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ОглавлениеEndorsements for The Coach ADVenture
“As leaders, if we truly want to make a dramatic impact on the learning and teaching that occurs in our schools, then we must fully embrace our role as an instructional coach. In The Coach ADVenture, Amy Illingworth (one of the best instructional coaches with whom I have ever had the privilege to work) peels back the layers of this complex work to get to the heart of what impactful coaching entails and the skills you need to do this work exceptionally well. She then meets you where you are and provides you with the practical tools you need to take the next steps on your own coaching adventure. You will benefit from hearing her story and learning from her commitment to Appreciating the strengths in each individual, Designing coaching plans that meet each person’s unique needs, and the Value she places on the collaborative partnership established with each person she coaches.
“In addition to sharing her own journey, Amy offers us the opportunity to choose one of two principals to follow as they embark on their coaching adventure, which gives this book a creative, fun, and insightful look at the very real challenges leaders face and the strategies they use to strengthen their own learning and become more successful in their roles as coaches. Designed to meet you where you are as a coach whether you are just starting out in the coaching role as either a teacher or administrator, you’re frustrated that your coaching isn’t producing the desired results, or you’re a seasoned coach looking for some inspiration, The Coach ADVenture is for you.”
—Shelley Burgess, co-author of Lead Like a PIRATE
“Incredible wealth of information and insight into the process of becoming an effective instructional leader. This book is packed with relevant, practical, easy-to-follow information to increase your skills as an instructional leader. As I read this, I found myself wishing this book had been available at the beginning of my leadership journey. This will definitely be in my go-to books in working with new leaders and in furthering my own coaching effectiveness.”
—Amy Glenn, teacher and former coach, Vista Unified School District, Vista, California
“Dr. Illingworth has captured the essential components of leadership development, mentoring, and coaching to improve student academic performance, purposeful planning, and personal growth. It is definitely from the heart; her personal experiences and journey shared with the reader make this book different from others. Her evidence-based, tried-and-true research and implementation of the essential components herself provide the reader with strategies, questions, and opportunities for self-reflection and action development. The Coach ADVenture is a clever means to practice the skills from the chapters and help the reader wonder and reflect upon their own coaching style and practice. Whether you’re a novice or veteran educator looking to improve student learning and achievement, this book is a must-read.”
—Dianna Carberry, EdD, retired assistant superintendent of leadership development and systems innovation, Sweetwater Union High School District
“Dr. Amy Illingworth is an exceptional educator. Over the twenty years I have known and worked with Dr. Illingworth in education, she has proven that each and every educator and student can succeed with the proper support and learning opportunities. Students, teachers, principals, and districts have excelled under her leadership through her systematic planning and coaching. Coaching is and has been the key to her success! She is a skilled leader and knows what it takes to develop students as learners and masterful educators in a school system.
“Dr. Illingworth’s book, The Coach ADVenture, has provided me with specific strategies, structures, and ideas for how to facilitate learning for my leadership teams as well as a clear instructional leadership plan for myself as I lead my school. What I also love about this book is the clear belief that each and every educator can succeed if given the proper coaching, and it gives you an outline on how to make that happen. This is a must-read for any principal or educational coach, and I plan to use this as an instructional tool for my assistant principal and teacher leaders.”
—Pauline Leavitt, principal, Ramona Middle School, Ramona, California
“The Choose the Coach ADVenture organization really helps novice and veteran instructional coaches alike! As you adventure with the coach of your choosing, you encounter many coaching pitfalls. Choosing your own coaching adventure lets you address these pitfalls one at a time. Coaching can be overwhelming, but this book makes it so much easier to digest. Following Principal Martinez opened my eyes to pitfalls I hadn’t even realized I’d encountered. Seeing how she addressed the problems was invaluable! I now have a much better handle on my own coaching theory of action. Illingworth reminds instructional coaches of the power of listening and asking the right questions. The examples and questions provided are exactly what I needed to narrow my focus for observations and coaching conversations. I’ve been in education as an instructional leader for over twenty years, and this is easily the best coaching book I’ve read. Illingworth gets straight to the point and helps coaches refine their thinking when observing and coaching.”
