

And so what comes up for you when you coach a perfectionist teacher? Do you see yourself in them? Do you have perfectionist tendencies?
Image used from Wikipedia.
You can't do transformational coaching without engaging simultaneously in your own transformation. Know yourself. Understand your emotions. Stay clear about your purpose as a coach. Activate your courage. Engage your curiosity. And reach out for connection with that perfectionist teacher.

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How to Coach the Perfectionist Teacher: The Coach's Emotions (Part 3)

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Katie was one of the most challenging teachers for me to coach because of the emotions that arose in me. I often felt frustrated with her, because I felt like her perfectionism was getting in the way of her being a good teacher, and I felt impatient with her.

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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The most effective coaching conversations are those that you plan for. Just like when a teacher is prepared with a detailed lesson that outlines the flow of information and activities, the class will almost always be more productive for students. Does a carefully planned lesson mean that the teacher should never deviate from the plan? Of course not! In fact, a well-planned lesson often makes a teacher feel even more empowered to deviate from the plan when necessary, because it provides a structure to fall back on. The same is true of coaching conversations.

A basic plan-or an arc-provides a routine that allows you and your coachee to enter each conversation with confidence, while also providing a structure to return to should the conversation digress (as they often do!). Following this general arc when working with clients will help to ensure that the time you spend together is more meaningful and productive.

1) Check in. This informal chat allows you and your coachee to settle in and establish trust. Look to make personal connections without revealing too much information about your personal life (you don't want your client to be concerned about your emotional state or to be triggered by something personal you share). You can make personal connections while also keeping the conversation light. It's a good idea, too, to limit your check-in time so that the conversation remains focused on coaching. If the coachee regularly wants to spend a lot of time in check-in mode, you might suggest limiting this time to five minutes or an amount of time you agree on together.

2) Create a plan for the conversation. After you've settled in, steer the conversation towards teaching. You can say, "I have a plan for our conversation today, but I also want to hear what's on your mind and if there's anything else you want to make sure we talk about." Let your client share any thoughts, and then see if you can link their interests or concerns to the plan you've created.There are times when it's appropriate to be more directive in guiding the coaching conversations, rather than letting the client lead (more on that in this blog). In general, though, give your coachee input in the conversation so that they feel empowered. Of course, all coaching should also be grounded in a larger work plan, goals, or scope of work, but that's a different topic.

3) Discuss previous commitments. Part of your job as a coach is to hold your client accountable. Gently return to follow-up actions you may have suggested at the end of the last meeting: "Last week you decided to try ... how did that go?" Depending on how much work your client has put in, this could constitute a large piece of your coaching session.

4) Engage in coaching stances and approaches. You've checked in, created a plan, and followed up on commitments. Now it's time to return to the issues your coachee raised while using the stances and approaches. My book, The Art of Coaching, has several chapters dedicated to the dance of listening and questioning in a coaching conversation. In a nutshell, though, it is essential that you engage in the following practices:

Active listening. Listen deeply and with intention, paying attention to underlying beliefs and assumptions that may be present in your client's statements. Active listening also means demonstrating to your client that you are listening through body language and speech ("What I'm hearing you say is ... ").

Questioning. Ask both clarifying questions ("Would you tell me more about ... ?") and probing questions. A probing question is meant to help a client examine the beliefs and ideas behind a particular statement or action. It should be asked with empathy while also eliciting critical thinking. As in, "You seem unsatisfied with how that parent meeting went. What would you do differently next time?" or "I hear that you're frustrated your students didn't do the assigned reading. Why do you think that's happening?"

5) Determine next steps. Here, you'll help your coachee decide what steps should be taken to address issues that came up during the meeting. Consider strategies that they might try, such as observing another teacher or reframing an unclear assignment. Be clear about agreements, and write down the decided-upon course of action so that you can follow up with your coachee.

6) Finally, reflect. At the end of a session, it is helpful to know how your coachee is feeling. What was helpful about the meeting? What would the client like more or less of in the coaching work?

Remember that not every conversation will go as planned. If a conversation doesn't go as well as you would have liked, be gentle with yourself. After all, you are growing as a coach just as your client is growing as an educator.

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The Arc of a Coaching Conversation: Six Steps to More Effective Meetings

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The most effective coaching conversations are those that you plan for. Just like when a teacher is prepared with a detailed lesson that outlines the flow of information and activities, the class will almost always be more productive for students. Does a carefully planned lesson mean that the teacher should never deviate from the plan?

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We can also think of this as a solid "coaching stance" vs. "consultant stance"

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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In The Art of Coaching, I wrote several chapters focused on the "directive" and "facilitative" coaching stances. (You can download a short excerpt from the book here, AOC Ch9 Excerpt.pdf, about these stances). However, since publishing The Art of Coaching in 2013, I've continued to refine my thoughts about when to be directive or facilitative. Navigating these approaches also seems to be something that many coaches struggle with--for good reasons: It's hard to know what's the "right" amount of facilitative coaching and what's the "right" amount of directive coaching. To some extent, there isn't a hard answer to this question--every situation is different, every coach is different, and we need to trust our best judgment in the moment. And, I can offer some more concrete and clear direction around using these two stances.

Recently, I was coaching a coach who was grappling with this question. She is coaching a new teacher who is really struggling. She showed me a video of the teacher, then we went to observe him, and my feedback to the coach was: Be very directive. Very, very directive. I had so many reflections about this experience that I made this video for you to watch! (When I tried writing it all down it just got too long, so I'm experimenting now with incorporating video stories into my blogs. Let me know what you think!).
Three Indicators that You Need to Be Directive

1. When a teacher is in crisis. I often see struggling novice teachers who need directive coaching, but I also sometimes work with experienced educators who are going through a hard time and need me to be directive. In these moments of crisis and heightened emotions, the clear and rational thinking part of the brain isn't working optimally. You know that--because I'm sure you've been there. We all have. So in moments of crisis, it's appropriate for a coach to be directive. (In my video I describe what that sounds like).

2. When a teacher asks you to be directive. This can sound like a teacher saying, "I just don't know what to do!" or "Can you tell me what I should do?" In those moments, you could be facilitative and guide them towards their own insights, but sometimes it's also really important to just give them what they want. Especially if they're new and/or in crisis. This can help to build your relationship and their trust in you as a coach, and you can later guide them through some facilitative reflection on their situation.

3. When a client is learning a new skill set. Let's say you're working with an experienced educator who wants to learn some new technology or try a new instructional approach. They'll need you to be really explicit in your coaching--modeling, guiding their practice, offering real time feedback on their first solo attempts--but then you need to back off as they acquire the skills themselves.

Three Caveats to Being Directive
There are a few caveats to my suggestions to be directive. First, make sure that the client you're coaching is receptive to you being direct--otherwise they could shut down to your coaching. None of us like to be told what to do. You can ask for permission by saying, "I'd like to offer some concrete feedback or suggestions. Is that okay?" Or you can say, "I think it would be helpful if I'm really directive in my coaching today, but feel free to push back." Make sure you pay close attention to their body language and response so that you can gauge how they received your directive coaching.

Second, make sure you offer this directive coaching and feedback without judgment. Your disposition is critical to the effectiveness of your coaching. If someone is in crisis, blame and aggression and judgment won't help. Be very mindful as you give directive coaching to keep your heart open and your conviction strong that someone can change.

And third, be careful not to get stuck in directive coaching. It can feel tempting--especially if you're being directive and telling your client to do X, Y and Z, and they are doing it and things are getting better and they're grateful for your coaching--but don't stay in directive coaching. The danger here is that you create a dependent learner, a teacher who needs you to help them at every step, who can't think for themselves, who can't make good decisions without your guidance. And we need teachers who are reflective, critical thinkers in our classrooms, who are self-empowered and can make decisions alone.

So, in sum, consider directive coaching as a scaffold necessary for when someone is struggling, but something that you want to slowly pull away from when your client is ready.

Oh, and don't forget to watch the video for a story!

