October 2011
| Volume 69 | Number 2
Coaching: The New Leadership Skill
Marge Scherer
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Bob Tschannen-Moran and Megan Tschannen-Moran
Evaluation and coaching should not be linked, these authors argue. Although it's tempting for evaluators to identify deficiencies and then specify coaching as a remediation strategy, doing so turns coaching into a consequence of a poor evaluation and termination into a consequence of failed coaching. Another mistake is to use coaching as a data source for evaluation, for example, when an administrator asks a coach for information regarding teacher performance. Tying evaluation and coaching together in these ways compromises both functions.
At their best, evaluation and coaching should proceed on separate but complementary tracks. Coaching supports excellence by tapping into five crucial factors: consciousness, connection, competence, contribution, and creativity. In addition, research shows that coaching in schools can best improve teacher practice when it's teacher-centered, no-fault, and strengths-based.
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Jim Knight
Instructional coaching guru Jim Knight suggests that how we think about coaching can enhance or interfere with our success as a coach. He suggests that coaches take a partnership approach to collaboration and adopt seven principles that define how coaches interact with collaborating teachers: equality, choice, voice, reflection, dialogue, praxis, and reciprocity. Coaches who act on the partnership principles enroll teachers, identify teachers' goals for their students, listen, ask questions, explain teaching practices, and provide feedback.
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Katherine Casey
As teachers learn new pedagogical strategies, they crave explicit demonstrations that show them how the new strategies will work with their students in their classrooms. Successful instructional coaches, therefore, understand the importance of modeling lessons to help teachers develop a vision of effective instruction. The author, an experienced coach, provides practical tips on using both live and videotaped demonstration lessons to help teachers examine and improve their practice. For example, demonstration lessons should have a clear purpose and should be connected to ongoing, collaborative professional development. Observing teachers should be actively engaged in the lesson—for example, by taking notes on specific students, or by jumping in at planned points to take over part of the instruction. Used effectively, says the author, demonstration lessons are a crucial part of coaching that can help schools build a common vision of effective instruction.
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Gabrielle Nidus and Maya Sadder
Formative coaching, an approach that uses student work as the foundation for mentoring and professional development, can help principals become more effective instructional leaders. In formative coaching, teaches and coaches analyze student work to determine next steps for instruction. This article shows how a principal can use the steps of the formative coaching cycle to deepen the conversation following a classroom observation. The article also describes how such one-on-one conversations can be expanded to improve professional conversations about teaching and learning throughout the school.
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Elizabeth A. City
Instructional rounds are a disciplined way for educators to work together to improve a school's instructional core. The practice combines three common elements of improvement: classroom observation, an improvement strategy, and a network. Instructional rounds differ from supervision and evaluation in that people doing rounds learn something themselves. It's not about "fixing" individual teachers. Rather, rounds are about understanding what's happening in classrooms, how we as a system produce those effects, and how we can move closer to producing the learning we want to see. The process of doing rounds involves gathering a group of colleagues who will meet together over time, defining a problem of practice, visiting classrooms in small groups, debriefing after the observation, identifying next levels of work, and building the group's knowledge and skills about that work.
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Marcia L. Rock, Naomi P. Zigmond, Madeleine Gregg and Robert A. Gable
Amid budget cuts in U.S. public schools, the spotlight is on how to make less effective teachers more effective—fast. The authors describe virtual coaching—in which a coach interacts electronically with a teacher as a lesson unfolds—as a promising way to help teachers with weak teaching skills. Virtual coaching uses online and mobile technology (termed bug in ear) to allow a coach located down the hall or across the country to observe a teacher's lesson and offer discreet, running feedback through an earpiece the teacher wears. Rock and colleagues, who have worked as virtual coaches to dozens of teachers, describe how such a set-up can help struggling novices break through to solid teaching skills. Because the coach provides feedback, helpful criticism, and suggestions as a lesson progresses, virtual coaching can shape teaching, and teachers' awareness of their weaknesses, in a way traditional coaching can't. It also saves time and money. The authors discuss the skills and conditions needed to make virtual coaching successful, and the kind of technology and equipment both teacher and coach need to proceed (including sample prices).
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Michael Fullan and Jim Knight
The role of school leadership—of principals and coaches—must be played out on a systems level to get widespread and sustainable improvement. Successful, whole-system education reform relies on capacity building, teamwork, pedagogy, and systemic reform. The strategies of good coaches and the right drivers for whole-system reform go hand in hand. Too often, however, coaches are unable to do their work because they're asked to do quasi-administrative tasks instead of focusing on student learning, have unclear goals concerning what they are to accomplish in their schools, and don't receive adequate training.
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Janice Silva and Kathia Contreras
In 2008–09, Colegio Inglés had a watershed year in terms of teachers learning to enhance one another's skills. Beneath a deceptively congenial surface, teachers at this Mexican preK-9th grade school were avoiding professional confrontations and rarely observed one another's classes or shared teaching solutions and innovations. That same year, the school's elementary division implemented a new student-centered math program that challenged teachers' traditional methods of operating. To help its elementary teachers learn to share their instructional practices and to collaborate, Colegio Ingles piloted the Collaborative Coaching and Learning model (developed by the Boston Plan for Excellence). Silva and Contreras describe the steps of this model, from joint lesson planning, to mutual observations and "critical friend" style debriefing, to holding teachers accountable for the resulting plans to change their instruction.