—Liz Wong, assistant principal, Montgomery Middle School, San Diego, California
“I have had the good fortune of working with Dr. Illingworth on many occasions. She has been instrumental in my growth as a principal. As one of the directors of the Aspiring Administrators and Professional Development team for our district, she consistently shared strong instructional leadership practices that helped shape our district’s goals and plans to address them. In mentoring others, Dr. Illingworth created learning experiences that brought together theory with action; additionally, she consistently modeled these practices at the school site with administrators either through classroom observations or implementation discussions. In all cases, her advice and insights have been timely and effective. The Coach ADVenture is a conversation with the reader covering many of the instructional practices, belief systems, and organizational theory that she shared with our leadership teams. The book allows for reflection and application. I am sure you will benefit greatly as I have from Dr. Illingworth’s insights and leadership experiences.”
—Dr. Ricardo Cooke, principal, Eastlake High School, Chula Vista, California
“In reading Dr. Illingworth’s new book, The Coach ADVenture: Building Powerful Instructional Leadership Skills That Impact Learning, I first and foremost appreciated Illingworth’s attention to her audience. While some books approach the topic of coaching from strictly the author’s point of view or background, Amy is sensitive to the fact that as school leaders, we are approaching this reading—let alone our professional development—from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and with different levels of instructional coaching. I thus enjoyed exploring the journey of Ms. Martinez from Learning for All High School, since I found her sections most relevant to my personal journey.
“Any educator can appreciate an experience where they can have a mental dialogue or ruminations with someone who doesn’t necessarily provide all the answers but poses questions that lead us to greater understanding. The Coach ADVenture: Building Powerful Instructional Leadership Skills That Impact Learning represented the kind of experience that allowed me to ask myself questions and allowed me to take away what was relevant to my professional growth. In this exploratory approach, Dr. Illingworth models not only inquiry in this book of professional learning, she also models equity as she seeks to meet readers’ needs at different points in their coaching journey.
“Although you can simply read one or two chapters from this book to take away something meaningful, this book kept hooking me into continuing on to other chapters that enhanced my understanding on instructional coaching.”
—Alex Salazar, assistant principal, Sweetwater High School, National City, California
Contents
Part I: Developing Instructional Leadership Skills
Chapter One: Why Do We Need Instructional Leadership Coaching?
Chapter Two: What Are Instructional Leadership Coaching Skills?
Chapter Three: What Is the Role of an Administrator as Instructional Leader and Coach?
Chapter Four: What Is the Role of a Teacher Leader as an Instructional Coach?
Part II: Building Instructional Capacity through Coaching
Chapter Five: What Is a Coaching Theory of Action?
Chapter Six: What Does Coaching Look Like?
Chapter Seven: Who Is Listening the Most?
Chapter Eight: How Can Lesson Study Support Coaching?
Part III: Creating a Coaching Community
CHAPTER NINE: Who Is in Your PLN?
Chapter Ten: How Do Coaches Facilitate Collaborative Professional Learning?
Chapter Eleven: What Do Coaches Need to Know about Time Management?
Chapter Twelve: How Do Coaches Address Challenges and Roadblocks Along the Way?
Part IV: Finding Your Coaching Adventure
Chapter Thirteen: What Is Your Coaching ADVenture?
Chapter Fourteen: Where Did This Coaching Adventure Take You?
Appendix A: Note-Taking Guides
References
Interested in Working with Amy?
About the Author
More from
The Coach ADVenture
© 2019 by Amy Illingworth, EdD
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing by the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information regarding permission, contact the publisher at books@daveburgessconsulting.com.
This book is available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for use as premiums, promotions, fundraisers, or for educational use. For inquiries and details, contact the publisher at books@daveburgessconsulting.com.
Published by Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.
San Diego, CA
http://daveburgessconsulting.com
Cover Design by Orange Brain Studio
Editing and Interior Design by My Writers’ Connection
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950003
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-949595-87-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-949595-88-8
First Printing: October 2019
Dedication
I dedicate this book to all the teachers, leaders, and instructional coaches I have known, worked with, and learned from. Every teacher and leader I’ve learned from was in this profession to make a positive impact on students and change the world one learner at a time. Please continue to work hard on behalf of each and every student we have the honor and privilege to serve in our schools.
I want to thank my family and friends for encouraging me throughout this process. Whether you asked me, “How’s the book going?” or you read a draft of the book and gave me feedback, I appreciate your love and support.
Thank you to Shelley and Dave Burgess for their friendship, mentoring, and support before, during, and after the writing of this book.