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When to Be Directive in a Coaching Conversation

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In The Art of Coaching , I wrote several chapters focused on the "directive" and "facilitative" coaching stances. (You can download a short excerpt from the book here, AOC Ch9 Excerpt.pdf, about these stances). However, since publishing The Art of Coaching in 2013, I've continued to refine my thoughts about when to be directive or facilitative.

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Diane on Coaching Through Cognitive Dissonance

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Diane on Coaching Through Cognitive Dissonance

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Student-Centered Coaching: How do we coach through moments or periods of cognitive dissonance?

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Elena's think-aloud about Directive vs. Facilitative Coaching

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Elena's think-aloud about Directive vs. Facilitative Coaching

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Staying student-centered with learning targets in SCC conversations

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Staying student-centered with learning targets in SCC conversations

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Is listening the most important communication strategy for coaches? Maybe. Listening certainly is essential for effective coaching, but it is also essential for almost any meaningful communication. And, when we asked people from nine countries around the world to video record and watch their conversations, listening was the one strategy they identified that they most needed to improve. In today's video, I talk about listening, why it is important, and I share one simple strategy that will help anyone become a better listener.

You can download free forms to help you improve as a listener (and improve at demonstrating empathy) here:
https://resources.corwin.com/node/28065/student-resources/chapter-3

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Is listening the most important communication strategy for coaches? Maybe. Listening certainly is essential for effective coaching, but it is also essential for almost any meaningful communication. And, when we asked people from nine countries around the world to video record and watch their conversations, listening was the one strategy they identified that they most ...

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The importance of establishing common language

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The importance of establishing common language

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Originally published February 26, 2013 on reading.org

The Eskimos have 52 words for snow because it is so special to them; there ought to be as many for love. - Margaret Atwood

We tried to talk it over, but the words got in the way. - Leon Russell

Margaret Atwood is right, of course. We could communicate more effectively with more words to describe different kinds of love. But having just one word is infinitely better than none.

Words, despite their limitations, help us talk about topics we would not otherwise be able to discuss, and see things we would not otherwise be able to see. A word is a candle held up in the darkness to help us move forward.

Words might be humanity's greatest invention. A common vocabulary helps us share emotions, share ideas, learn, grow. And this is just as true in conversation in schools as it is in conversations at home.

An important common vocabulary in schools, as Phil Schlechty has explained, could be developed around student engagement. Teachers can have meaningful conversations defining and acting on the terms authentic engagement, strategic compliance, and off-task behavior. And once the words are defined, teachers can share ideas and strategies to increase authentic engagement.

Educators can also benefit from coming to a shared understanding of positive reinforcement, and defining such ideas as growth mindset, ratio of interaction, and positivity. When people develop clear definitions of positive and negative reinforcements, they begin to see interactions in a clearer way in the classroom. Some words make the invisible, visible.

Powerful professional learning also happens when teachers agree about the meaning of other words, such as those describing reading strategies, like text-to-self or summarizing, or writing concepts such as sentence fluency, coherence, or voice. The simple act of talking about a word like voice, and working to develop a shared, deeper understanding, can be very meaningful professional development.

Teachers, of course, are not the only people who need to develop a shared vocabulary. When administrators do not share with teachers a common vocabulary about the meaning and importance of observations, their evaluations have little positive impact on teaching and learning. What good is an administrator's evaluation when the teacher and administrator can't authentically talk about what was observed? Worse, what good are observations when observers can't clearly define what they are seeing?

A clear picture of reality is an essential part of growth, but the picture does have to be clear, and people need a shared understanding if they are going to talk about it.

Students should also be a part of developing a shared vocabulary. When students understand authentic engagement and strategic compliance, they can give meaningful feedback to their teachers on what works and what doesn't work for them. Sandi Silbernagel, for example, a teacher in Slidell, Louisiana, learns a lot by asking her second graders for their feedback on their level of engagement.

No doubt Leon Russell was right. Sometimes the words can get in the way. But without words we can't talk. Language is the means by which communication takes place.

And as in life, so in schools. We should do all we can to develop a shared vocabulary. When we can truly talk about what we see, important learning-for teachers, administrators, and students-can really happen.

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The Power of Words - Instructional Coaching

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Originally published February 26, 2013 on reading.org The Eskimos have 52 words for snow because it is so special to them; there ought to be as many for love. -Margaret Atwood We tried to talk it over, but the words got in the way. -Leon Russell Margaret Atwood is right, of course.

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"One of the great challenges we face as we speak with truth about what is good and true is that we need to move away from judging others. Judgment is a relationship killer, and if we are going to connect with others, it starts with relinquishing judgment."

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In most math classes in Pocahontas County, W.Va., students aren't taking notes from the board. They're not listening to a teacher lecture.

Instead, small groups in middle and high school classrooms discuss and debate: What's this problem asking? What's one approach we could try? Sometimes, students get things wrong or hit a dead end-then they come back and try again. Teachers say that the classrooms hum with energy.

"We have really tried to get away from drill and kill," said Laurel Dilley, a math and computer science teacher at Pocahontas County High School.

Meet the Leader

Meet Joanna Burt-Kinderman and learn even more about her strategies for instructional coaching and collaborating with teachers and students on math teaching and learning at the Leaders To Learn From live event, May 2-3, 2019.

Register for the event today >

"We rarely do that in any math classroom anymore, and Joanna has been the push for that."

Joanna is Joanna Burt-Kinderman, the district's math instructional coach. She's introduced a problem-based system of professional development that calls on teachers to identify challenges in their classrooms, collaborate on solutions, and iterate.

Burt-Kinderman, 41, who grew up in Pocahontas County and attended its rural schools, is driven by the idea that teaching math should empower students and teachers alike.

"If you're trying to come in and say, 'I have a better way to teach than you do,' you're totally going to fail," she said. "We have to be led by the teachers. We have to be able to really trust that they know their troubles."

That strategy has changed the way math teachers work with students in Pocahontas County. In math classes, students wrestle with tough problems together and persist in reasoning them through. Middle and high school math test scores have risen from around the average for the state to among the top in West Virginia. And in a district that has struggled to retain math teachers in the past, teachers now say they feel professional ownership of their subject.

Lessons from the Leader

Model Coaching on Good Teaching: Teachers need a safe space and respectful community to explore ideas that won't all be "right." Give them challenging problems to grapple with collectively and a license to learn through mistakes.

Give Students and Teachers Ownership: Students need incentive and support to become agents of their own learning, and so do teachers. Teachers should define the problems that need solving in their classrooms, then work together to test and revise their improvement strategies.

Use a Strength-Based Approach: In the journey of improvement, pay at least as much attention to strengths as failures. Name, celebrate, elevate, and double down on the best of student and teacher practice.

Letting Teachers Lead
The jump in math scores over the past decade is a feat for the small, rural county, the state's least densely populated. The community, surrounded by national forest land, is home to one of the world's largest radio telescopes at the nearby astronomy research center, the Green Bank Observatory. The children of scientists from the center attend the same schools as employees of the ski resort in the nearby Allegheny Mountains and timber-industry workers. In Pocahontas County, where the majority of the district's 1,025 students receive free or reduced-price lunch, the public schools are an equalizer, said Burt-Kinderman-and a major employer, as well.

A decade ago, Burt-Kinderman had recently moved back to the county with her family, after teaching math in Georgia and Virginia and living abroad for several years. She was working as a media specialist and teaching one algebra course at a middle school. But Burt-Kinderman had been developing an idea-about a more teacher-centered, job-embedded type of professional development. It might change the way teachers learned, and in turn, the way they taught.

She pitched it to Terrence Beam-then director of federal programs, now the superintendent.

Beam admits he was a little skeptical of dialing up coaching feedback at first. High school teachers see themselves as authorities in their subjects. Most have content expertise. "Trying [to get] them to look at doing things a little bit differently is sometimes not easy," he said.

But Burt-Kinderman didn't want to prescribe solutions. When she got the go-ahead to start the work with the 9th grade math faculty, the goal was to figure out what was bothering teachers and working with them to fix it, one-on-one and in professional-development meetings. She asked for initial funding from Beam-not for materials but to pay the teachers for their time spent out of school, in professional learning.