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Kimberly Hartnett-Edwards
In the struggle to raise U.S. students' achievement in literacy, Hartnett-Edwards says, the emphasis has shifted from finding the right materials to creating better teachers. Central to creating better teachers are literacy coaches. The author claims that the role of literacy/reading coach has evolved beyond its roots in NCLB legislation, when reading coaches generally monitored whether teachers were faithfully implementing Reading First and similar mandated programs. The coach's role is now to support teachers and generally help advance their teaching skills in reading and language arts. Building a trusting relationship is the foundation of a coach's success. Hartnett-Edwards describes three case studies of a coach who worked effectively with three different teachers in a rural Hawaiian elementary school.
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Catherine Lewis, Rebecca Perry, David Foster, Jacqueline Hurd and Linda Fisher
The authors assert that lesson study—a collaborative, teacher-led approach to learning from practice—offers a deeper, broader, more sustainable method of improving teacher practice than one-on-one coaching does. In lesson study, teachers and coaches of all levels of experience can work together, each bringing his or her own professional questions to the work. Thus, lesson study can accommodate differences in expertise without fixing any group member in the role of "expert" or "novice." In addition, lesson study offers a structure in which coaches themselves can actively engage with current curriculum and standards and thus continue to grow as learners. The authors, all of whom are involved with the Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative, give examples of how lesson study is woven throughout the initiative's work.
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Elena Aguilar, Davina Goldwasser and Kristina Tank-Crestetto
The Transformational Coaching Team in Oakland Unified School District provides differentiated, sustained, job-embedded support to the district's school leaders. In this article, members of the team describe how they work with principals to transform the culture of schools. Student achievement data show above-average improvement in schools in which transformational leadership coaches have worked.
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Ronald R. Bearwald
The best coaching partnerships are built on conversation and listening, and they are not built on a coach giving answers to a mentee. Ronald Bearward explains how coaches can use questions to help mentees find answers for themselves. Effective questions lead to greater reflection and solutions that teachers can use now and in the future.
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Liz Hanson
A literacy coach describes the various components of her work and how they combine to help teachers provide more effective literacy instruction. Walk-throughs, literacy team meetings, formal coaching, professional learning communities, and regular meetings with the principal enable her to understand what teachers need and then assist teachers in implementing strategies right away.
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Bryan Goodwin
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Robert J. Marzano
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Thomas R. Hoerr
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Carol Ann Tomlinson
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Jennifer Abrams
One of the most effective tools for planning a coaching conversation is an outcome map. The map helps users think through the challenges that colleagues might face in their work, envision in detail the desired behavior, and offer context-specific supports. The outcome map includes six key questions: What's the presenting problem? What's the tentative outcome? What would the outcome look and sound like in practice? What knowledge, skills, or dispositions are needed to engage in the desired behaviors? What strategies might promote the specified outcome? What supports does the coach need to implement these strategies?
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Carl A. Harvey
In most schools, the word coach is used to describe a teacher with special expertise in a content area. Although the title is seldom associated with school librarians, perhaps it should be. The role of the school librarian (or media specialist, as they are often called now) has evolved greatly. A school librarian worth his or her salt must be involved with enriching the literacy, technology use, and curriculum of a school by collaborating to design instruction and assessment and co-teaching lessons. Harvey, a librarian at North Elementary School in Noblesville, Indiana, gives examples of how he has coached teachers by modeling how to use cutting-edge resources, leading small-group presentations, and providing one-on-one instruction.
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Philip E. Poekert, Sylvia Boynton, Magdi Castañeda, Raquel Munarriz Diaz, Tanetha J. Grosland and Carolyn Spillman
Education professors can be great sources of knowledge and guidance for teachers, but not if they are out of reach at the university. The Teacher Leadership for School Improvement graduate program at the University of Florida embeds professors in schools to teach graduate classes to teachers in the program and offer informal coaching to all teachers and administrators at the schools. The professors in residence have the expertise to help educators grow in their practice, but their outsider status and distance from the evaluation process enable teachers to feel safe accepting their help. Since the start of the program, academic achievement among students at the school involved has improved.
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Tony Borash
As an instructional coach for public schools in Charlottesville, Virginia, Borash often hears comments like "everyone's treading water just to keep up with day-to-day work." Such sentiments indicate to him that teachers are struggling to stay afloat under too many responsibilities. Fearing that those he strives to help are drowning, Borash considers the recommended practices to rescue a person who's literally drowning. Using a lifeguard's lingo for the preferred order of lifesaving actions—talk-reach-throw-row-go-tow—he suggests how coaches can try each option in turn—first talking with a struggling teacher, then "throwing" or providing helpful resources, up to the last resort of jumping in to help.
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Naomi Thiers
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Inservice Guest Blogger
http://ascd.typepad.com/blog/educational_leadership/
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