Introduction
Most coaching and leadership books begin with a focus on students. After all, they are the reason we are all here, right? Every school or district mission statement includes a line about meeting students’ needs, educating students, or building future citizens through our work with students.
Yes, students are why schools exist. And the ability to serve students well is often the reason excellent teachers are recruited, tapped, or otherwise encouraged to pursue teacher leadership, coaching, or administrative roles. But expertise in the classroom with students does not always immediately transfer to working with adult learners. When an educator takes on a leadership role, whether through formal or informal positions, the transition from the discussion about our work with students to the reality of our work with adults seems to get lost in the shuffle. That’s why this book begins with a focus on leaders who want to enhance their instructional coaching skills.
First, let me clarify whom I mean when I say leaders. If you are an educator, I mean you. Every one of us has the potential to lead from where we are no matter our position or title. Teachers lead every day, in their classrooms with students, in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) with peers, in staff meetings, and one-on-one conversations. Administrators lead every day as well.
Even though every educator is tasked with leading, few teachers or administrators receive formal training in how to coach other adults. Coaching for instructional leadership requires a skill set that includes knowledge of adult learning theory, an understanding of coaching models, clarity on educational pedagogy and student learning, and the ability to build trusting relationships with colleagues. I can say, from years of experience, that this is not an easy skill set to master. Each of these skills takes time, practice, and feedback. The plus side is that it can be quite an adventure! We will discuss each of these skills as we go on the Coach ADVenture together.
I began my career as a middle school teacher. A few years into my career, I was blessed to participate in a district initiative around a new-to-us pedagogy, It was a completely new way of teaching that required intensive professional development. Along with workshops, our school had a full-time peer coach who worked with us to support our learning and practice. After a few more years, I became one of those peer coaches, working alongside my colleagues to learn and implement the new structure to support our students. Thanks to the encouragement of a principal who was my mentor and who is still my friend, I then stepped into an administrative role. Since that time I have served as an assistant principal, a principal, a director, and as assistant superintendent at the district level, working at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. I’ve also had the privilege to work at the university level in an administrative preparation program.
In all my roles in education, I have always thought of myself as a learner first, then a coach, and finally a leader. It is my desire to share with you my successes, my missteps, and my learnings throughout my coaching and leadership journey.
Throughout this book, you will find . . .
A road map for your journey as an instructional coach
Examples from the field, where I share my successes and failures on this learning, leading, and coaching journey
At the end of each chapter, you will choose the Coach ADVenture you want to experience throughout this book. You’ll read a little about two different instructional leaders and their schools, and based on the scenarios shared, you will choose the leader’s next coaching adventure.
I see three paths on which you might be at this stage in your career. Each of these stages is ripe for a coaching adventure:
1 You are about to begin, or are in, a job that includes the role of instructional coaching.
2 You are a teacher leader who wants to improve your own practice and share your learning with others. You recognize that you and your colleagues aren’t getting much coaching, and you want to do more.
3 You are a site or district leader who wants to take on more of an instructional coach role; you support instructional coaches within your system.
A coaching ADVenture begins with an appreciation of an individual’s strengths. From there, a coach collaborates with his or her colleague to design a plan that will help the educator transform his or her instructional practice on behalf of students. When completed, a coach has added value to a teacher’s repertoire, and the duo can value and appreciate the work they did together. This is where our #CoachADV hashtag originates. I’d like to encourage you to visit and use this hashtag as you travel on your coaching adventure.
You will notice that each chapter’s title is in the form of a question. That is by design. The art of questioning is a critical skill in the instructional leadership coach’s repertoire. Asking questions is a powerful way to coach someone else to become their best self. An essential skill that pairs with asking questions is listening. Together, these skills will take you far on your coaching journey.
Now let’s take a moment to get to know the two school principals we will be following through the coach ADVenture.
Principal Andrew Fox of Smooth Sailing Elementary School—Mr. Fox spent his teaching career teaching fifth and sixth grade. As a principal, he does not feel confident in his ability to support primary-grade teachers with their instruction since he’s had no experience teaching lower grades; therefore, he often avoids going into those rooms or PLC meetings. When Mr. Fox does visit classrooms, he stands in the back of the room, stays a few minutes, then leaves. He does not write anything down, nor does he provide the teacher with any feedback.