Burt-Kinderman homed in on the math concepts that teachers said just "weren't sticking" with students. Together, she and teachers dove deep into those lessons. What about them was working? What wasn't? Burt-Kinderman came into classrooms to model new instructional approaches or observe and offer feedback while teachers tested them out.

It wasn't all smooth sailing. Veteran teacher Teresa Rhea said using new strategies could be overwhelming and frustrating. But Rhea said it's been worth it. "I would never go back to teaching like I did before."

Burt-Kinderman wanted teachers to see her-and their colleagues-as thought partners, she said. The coaching program has since expanded throughout the middle and high school, and now Burt-Kinderman has started working with elementary teachers as well. At the high school, the culture shift is clear.

"In other schools, maybe I'd be embarrassed to go admit that I didn't know exactly how to do [something]. ... But I don't feel like that here," said Dilley, the math and computer science teacher. "I feel like [my colleagues would] be like, 'Oh, that's really interesting, let's talk about it.' And [Burt-Kinderman] has fostered that. I don't think we would be like that with each other if it wasn't for her bringing us together as a family, as a department."

Teachers in West Virginia kicked off last year's wave of protests, going on strike for higher pay and better school conditions. Teacher recruitment and retention remain major challenges. In 9th grade math, about a third of teachers across the state aren't certified to teach the subject. Ticking off the barriers to getting and keeping certified math teachers, Beam noted Pocahontas County's remote location and sparse population.

"But we've been able to maintain fully certified math teachers in our county, which is very unusual for West Virginia," he said. "Joanna's leadership has helped do that."

Burt-Kinderman emphasized, though, that a supportive professional environment isn't a cure-all. She had some teachers who felt torn about attending after-school PD, because it meant a loss in income. Most teachers in the county work a second job, she said.

"They really wanted to do this work, but it's tough when you can go to the ski resort and wait tables and make more money," she said.

Burt-Kinderman took part in the strikes, traveling with her two daughters-then ages 8 and 10-to the state capital. Teacher turnover is directly linked to the pay raises that educators were fighting for, she said.

"When your own compensation package is so low, and then your benefits package starts to get scraped away, and then you have all of the normal problems of teaching and learning in a state with huge opioid problems, huge poverty problems-you really can wear people out," she said. "Time after time, I've seen really great folks leave the profession."

Burt-Kinderman valued growing up in Pocahontas County, an economically diverse area, where children from comfortably middle-class families and children who had grown up in poverty went to the same public schools. Her mother was a teacher who started a leadership program for local girls, and her father founded and ran community radio stations.

When she left for college and arrived at Haverford, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, she experienced some culture shock. "The only folks that I met who knew about the place where I grew up had come on Habitat [for Humanity] trips," Burt-Kinderman said.

In an intro to calculus course at Haverford, she started to understand how different her K-12 math education had been from many of her peers'. But the class, taught by "just a truly incredible teacher," ignited a love of math she never had as a high school student. At Haverford, she also read the book that would inspire her to become a math teacher- Radical Equations, civil rights leader Bob Moses' work on raising math literacy in poor communities.
'Talking Culture'
She started thinking about a strong math foundation as a matter of justice and equity, a doorway to civic participation. "If your math literacy isn't strong enough, you can't poke holes in analysts' arguments about the economy. You can't look at data presentations and realize that someone could be manipulating you," said Burt-Kinderman.

Those skills-"reading something critically, listening to something critically, finding a better way ... those are the kinds of skills that inherently we want to be focusing on in math class," she said.

How do teachers change the goal of math class from answer-getting to reasoning? It started with overhauling the curriculum.

We have to be led by the teachers. We have to be able to really trust that they know their troubles.

When Burt-Kinderman started as a math coach, the state was moving from a subject-based progression-the traditional Algebra 1, geometry, Algebra 2-to an integrated-math sequence that wove together topics each year. Pocahontas County had to follow suit.

But the district didn't buy textbooks or use any one resource wholesale. Instead, it chose to build a curriculum, with Burt-Kinderman and the teachers working together.

Burt-Kinderman would dole out responsibilities to the teachers-for example, finding tasks that would teach statistics standards. Teachers searched for options, relying on materials from free sources like the Mathematics Vision Project, Desmos, and Illustrative Mathematics. They reconvened with the materials they'd found, tested them out together, and debriefed. The process worked because it was democratic, said Burt-Kinderman-teachers had a professional say.

In classrooms, she and the teachers have also developed tools that encourage students to ask questions and persevere through difficult problems. They've put in place grading structures that assess students' persistence and thought process, rather than a correct answer.

Discussion, or math talk, is now central to lessons in Pocahontas County. Teachers say it's engaging for the students. "My hour goes by so fast," said Nebraska Scotchie, a middle school math teacher.

But there's another reason why Burt-Kinderman wants to build math classes on sense-making and conversation.

"Appalachia's a real talking culture. We're oral history, we're porch-sitters-still," she said. "I think a lot of the stories told about Appalachia really paint our culture as weakness."

Centering math talk as a pathway to academic success, she said, is "a rewriting, in our minds, of our culture as a strength."
Learning From the Trenches
Now, she's expanding her work outward. Burt-Kinderman has encouraged her teachers to attend regional and national math conferences, to share the strategies that have worked so well in Pocahontas County. Watching her staff bring expertise to those spaces, understanding that "success here is something that can translate," is really rewarding, she said.

She's working on two grant projects through the National Science Foundation: one to involve more rural, first-generation students in STEM, the other to develop a statewide math master-teacher network.

Matthew Campbell, an assistant professor of math education at West Virginia University who is working with Burt-Kinderman on the master-teacher grant, said that she is an ideal person to be leading this work.

She's built relationships not just with teachers across the state but also K-12 officials and people in higher education. But she believes in learning from what teachers are doing in the trenches, Campbell said. She thinks about building this network in the same way she envisions classroom practice-raising up best practices and working together toward improvement elsewhere.

"There's a lot to learn from and build from, in terms of what's going on here," said Campbell. "It's not a matter of some directive coming in to save West Virginia."

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In most math classes in Pocahontas County, W.Va., students aren't taking notes from the board. They're not listening to a teacher lecture. Instead, small groups in middle and high school classrooms discuss and debate: What's this problem asking? What's one approach we could try?

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Inclusive Coaching Focuses on Students, Not Teachers

Lindsay Stoetzel and Stephanie Shedrow

Inclusive coaching, based on the premise that all teachers are lifelong learners, enables participants to self-direct their professional development with guided support (Sweeney, 2016). Yet, for this kind of coaching to be successful, we must overcome a long history of deficit models targeting "deficient" teachers who need "fixing."

As instructors within the Student-Centered Coaching Certificate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we work with new and veteran coaches in diverse and international settings. Coaches from New Mexico to Columbia to our home state consistently express the same struggle to build relational trust and maintain teacher buy-in, especially when teachers perceive coaching as purely evaluative.

Not all teachers are willing to put themselves under the microscope. They might have a lack of engagement in collaborative planning activities, choose not to share student work during analysis, or resist invitations to visit peer classrooms while keeping their own doors closed. Such reluctance might speak to a teacher's own insecurities or be well warranted by prior negative professional learning experiences. If we truly believe that coaching is a partnership of shared expertise, then teacher expertise needs a place at the table.

To make this change, coaching meetings must focus on student evidence (what students say and do in relation to learning goals) rather than teacher moves (what the teacher says and does). This change can seem overwhelming because it repositions the underlying beliefs that shape many coaching programs. But a commitment to shared ownership of the coaching process fosters teacher professionalism and a growth mindset without placing blame on teacher shortcomings. These values must not only be clearly communicated through a coaching vision but also reinforced by administrators who are able to walk the walk.

The Collaborative Work of Goal Setting

The shift to inclusive coaching starts with the goal-setting meeting. Carefully crafting learning goals provides direction for coaching collaborations and keeps the purpose of the work-students-at the center of the process.

During goal-setting meetings, teachers and coaches can work collaboratively to establish learning goals based on students' previous work, tests, and other evidence, as well as curriculum standards. Coaches can address concerns about classroom management, content knowledge, or instructional design by discussing how these pedagogies affect students' ability to learn.

