Everyone Deserves a Coach
by Sarah Bernadette Ottow
As John Dewey said, “We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience." Reflection means we take time and space to pause, to think about their current wins, to share challenges, and to imagine next steps for success. Educators are so busy with the task of teaching and supporting others that we don’t always build in time for our own learning and reflection. With the support of an effective coach, we can use structured time together for reflection and goal setting. With the support of an effective coach, we can be more present in tackling our instructional tasks and meeting specific needs of our unique learners even better. We can have a truly valuable professional learning experience, not just an isolated event that may not really help us help our students.
As educators, we all know how professional learning (also known as professional development or PD) experiences can greatly vary. As Dr. Margie Kirstein has said about her years in the classroom, “I was kind of a PD junkie, constantly seeking answers to the many challenges that come with being an ESL teacher. Post-PD, I always tried to implement what I learned. Even with the highest quality PD, it was hard to sustain meaningful change in my teaching based on short-term exposure.”
As a lifelong teacher and coach myself, Margie’s experiences resonates greatly with me. Through years and years of taking courses, workshops and seminars, I have felt a mishmash of mixed emotions and seen a varying level of impact in my practice. While learning alongside other participants, I often felt elated when absorbing knowledge I knew I needed to support my students. There were a lot of “A ha!” moments and a ton of elaborate notes and plans I would compile for transforming my instruction. However, when the formal learning was over and I was back in my classroom, alone, the new knowledge didn’t always transfer to help my students in the ways I was hoping for and, quite frankly, was expecting after so much time—and often money—invested. I would feel disconnected from what I had been so excited about during the professional learning experience to what happened after these events. I also felt frustrated because the impact on students would be fragmented at best.. It wasn’t until I discovered the art and science of coaching and mentoring that I really saw that I needed coaching to get the results my students deserved.
What is Coaching? Why Do We Need It?
Coaching is an effective form of professional learning. Full stop. I’ll say that again: Coaching is an effective form of professional learning. And I’ll go even further: Coaching is a more effective form of professional learning that isolated professional learning events alone. Coaching is embedded professional learning, not a formal course, workshop or seminar. We often don’t necessarily need to leave our classroom for coaching to occur. For these reasons, we may think that coaching does not qualify as professional learning, when, in fact, it actually does. Coaching is actually a way to make new concepts and skills transfer to practice in real time. I believe that everyone deserves a coach, even coaches! I myself have several coaches and couldn’t do my work as well without my guides, my sounding boards, my support system.
We need to rethink professional learning as only formal events and bring learning back into the classroom alongside teachers to make positive change for students. With this clear picture of coaching as effective professional learning in mind, let’s recall some classic research from Joyce and Showers (2002) that shows us the power of coaching to transform practice:
You see, coaching can be an extremely effective professional learning method to change practice for the benefit of students when it’s done intentionally. Again, from Dr. Kirstein, “According to a 2017 report from the Learning Policy Institute, ‘traditional PD rarely makes room for participants to connect the content to their individual contexts to build understanding, and provides no opportunities for participants to learn skills or strategies by actively trying them out.’” Coaching flips the script by putting the onus in the classroom, centering learning and applying around real-time student issues.
Coaching isn’t about having all the answers; instead, coaching is about asking the right kinds of questions and helping other educators find ways to answer their own questions. Coaching is a process of ongoing reflection and improvement. When done effectively, coaching is student-centered and teacher-driven, grounded around cycles of inquiry to continuously improve, to constantly make time for reflection and problem-solving, like how we use the Action Cycle™ at Confianza:
What is Effective Coaching?
Maria Lee will be exploring answers to this question in an upcoming blog series. I’m excited about this set of resources we are developing and refining from our toolkit because coaching is at the heart of all we do at Confianza. In our upcoming blog series, we will bel presenting key information about how to develop your own vision/”look for’s”/instructional playbook. I will be sharing examples from our clients along the way, too, so our readers can see these practices in action. One of my favorite coaching leaders is Jim Knight so you’ll see many references to his work as well as other leaders in the field. Explore Confianza’s research base for our professional learning model here.