The coaching process, broken down in Figure 1 below, still develops specific teaching practices, but those practices are a means to an end (the student's performance) as opposed to representing the teacher's performance.
Figure 1. Setting Student-Centered Goals
Esme, an instructional literacy coach enrolled in our coaching program, began the goal-setting meeting by asking her 1st grade teaching partner, Laura, what her students had been working on and where she saw them going next. Laura explained that most of her students did well but identified two areas where they seemed to be struggling and wanted to help them succeed during small group work. While Esme did offer instructional support, she did so by supporting Laura's goals for improving student evidence, rather than by telling Laura what her goals should be.

The Justification for Teachers' Goals

Because teacher agency is paramount to the goal-setting process, coaches should draw on research to look at how an educator will best learn. Adult learning theory, which recognizes that adults do not learn in the same manner as children, tells us that adults request explanations of why concepts are being taught, prefer learning that focuses on performing a common task, want instruction that accounts for prior experience, and desire self-directed discovery learning (Merriam, 2011).

Coaches can draw on adult learning theory by creating opportunities for teachers to share their experiences, connect new learning to their immediate contexts, and set learning goals relevant to their current needs (Aguilar, 2016). When teachers attend goal-setting meetings with instructional goals already in mind, the coach's role is to ask prompting questions to illuminate why the teacher has selected these goals.

When Esme and Laura were setting goals, Laura said that she likes to use centers and wanted students to rotate through various activities, but she needed help planning for each station. A common coaching reaction might be to jump into coplanning station activities. However, it was important for Esme to direct the conversation back to the students during the early planning stage. She asked several probing questions:

Before we think about the activities, do you have any student work we can look at to determine how you might group students? Are there any patterns in student understandings that might help to inform our creation of small groups?

Based on student evidence, do you think that all students need to work through every station? Do you notice any students who might benefit more from an extension activity based on the original learning goal?

Were students able to demonstrate their understandings in multiple ways on this assessment? How could we offer opportunities to engage different literacy domains to meet a wider range of student abilities?

This probing exercise grounded goal setting in students' knowledge. If a teacher's purpose is based on generalized notions or gut feelings, coaches can introduce the need for evidence, such as student work, to support conclusions. Teachers might see that they can adapt their original goals to better fit the needs of their students. The ultimate outcome is to help teachers identify their own justification for selecting each goal.

Goal-Setting with Prescribed Curricula

Many coaches find themselves in contexts where packaged curriculum predetermines the process and focus of goal setting. When curricular initiatives drive coaching efforts, teachers are often left out of the goal-setting process. These circumstances also tend to frame the coach's role as an expert providing direction on implementation of fixed curricula.

In order to shape instructional practices, teachers still need to understand what students know and can do, which requires a step backwards to analyze student evidence. If Esme were in this situation, we would advise her to allow Laura to drive the partnership by inquiring into Laura's expertise. Esme might ask: What prior experiences does Laura have working with stations? Has she noticed any patterns in recent student work that would indicate grouping as a support, and could Laura and Esme look at this evidence together? Is more student evidence necessary to determine what standard/skill to focus on?

These questions validate Laura's professional experience as a teacher and again move the focus to student evidence. If there is not enough evidence to differentiate planning, Esme and Laura could design a formative assessment to learn more about student needs, interests, and strengths relative to the curricular focus. This process of engaging in a goal-setting meeting with a predetermined goal, and then using student evidence to plan how that goal will be achieved, is depicted below in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Keeping a Student-Centered Focus Within Curricular Goal Setting
A coaching vision that begins with student-focused goal-setting meetings enables teachers to act as professionals who continue to learn alongside their students. This simple shift opens doors to positive coaching relationships and sets the expectation that growth through coaching is a meaningful practice for us all.

References

Aguilar, E. (2016). The art of coaching teams: Building resilient communities that transform schools. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Sweeney, D. (2016). Student-centered coaching: The moves. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Lindsay Stoetzel is an instructor for the Student-Centered Coaching Certificate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Stephanie Shedrow is an assistant professor of literacy education at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

ASCD Express, Vol. 14, No. 13. Copyright 2019 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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instructional strategies (active and project-based learning)

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Inclusive Coaching Focuses on Students, Not Teachers

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Inclusive Coaching Focuses on Students, Not Teachers Lindsay Stoetzel and Stephanie Shedrow Inclusive coaching, based on the premise that all teachers are lifelong learners, enables participants to self-direct their professional development with guided support (Sweeney, 2016). Yet, for this kind of coaching to be successful, we must overcome a long history of deficit models targeting "deficient" teachers who need "fixing."

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Grow a Coaching Relationship from the Ground Up

Sara Tellman Veloz

Two words come to mind when I think about coaching: relationship and willingness. The relationship between a coach and teacher is the critical lever that initiates and sustains any successful coaching venture, and a teacher's willingness to receive that coaching is essential for growth on any level. Crucial for all coaching success is the leveling of any perceived hierarchy. When teachers relate to coaches as professional equals, the power balance enhances the relationship's quality and efficiency.

As an elementary and middle school teacher, I received feedback from instructional coaches. These subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle nudges to improve my practice translated into changes only when I was open to them. Years later, after training as a coach, I look into the faces of teachers and know that any nudge I deliver must be borne out of trust and kindness.

Whether one is a consultant coach, district coach, or site-based coach, it is important to be authentic, respectful, and humble. Site-based coaches are the near-peers of those they coach, frequently moving into the position from the classroom down the hall. Coaches must remember, regardless of their previous background, that they now have a unique distance from a teacher's classroom experience. This parity in school status can pose a relational challenge if any hierarchy exists, especially if teachers have encountered negative interactions with coaches in the past. Memories of negative experiences sear the psyches of teachers and can stunt the formation of future relationships.

I have witnessed these challenges in my coaching practice and have learned from personal reflection on my missteps, as well as from formal study of effective coaching, how to mitigate these potential challenges and walk the path toward a successful coaching relationship. I recommend five actions for coaches that will facilitate a coach-teacher connection:

1. Go slow with feedback. Teaching is a form of performance, and observation by even the kindest critic can provoke stage fright. Instead of leaping headlong into teacher observations, a scenario that can give even the most resilient teachers the jitters, begin by meeting away from the stage of the classroom. When I meet teachers for the first time in professional development settings or in collaborative meetings, the pressure is lower than when I simply show up in the back of their classroom for an observation. I try to meet teachers several times individually to allow for introductions and friendly interaction prior to an observation. This approach is especially helpful when a teacher is nervous about coaching or damaged by previous coaching experiences. I frequently use restorative circles, a relationship-building activity in which participants sit in a circle and respond to a prompt, at the beginning of professional development. This allows me to learn about the participants and gives them an opportunity to learn about me. I jot down any relevant information teachers share and revisit my notes before I meet with teachers individually.

2. Begin and end the session off-topic. Begin a postobservation debriefing by discussing a topic far from the classroom. Acknowledging a shared human experience separate from the classroom helps to foster a true relationship. Talk about a shared interest, activity, or experience. Ask about a hobby or an enjoyable weekend outing. Assess teachers' body language, voice quality, and ease of discourse to gauge emotion levels. If teachers are guarded at the beginning of a conversation, they will find it difficult to hear and respond to feedback, so use this informal data to guide your coaching approach. Once the coach provides feedback and the teacher and coach formulate an action plan, guide the conversation back to a topic that reflects life away from school.

3. Ask questions. Just as inquiring about life outside the classroom invites the teacher into the conversation, maintaining a cadence of inquiry keeps the teacher's voice at the center of the coaching conversation. In their book Cognitive Coaching, scholars Robert J. Garmston and Arthur L. Costa write that questions suggest "a constant, dynamical process of ongoing, creative problem solving, questioning, and experimentation leading to continuous spirals of learning" (2016, pp. 150). Suffuse coaching conversations with queries and jot down notes or transcribe teacher responses. If stumped for questions, simply ask the teacher to elaborate on an observation or recommendation or to share her feelings about the session so far. I frequently ask, "How is this feeling for you?" or "What are your thoughts on my observation?"

4. Teach with, not for, the teacher. Teachers often ask a coach for a lesson demonstration. In my experience, the motivation can sometimes be less about authentic interest in an instructional method and more about evading the discomfort of an observation. Teaching in tandem, where a coach and teacher give a lesson in turns, offers support and demonstration while simultaneously disallowing escape and diminishing the emotional load of observation. When a coach is willing to become a thought partner, a teaching partner, and a critique partner, relational parity thrives.

5. Be of service with humility. What do you find most helpful in our debriefs? Is there something I could do better? How can I be of service to you? My life as a coach changed when I began to end all my coaching conversations with these simple questions. Because I was honestly interested in the answers, my humility shone through. In her book The Art of Coaching, instructional coach Elena Aguilar encourages coaches to ask questions about the quality of service they provide (2013). This is an essential practice of "right-sizing" oneself in the context of the coaching relationship by extending willingness to receive feedback and suggestions.

Instructional coaching is a multifaceted craft that develops through learning and experience. Becoming a master coach requires the union of professional and experiential knowledge and an acumen that weaves together interpersonal communication and emotional intelligence. When done right, the practice allows fellow educators to link arms in support.

References

Aguilar, E. (2013). The art of coaching: Effective strategies for school transformation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Costa, A.L. and Garmston, R.J. (2016). Cognitive coaching: Developing self-directed leaders and learners. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Sara Tellman Veloz is the founder of Buckerfield Educational Consulting, Inc., which works with teachers, site-based coaches, and school and district administrators in Arizona and northern California. Sara provides professional development in literacy topics as well as in content designed to increase teacher effectiveness, improve classroom management, and deepen the authentic cognitive engagement of students. She was an elementary and middle school teacher for 12 years.

ASCD Express, Vol. 14, No. 13. Copyright 2019 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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professional development (coaching and mentoring

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Grow a Coaching Relationship from the Ground Up

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Grow a Coaching Relationship from the Ground Up Sara Tellman Veloz Two words come to mind when I think about coaching: relationship and willingness. The relationship between a coach and teacher is the critical lever that initiates and sustains any successful coaching venture, and a teacher's willingness to receive that coaching is essential for growth on any level.

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It is with our judgments as with our watches: no two go just alike, yet each believes his own.
Alexander Pope

One of the difficulties inherent in challenging teachers' judgments is that when those judgements appear to be contradicted teachers sometimes say, "Well, it works for me and my students." This is hard to challenge.

Anthony Radice made a similar point in a recent blog post about the debilitating nature of complacent certainty:

A clear example of this kind of complacency is contained in the words, 'I know my pupils'. It's the killer punch to an argument, because it is not falsifiable. There is no definitive evidence that can be presented to refute this statement. One can debate endlessly over the evidence for this approach or that, only to have the whole discussion closed down with these four short words. The implication tends to be that 'you can pontificate all you like about cognitive science; you can use any logical argument you like; but I possess knowledge which supports my approach, knowledge to which you evidently have no access, you cold-hearted intellectual, you!'

Falsifiability is important because it's the backbone of progress in science. A scientist states a theory, describes the evidence which supports that theory and then other scientists are able to test the theory and replicate the experiment looking for possible flaws. This is not how, say, religion works. Religious belief relies on faith. When faith is challenged by evidence, it's possible to say things like, "God works in mysterious ways." It's not possible to disprove such a statement because it's not falsifiable. How could you begin to attempt to show that God doesn't work in mysterious ways? if a statement or a theory is true in all possible circumstances then it's unfalsifiable: you can't disprove it. If we can't disprove something then no amount of evidence or reason could possibly sway us from our entrenched positions because those positions are not based on evidence or reason but are instead based on faith.

If, in the face of contradictory evidence, we make the claim that a particular practice 'works for me and my students', then we are in danger of adopting an unfalsifiable position. We are free to define 'works' however we please. If we're told that students' exam results might improve if we changed our practice we can say things like, "There's more to education than exam results" and claim that our students are happier, better rounded, or have an excess of some other vague, unmeasurable trait. We can laugh at the idea of measurement and say, "Just because you can't measure it, doesn't mean it isn't important." We can insulate ourselves from logic and reason and instead trust to faith that we know what's best for our students and who can prove us wrong?

The thing is, this sort of faith results in stagnation. Science has made tremendous leaps and bounds over the past 200 or so years because scientists learn from their mistakes. Religions have stayed pretty much the same (much to the satisfaction of their adherents as their beliefs represent eternal Truth.) If we as teachers adopt a position of faith, we cannot learn or improve. We cannot receive meaningful feedback about our mistakes if our response is to shift the parameters and respond with, "Yeah, but". By testing our ideas and accepting where we have made mistakes, we learn.

As Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein point out in Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree, there are some professions - psychotherapy, clinical psychology, recruitment, radiology, stock broking, the judiciary - where practice and experience doesn't seem to improve judgement. What all these professions have in common is that it's very hard to learn from mistakes. If you work in recruitment it's unlikely that you'll track the long-term success of the personnel you recruit so you never know when your judgement was successful and when it was not. A psychotherapist takes feedback from the apparent progress of patients in the clinic but has no mechanism for knowing how they behave in the real world. All these professions rely on their subjective judgement without getting meaningful feedback on how successful their judgements might be. Teaching is, perhaps, a little like this. We get instant and meaningful feedback on some aspects of the job; if our behaviour management isn't up to snuff, students are unambiguous in their feedback. But how do we know if our ability to get students to retain and transfer new skills and knowledge is good enough? Most of the time we rely on our subjective judgement and certain visible proxies such as whether children are working hard, solving problems and generally performing well in the classroom. It's easy to look with satisfaction at a sea of happy, contented faces and conclude, "Well, it works for me." As Kahneman and Klein put it, "human judgments are noisy to an extent that substantially impairs their validity."

There are two main barriers to teacher improvement. One is that we often fail to notice whether our ability to teach is any good. The other is the way we are held to account. We are asked to justify and explain why students failed to make the grade; we are under pressure is to make excuses and conceal mistakes to avoid being blamed. Instead of admitting that what we're doing doesn't appear to be effective we shrug and say, "These things happen" and "What can you expect with kids like these?" Sometimes we blame specification changes or marking protocols: It must be the fault of the exam board, Ofqual, the DfE. I've heard failure blamed on timetabling, sports fixtures, room temperature and litany of equally plausible excuses. My favourite excuse is one I wrote about in my recent book:

Once in an exam analysis meeting, a school leader who taught in a particular department said that the reason the exam results of that department were so poor was because of their outstanding teaching. They concentrated on independent learning and refused to 'spoon feed'. This obviously meant kids did less well in the test.

If we want to improve as teachers we have to acknowledge our errors. If school leaders want teachers to acknowledge their errors they must create a culture where this is safe and normal. One positive change to school culture would be to change the norm from using evidence to confirm our prejudices to using it explore how we might think and act differently.

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"Works for me!" The problem with teachers' judgement

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It is with our judgments as with our watches: no two go just alike, yet each believes his own. Alexander Pope One of the difficulties inherent in challenging teachers' judgments is that when those judgements appear to be contradicted teachers sometimes say, "Well, it works for me and my students."

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Making Coaching Part of Your DNA

Paul E. Smith with Jason Haap
Oh, no! I have a coach! What have I done wrong?
I began coaching and leading coaches at the beginning of the millennium. The term "coach" conjured images of adults with whistles around their necks. Coaching teachers was something new. I worked in a large urban district that implemented coaching as a means of professional development in Title I schools. These schools were already highly scrutinized, so the idea of having a coach in classrooms was just one more thing to make teachers feel like they had done something wrong. "If you are assigned a coach," their thinking reasoned, "then you must be a bad teacher!" This deficit mindset runs counter to creating a culture where everyone has room to grow. Surgeon and professional coaching advocate Atul Gawande wrote that, "No matter how well-trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That's where coaching comes in . . . ."