I am very fortunate to spend most of my time coaching—mostly coaching instructional coaches and coaching other instructional leaders, although I do coach teachers directly and other consultants on my team do as well. Our goal at Confianza is to improve outcomes through promoting equity-based practices, and language/literacy practices in ALL classrooms. My guidebook, The Language Lens for Content Classrooms, help shape what those mindsets and practices are when we co-create a vision of what we need to be coaching around across a school or across a district. Coaching, combined with more formal professional learning experiences carefully planned and facilitated with schools, is a way to help maximize both student and teacher potential.
“You can’t promote transformative change if you take away people’s agency,” Milford Public Schools, MA, PreK EL Teacher/Coordinator, Silvia Fomin, M.Ed., M.S., shared in a recent coach-the-coach seminar I was facilitating, and I couldn’t agree more. Starting with students is key—especially students who have been historically marginalized. Then, ensuring that teachers define their own challenges to reach these students and all students come next. Through structured coaching experiences, teachers can get support on their goals, goals that matter to them as adult learners.
By sitting alongside teachers, coaches can bring teachers together around a common vision of equitable instruction and a shared toolkit of strategies. I like to call this “a school-wide approach” for supporting students where we build bridges instead of stay in silos, where we collaboratively define our “look for’s” that bring all students into the learning, like as you see in this set of pillars co-developed with a district leader and myself below:
Please join us for this upcoming deeper dive into the coaching research, processes and tools that make this happen for the benefit of students. Thank you!
Bonus: Hearing from Coaches about the Power of Coaching
Let me share with you what some of the coaches we support have shared. I believe that they can explain the benefits of coaching (and coaching-the-coach!) more effectively than I can:
Change takes time but I think we are on the right path to aligning ourselves and getting teachers the ongoing support that they need to be effective teachers.
I have learned how to become an effective coach by building trust with my colleagues, utilizing the coaching tools like the coaching cycle and log to support teachers' with instructional practices, administering and analyzing data, reflecting and planning, and implementing new tools and programs to increase student engagement, SEL, and academic growth. I really love my role and truly enjoy working with and building professional relationships with my colleagues and having the opportunity to work with students in my school.
Our sessions as a coaching team have been very helpful. It is great to feel that we are moving forward in a positive direction even during a global pandemic. These sessions have a SEL element to them that is so vital for all of us as educators this year.
Our district is working towards being more cohesive. It has been a huge help to stay organized as a coach and understand the role and value of coaching in a very structured way through our coaching cohort.
I am starting to see small changes in teams who are more receptive to my coaching and also to teachers willing to try new ideas in their grade levels. Slow but steady....
I have enjoyed discussing the different areas of data and that it is not just standardized testing and class assessments.
The impact ~ moving mindsets, my responsibility and my role. It will definitely affect teachers which will directly affect students.
I have applied knowledge we have learned together about coaching by thinking differently about my own practices, and how to use data as a way to reframe how I think about learning and teaching. By reviewing data, I am better equipped to help teachers in very targeted specific ways to help alleviate some of the issues they are experiencing. Our meetings as a team have been extremely helpful!
I have celebrated the baby steps and I am also quick to point out the things that I see that are working for teachers and students. Then we brainstorm ways to make it even better. I also feel okay with doing things for teachers that are less than what I would like to be doing but know that these small things will help later on with the bigger things.
Our work together has furthered my thinking around shared ownership of student learning and success as well as moving towards creating actionable steps of what is in our locus of control. We must address our mindsets and make sure that we are creating equitable systems for all students. We can take back our learning experiences by having a mindset of "professional development isn't an event but a habit of mind". We can create a community of practice to have an inquiry cycle to meet the needs of students.
Check out the next blog in our coaching series, A Partnership Approach to Instructional Coaching Part 1: Equality, Choice and Voice.