To shift our culture from the belief that, "I've been sent a coach because I'm a bad teacher" to "A coach can make me an even better teacher," we had to infuse coaching conversations with growth-oriented statements. For example, at the beginning of a coaching relationship, a coach might say to a teacher, "I'm here to learn about your strengths and to talk about how we can build on them to become even stronger, together." It might take frequent repetition of this sentiment to instill it in a teacher's mind, but it is important to take this time to establish the new coaching culture.

Invitation and Challenge

Additionally, a coach might frequently reinforce the idea that "We are in this together." Coaches are partners and collaborators, not experts making proclamations from a position of power. We embody this trait through co-planning and co-teaching, positioning ourselves as partners in practice. When we model lessons, we invite feedback to promote a sense of reciprocity, and to emphasis the collaborative nature of the relationship. In other words, good coaching models the tenets of good teaching, and offers colleagues an invitation and a challenge.

Goethe said, "If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that." Good coaches know how to balance an invitational yet challenging approach. To be inviting, I must take an interest in who the teachers are as people. What are our shared interests and values? These can form the basis of our coaching relationship. Both coaches and teachers are social creatures, and this social relationship needs a foundation beyond the technical details of a lesson. To provide appropriate levels of challenge in a coaching relationship, I might adapt the traditional "I do, we do, you do" instructional model. The coach demos a targeted model lesson ( I do) while the teacher watches and takes notes. The pair can debrief, and then coplan and coteach another lesson which emphasizes the same targets ( we do). Finally, after this level of support, the coach might watch the teacher try a new approach alone, offering feedback ( you do). If I fail to be inviting, I cannot build the trust needed for a growing relationship with colleagues. Or, if I'm not a source of challenge-meaning I don't encourage colleagues toward achievement, then our relationship is shallow and low substance. Individuals thrive in environments that promote high substance and high approachability

Coaching Is a Life Skill

I have trained or supervised hundreds of coaches in the last 18 years. In my presentations, I am quick to show how coaching can not only positively affect our professional lives, but also our lives outside the classroom. To foster positive cultures in our schools, we need to embody coaching ideals in all areas of our lives. I cannot begin to tell you all the benefits that coaching contributed to raising my own teenagers as they navigated the highs and lows of adolescence. Coaching is a way to engage in a thoughtful life, both in school and at home. In either context, we need (as coaches) to be approachable and trustworthy.

Coaching promotes a culture of treating people with dignity and professionalism, and this is beneficial in any human interaction. Author Arthur Koesterler coined the term holonomy to describe an individual's drive to preserve and assert their individuality while functioning as an interdependent part of a larger system. Holonomy recognizes efficacy, flexibility, craftmanship, consciousness, and independence as essential to our humanity. Good coaching, too, works with these human drives to improve systems by elevating individuals to their best performances.

For coaching to become a positive mindset in our schools, it needs to be a natural extension of who we are. The rhythms of coaching should not be forced, but seamless in our approach to improved educational environments.

Paul E. Smith is the director of urban educational services at Hamilton County Educational Service Center in Cincinnati, Ohio; he also supervises 50 coaches in the Cincinnati area. Paul has been a coach, or has led coaches, for the last 18 years of his 35-year career. Jason Haap is a school improvement coach at Hamilton County Educational Service Center. He has been coaching the last 7 years of his 22-year career.

ASCD Express, Vol. 14, No. 13. Copyright 2019 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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Making Coaching Part of Your DNA Paul E. Smith with Jason Haap Oh, no! I have a coach! What have I done wrong? I began coaching and leading coaches at the beginning of the millennium. The term "coach" conjured images of adults with whistles around their necks. Coaching teachers was something new.

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Emotionally Compelling, Buildingwide, Differentiated Coaching

Kristen Moreland

I was in my 14th year of teaching the first time I was assigned a coach. I knew of this person, because she had trained teachers on an external curriculum resource our school was using, and she seemed like a lovely human being. But that was the extent of our "relationship." Having never before had a nonevaluative visitor in my classroom, I spent the first few weeks of our "coaching" politely brushing her off. It seemed as if my plans were always unexpectedly changing on the day she was scheduled to observe (or I was reacting in real time to student need, as I liked to say), and, I'm so sorry, but could we possibly reschedule? became my regular refrain. I had survived more than a decade as a middle school teacher. Why would I need help now?

Eventually, this coach did what she came to do: she observed my class anyway. I was a nervous wreck the entire time, assuming the worst. Instead, her feedback was so validating that I teared up. There were no comments like, "maybe you should ..." or any jargon like "highest leverage point" for me to consider. She was simply another educator showing me that she understood who I was, what I was doing, and that those things mattered. Her words planted a tiny seed of trust that seemed to sprout overnight into a lush garden.

That was all it took-a kind, honest conversation about teaching-to form a true coaching relationship. I began to welcome her into my classroom, always looking forward to her insights and perspective. I gathered my questions and sent her drafts of documents for feedback. We dissected student work, looking for clues on how to reach every student. My entire energy shifted, which, of course, positively affected the level of work from my students, resulting in real, measurable growth. I felt incredibly supported as a teacher, which made me realize how many constructive experiences I had missed, simply because I dismissed coaching as only appropriate for newbies. I wanted all teachers to feel this support. The next year, I moved into a teacher leader role (part-time teacher/part-time coach), eventually joining my district's team of full-time instructional coaches. My life was irrevocably changed.

My experience with my first coach was part of an external, grant-funded program staffed with its own coaches, and teachers were expected to participate. When teachers have a choice, however, how does a school create a culture that encourages all adults to pursue meaningful goals? The key lies in differentiation.

Each of your colleagues may envision the coaching relationship differently, based on their previous experiences. . Some may have had limited interaction with a consultant who supported a specific initiative, and others may have had a fantastic experience with their previous coach. So, I always have my "elevator speech" ready to answer, "What do you do?"
My job is to do two things. One: I help you find and embrace moments of joy in your practice. And two: I help you remember your "why" for doing this crazy job in the first place. I do this by asking questions to help you sort out what is already in your head and arrange it so that you can see your own brilliance. What that looks like in practice can and should be different for every teacher, and I'm excited to explore the possibilities with you.
By introducing myself this way-whether it's to an entire staff or an individual-I hope that I can open the door for human-to-human connection. Teaching is the most intense work there is, and when teachers feel supported on a heart level-as I personally experienced, data dives and conversations about shifts in instructional practice to achieve student-centered goals become much more welcomed and even sought out. This is where the magic happens.

Whether you are new to coaching or coaching is new to your school, I believe you can implement a buildingwide plan to support all stakeholders in growing professionally and personally and positively affect student achievement if you communicate your belief in who they are and what they do. This is simultaneously very simple and incredibly complex, because we're dealing with emotions in what can often be volatile and unpredictable environments: schools. This is why differentiated approaches built from relational trust are the roots of any coaching initiative, no matter where the funding is coming from.

Currently, I am fortunate enough to be a part of team that embraces coaching at all levels. My caseload includes teachers brand new to the profession and those with a range of experiences who are new to our community. I support a building veteran taking on a teacher leader role, as well as members of the administration who are committed to both student achievement and personal leadership development. For teams with schedules that are difficult to coordinate, I run learning labs via video, so all members have a chance to participate. And for my own growth, I engage in meta-coaching via a virtual professional learning community for instructional coaches with participants from all over Central and South America.

Every conversation is different. Every goal is different. Every success is different. What is the same is my unwavering belief in all these individuals as educators.

There are amazing experts with books and programs and videos and blog posts and Twitter chats and all sorts of other fantastic resources to help you figure out the "what," "when," and "how" of coaching. What data to collect. When to consult. How to paraphrase. How to use video in a way that will have the greatest impact. These questions and a million more can be answered in all the literature that is out there. But I believe the skill that truly allows me to build trust and craft my differentiation is this:
I ask questions to help you sort out what is already in your head and arrange it so you can see your own brilliance.
When teachers and leaders recognize their own brilliance, they show up in different, more intentional ways. When this happens, kids win. And isn't that what matters most?

With more than two decades of experience in education worldwide, Kristen Moreland is committed to bringing humanity back to education. She serves as an instructional coach at the Pan American School of Porto Alegre, Brazil. You can follow her on Twitter @kmorekin and on Instagram @educatorsforhumanity.

ASCD Express, Vol. 14, No. 13. Copyright 2019 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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Emotionally Compelling, Buildingwide, Differentiated Coaching Kristen Moreland I was in my 14th year of teaching the first time I was assigned a coach. I knew of this person, because she had trained teachers on an external curriculum resource our school was using, and she seemed like a lovely human being.

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Check out this exchange I recently had on Twitter. I was discussing frustrations of middle school teachers:

Have you ever felt like this Tweet, that you don't have the time to teach your content and all of the content your students should have learned before you? Why do we have students who seemed to do fine last year, but don't have what they need to succeed now? How is it that so many students have so many gaps?

Do you teach third grade and find that your students don't know addition facts?

Do you teach middle school and find that your students don't know their multiplication facts?

Do you teach algebra and find that your students don't understand ratio?

I have thought a lot about this. I have thought and researched and read and worked with teachers and students at all grade levels. And I think I have found something that can help.

This post is intended to start that conversation.

I invite you to consider this graphic that represents the development of mathematical reasoning.

Notice how the levels of reasoning build on each other. Each kind of thinking and reasoning is based on the previous and is more complicated.

This graphic is meant to suggest that teachers' role is to help students change the way they think, in increasingly sophisticated ways. Too often well meaning teachers help students get answers to questions, but because it's easier they often use methods with reasoning in the level(s) before. Students get answers but don't change the way they think. Then students are stymied when they are expected to solve problems in the next level involving more layers of complexity. They haven't developed the ability to think with sophisticated mathematics, they only know how to get answers. We, as teachers, need to understand the development of mathematical reasoning so we can help our students think and reason in ways that allow them to continue to grow and learn.

In this post, I'll give examples of what it means to reason in these increasingly sophisticated ways. Later on in the post, I'll give you a helpful one-page questionnaire to help you decide how your students are thinking and reasoning.

Counting Strategies

What does it mean to use counting strategies to solve problems?

Counting strategies involve counting by 1's. Here are examples of solving problems involving the four operations counting by 1's.

27 + 8:

27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35. This could be done with fingers, tally marks, pictures, beads on a rack, on a number line. The part that makes it a counting strategy is the counting by 1's.

27 - 8:

Student says 27. Then puts up a finger and says 26, puts up another finger and says 25... puts up an eighth finger and says 19.

7 x 8:

Count out 8 (tallies, beans, etc.) into a pile. Then do that 6 more times so you have 7 piles, each with 8 in them. Then start at the beginning and count them all by 1's.

40 ÷ 8:

Draw 8 circles. Deal out 40 tallies, one at a time to each circle. Count the number of tallies in each circle: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

These are all counting strategies, even though the student is finding answers to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. The student's brain is thinking in terms of counting by 1's.

Additive Thinking

What does it mean to solve problems using additive thinking?

Additive thinking means students solve problems using bigger amounts of numbers than 1 at a time.

27 + 8:

27 + 3 is 30, then add the leftover 5, 35.

27 + 49:

27 and 50 is 77, but that's a bit too much, so I'll back up to 76.

27 - 8:

27 subtract 7 is 20, subtract 1 more is 19.

52- 27:

52 subtract 30 is 22, but I subtracted too much, so adjust back up to 25.

7 x 8:

Seven 8's. 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56. This is called skip counting but it's not counting by 1's. It is adding one group of 8 at a time. That's additive thinking.

48 ÷ 8:

48 - 8 = 40; 40 - 8 = 32; 32 - 8 = 24; 24 - 8 = 16; 16 - 8 = 8. How many 8's? 6. This is additive thinking, repeatedly subtracting 8's and keeping track of how many 8's.

These are all additive strategies even though the student is finding answers to multiplication and division problems. If they are doing it one group at a time, that's additive.

Multiplicative Thinking

What does it mean to solve problems using multiplicative thinking?

Multiplicative thinking means students solve problems using bigger chunks than one group at a time.

7 x 8:

I know that 7 7's is 49. But I need 8 7's so I need one more 7. 49 and 7 is 56.

7 x 59:

I'm going to think of this as 59 7's. I know that 60 7's 420. But I only need 59 7's, so 420 - 7 is 413.

48 ÷ 8:

I know that 40 ÷ 8 is 5, so 48 ÷ 8 must be 6.

1287 ÷ 13:

I know that 1,300 ÷ 13 is 100, but I need 13 less than 1,300, 1287 ÷ 13, so that's 99.

These are all multiplicative reasoning because the students are working with bigger chunks than one group at a time.

Solve for x in:

Multiply (3)(26.4) and then divide by 8. This is solving a proportion using multiplicative thinking (although it depends on how you actually think about the multiplication and division - if you just type it in a calculator or perform a rote algorithm, that's not using multiplicative reasoning.)

Proportional Reasoning

What does it mean to solve problems using proportional reasoning?

Students consider the relationship of two quantities at the same time and the effect of scaling up or down in tandem.

Solve for x in:

Consider the ratio 8:3 and scaling the 8 to get to 26.4, scaling the 3 along in tandem. 8 times 3 is 24, and 3 times 3 is 9 so now you have equivalent ratios of:

Since 8 times 0.3 is 2.4, then you have the equivalent ratios of:

and finally:

This is reasoning in tandem, using equivalent ratios, which is an example of proportional reasoning.

If it takes 3 workers 18 days to do a job, how long will it take 1 worker?

It will take one worker, working alone, three times as long, so 3 x 18 days is 54 days. How long will it take 9 workers? Three times the workers can get the job done in 1/3 the time, so 6 days. This is an example of reasoning inverse proportionally.

These are examples of proportional reasoning because the student recognizes the proportionality and reasons with the ratio in tandem, both parts of the ratio simultaneously.
Functional Reasoning
What does it mean to reason using functional reasoning?

It means that students consider the effect of the rate (which is a ratio) on the parent function, which is (often) a set of infinite points that follow a rule. Because they are considering 2 dimensional points, this means that the student is also considering the effect the domain has on the range as it interacts with the rule. Many things are happening simultaneously.

Here are examples of students using functional reasoning.

Find a good viewing window for the function:

y = 100 x ²

The student considers a domain of [-10,10] and then uses the function to determine a reasoning range, 100 (-10) ² and 100 (10) ² for a domain of [10,000, 10,000]. Knowing that the range depends on the chosen domain indicates the simultaneously consideration of the rule, y = 100 x ², the scale factor of 100 (rate), and how it impacts an infinite set of points.

Determining the long run behavior of a rational function like:

The student reasons to find the long run behavior by approximating the quotient of 3 x and realizing that the set of points in the extremes will approach the function y = 3 x . Reasoning that the long run behavior of a rational function will behave the way the ratio of the numerator to the denominator combines proportional reasoning with functional reasoning.

These are examples of functional reasoning because the student simultaneously considers the effect of the ratio (rate) on a relationship of x's to y 's that create an infinite set of points.

How are your students reasoning? Are you curious? To help you, I've written a free, one page questionnaire to help you find out. You can download it here.

Once we identify the thinking/reasoning our students are using, what can we do to help them? In the next blog, I'll write more about how we can help students reason in increasingly sophisticated ways.

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The Development of Mathematical Reasoning

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Check out this exchange I recently had on Twitter. I was discussing frustrations of middle school teachers: Have you ever felt like this Tweet, that you don't have the time to teach your content and all of the content your students should have learned before you?

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Coaching Mathematics: Navigating "coverage" vs. understanding the big ideas. 

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Coaching Mathematics: Navigating "coverage" vs. understanding the big ideas. 

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Lucy West

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Do you ever feel pressured to ' cover the curriculum'? How often do you notice that some of your students have not understood much of what you just taught? What do you do when the pacing calendar indicates it is time to move on and your students are not ready to move on? Do you find that some of your students come to you without the requisite knowledge expected by the grade level standards? I have been teaching for more than 33 years and I have yet to meet a teacher who does not face the dilemma of how to manage both coverage and depth for the students in her class. This dilemma has existed since factory model schooling was implemented over 100 years ago and has been exacerbated by the pressure of high stakes standardized testing and the accountability movement begun under the Bush administration. What are teachers and principals to do?

Unfortunately, schools that serve populations of students who are behind when they enter the school-whether at the elementary, middle, or high school level-generally feel this pressure even more than suburban schools that serve students whose families (and schools) have more resources, and whose students have larger vocabularies and a wider range of experiences. I have worked in urban, suburban, and rural schools all over the USA. Surprisingly, the teaching in high income suburban schools is not necessarily any better, and in some cases, it is less sophisticated, than the teaching in some inner-city schools. Yet the results are very different. High income students usually do well and inner city students coming from high poverty neighborhoods often do not. When we use test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness, the teacher in the urban setting is blamed for poor student test results and the teacher in a wealthy school gets credit equally undeserved. Clearly this is unfair and a misuse of standardized test results when there are far too many variables other than teaching that go into the test results.

Right now, we err on the side of coverage, and I'm advocating we tip the scale in the direction of depth. This means taking a risk. The risk of shifting our focus away from covering laundry lists of outcomes to engaging in learning processes that develop habits of mind that are more likely to serve our students throughout life. When we focus on the process of learning the content at hand rather than coverage of discrete facts and specific information, our students will learn to learn as well as learn the information they need to pass a test.
Take a Big Picture-Long Term Approach
How do we balance coverage and depth in a way that more students learn more deeply? We learn to think differently. Here's what I mean. If we want students to retain what they learn and build upon it, then we need to invite them to think about and discuss the topic at hand analytically, from multiple perspectives, so that they will ultimately be able to articulate their understanding and/or perspective orally and in writing. This implies slowing down, covering less trivia, and focusing on the important underlying ideas.

I'm suggesting that we take a bigger picture, longer term view than unit or lesson planning. For example, if we were to really consider what the biggest, connecting concepts were in any content area, and where they repeatedly recur in the curriculum within a school year and across the grades, we would realize that we have less to cover and a few overarching ideas students have to own in order to fully grasp the subject. The old adage "slow down to speed up" would apply here.

If we took a big picture-big ideas approach, we'd need to review fewer topics from year to year and decrease the repetition that permeates the curriculum. We as educators would come to see that much of what we teach each year are examples of ideas at play. For example, adding, multiplying, and solving equations all employ the distributive property. Helping students own that property and analyze when it is used will give them solid grounding for many applications in mathematics through high school and beyond. By making explicit how the procedures you are using in the examples under study are the same as the procedures used in another context, and how those procedures are actually utilizing the same property (e.g. distribution) we would help students make more connections (generate more synapses in the brain) and help ourselves to slow down and dig deeper.

It is in large part the repetition we engage in that saps a great deal of time from year to year. I once read a study that showed that from 3 rd grade on, 30-40% of what was covered in math textbooks was review from the previous year! This repetition is often advocated to combat lack of retention that is caused by failure to slow down and explicitly connect procedures to big ideas in the first place, and by failing to give students opportunities to articulate their understanding in writing so we could assess how much they fully grasped the ideas the first time. If we slowed down in the first place and really examined important ideas with our students, encouraged them to make connections among the ideas and their accompanying procedures every time they showed up in the curriculum, and asked students to articulate their reasoning and questions related to these ideas, they would own the concepts and we would have more time to teach new concepts and skills.

Using an example from elementary mathematics, let's think about equivalence. Equivalence shows up in mathematics from basic counting through higher levels of mathematics, including algebra and geometry (Charles, 2005). Yet, we rarely focus on equivalence as an overarching theme in mathematics when developing number sense, operations, place value, or even geometry. Instead we offer a diet of worksheets requiring oodles of computations. The repetition of solving equations does not necessarily result in an understanding of equivalence. We see this in the ubiquitous tendency of students as late as middle school to think that the equal sign means, "What comes next?" rather than equivalence. For example, when faced with 7= 4 + __, many students choose 11 as their answer.

Math teachers tend to teach mathematics as discrete topics (e.g. addition, subtraction, solving equations) and focus lessons on correct answers. They tend to focus on the procedures that allow us to compute or find answers to equations or geometric situations, and sometimes tell students the important idea or property underlying the procedure. If instead, we were to focus on the centrality of ideas like equivalence and highlight equivalence in all its many guises, then we might find that students are making more sense of operations, equations, or congruence. (This is not a new idea, it is actually advocated in the CCSS and was part of the NCTM standards offered back in 1989.)

If we knew that equivalence is going to show up repeatedly throughout the year(s), then we can worry less about getting through every lesson in a unit of study or handing out every worksheet, and think more about the lessons that are essential for our students. This implies knowing our curriculum materials well-not just the materials used in our grade level, but the grade level prior and the one after the grade we teach.

Do you know to what degree your curriculum materials focus on procedures or big ideas or both? So often the curriculum materials we use are not designed to focus on big ideas, and offer hundreds of worksheets for practice instead. Teachers are sometimes prompted in the "teacher notes" section of the textbook to state an important idea during the lesson (as part of the script the teacher is supposed to follow). However, following a script is not an effective way to help students learn. Students need to discover and articulate the idea by being nudged to notice when it shows up in various contexts. These contexts (e.g. contextualized problems) need to be offered to students by teachers in thoughtful sequences that help students uncover important ideas. The ideas need to recur several times and the teacher needs to highlight these ides when the students start to notice and articulate them in their own ways. Telling students up front or writing ideas as an objective on the board is generally in effective in getting students to own the idea and counterproductive if you are aiming for depth.

In too many math classes the focus is on the correct answer. The emphasis is on efficient algorithms to compute or formulaic ways to solve problems. This can be true even when teachers are employing "math talks" or other techniques that are meant to develop student reasoning and discourse. If the emphasis is still on the correct answer, the pedagogy may have changed, but the focus of the teaching has not.

Other than reminding students what we did yesterday, we rarely ask students to connect the major idea(s) running through the series of activities or problems that we may be working on over the course of a week or a unit or a year. In too many classes, we are still feeding students a diet of worksheets to practice skills and not emphasizing enough the need for students to analyze and make sense of why the procedures work. In other words, a superficial approach to content results in a lack of depth in understanding. Which leads to wasted time reviewing concepts over and over again. This is not just true in mathematics. It is true in all subject areas.
In Summary
We can navigate the tension between coverage and depth by starting with the big picture and planning out our year around the major ideas, rather than thinking only about the individual lesson or unit. This allows us to select and adapt the most important lessons from our curriculum materials and to chunk standards in ways that revolve around the ideas.

We can further ameliorate the tension by building our capacity to assess in detail the specific issue(s) that each student is grappling with and cultivating a repertoire of strategies to meet each student where he/she is. This means cultivating a more conversational style of teaching and a wider variety of ways to gather information (e.g. moves like, "Tell me more about that," during discussion, stop and jot moments, exit tickets focused on student self-assessment of what they've learned and what they still have questions about) about what our students understand and are wrestling with. Cultivating student discourse, asking students about their thinking, and listening to students as they express ideas gives us a window into how well they understand what we think we taught. We can then use that information to gage whether to dive deeper or move on.

While we would like a pat answer to the coverage verses depth tension, the truth is that it will persist so long as we have factory-like schedules in our schools. The challenge for all of us is to work within the structures we have in more sophisticated ways until we become brave enough or wise enough to create new structures that tilt the balance towards deeper learning.

Charles, Randall, Big Ideas and Understandings as the Foundation of Elementary and Middle School Mathematics. Journal of Mathematics Education Leadership, volume 7, number 3, 2005

Forschungszentrum Juelich. (2013, October 10). New theory of synapse formation in the brain. Science Daily. Retrieved December 9, 2016 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131010205325.htm

Author Lucy West.

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Navigating A Persistent Tension in Teaching. By Lucy West - Metamorphosis Teaching Learning Communities

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Do you ever feel pressured to 'cover the curriculum'? How often do you notice that some of your students have not understood much of what you just taught? What do you do when the pacing calendar indicates it is time to move on and your students are not ready to move on?