The longer Mr. Fox is principal at Smooth Sailing Elementary School, the less his teachers respect him. Rather than stepping into the role of an instructional leader or coach, he manages from his office.
Learning for All High School—Ms. Martinez is a high school principal with experience teaching secondary English and English Language Development (ELD). Though she has never taught any math, science, social science, world language, or other non-English courses, she visits all classrooms on her campus regularly. In collaboration with her Instructional Leadership Team, she has developed a site walk-through form that she uses to communicate evidence-based feedback to her staff after each classroom visit.
While she may not be an expert at something like AP Calculus, she still has confidence to provide the AP Calculus teacher with feedback based on the site vision and agreed-upon instructional focus. Because she participates in the PLC meetings with the math teachers, she is aware of what the AP Calculus teacher is working on with his students, and she can provide authentic feedback based on what she observes in connection to the PLC discussion.
The Coach ADVenture Begins Now!
Each chapter, starting with this one, ends with an excerpt about each of the two principals. After you read the segment, follow the instructions to decide where their (and your) coaching adventure will go next. Let’s get started!
Smooth Sailing Elementary School (SSES) has a professional development (PD) day coming up soon. Principal Fox wanted to hire a consultant to come and present to his teachers for the day, but his budget is tight, and his boss, the assistant superintendent, denied his request. Mr. Fox has never considered himself an instructional leader or a coach, so he is stumped.
What should Mr. Fox do next?
To learn more about how Mr. Fox plans his PD day, go to Chapter One: Why Do We Need Instructional Leadership Coaching? This adventure will take you through Mr. Fox’s instructional leadership journey from the very beginning. This journey is a great place to start if you are new to instructional coaching.
To learn more about those to whom Mr. Fox reaches out for leadership support, go to Chapter Nine: Who Is in Your PLN?
Learning for All High School’s (LAHS) principal, Rachel Martinez, is looking to enhance her instructional coaching. She realizes she doesn’t have a coherent, consistent system for her instructional coaching; in fact, she feels like she is running from class to class and PLC to PLC delivering feedback that is isolated from the other work happening around the school. After working with her own personal coach, Ms. Martinez is ready to build a coaching system.
What should Ms. Martinez do?
To learn more about how Ms. Martinez develops a coaching system, go to Chapter Five: What Is a Coaching Theory of Action? This adventure will take you through Ms. Martinez’s instructional leadership journey. This journey is a great place to start if you are already an instructional leader wanting to enhance your own coaching skills.
To learn more about how Ms. Martinez worked with an instructional coach herself, go to Chapter One: Why Do We Need Instructional Leadership Coaching?
If you are an educational leader and an adventurer who would like to improve your instructional leadership coaching, I hope you will choose to keep reading! The beauty of our Coaching Adventure together is that you can travel in any direction that will support your professional growth. You can follow Mr. Fox or Ms. Martinez’s journey, or you can use the Table of Contents as a guide to point you to an area on which you are focusing for growth. As you read, please consider sharing your learning with our educational community on Twitter, using the hashtag #CoachADV for the coaching adventure on which we are embarking together. For additional resources and reflection, visit https://reflectionsonleadershipandlearning.com/coach-adventure.
Part I
Developing Instructional Leadership Skills
Your coaching adventure may take you through this book chapter by chapter, or you may choose to jump around based on what you want to learn and experience. Either way, part one is dedicated to how coaches develop instructional leadership skills. A coach is not born; he or she is made through experience. If you are thrown into a new coaching role like I was, know that you are not alone! There are skills you can develop to support your work as an instructional leadership coach. You can come back to this part at any point as your coaching repertoire grows, and you need to develop new skills.
Chapter One
Why Do We Need Instructional Leadership Coaching?
In order to meet the needs of all students, we must also transform the experience for the adults who work in schools.
—Elena Aguilar
Think back to a time when you attended a mandatory full-day workshop as a teacher. You might not have been happy to be there. You spent hours the night before writing out detailed lesson plans so that a substitute could maintain control of your classroom and attempt to teach your students something in your absence.
Imagine that you walk into the large room and see theater seats where you will be sitting with teachers from a few other schools for the next six hours. You and your closest teaching friend find seats together and hope that you can do some planning throughout the day. The presenter starts with a funny joke and a silly video, so your spirits lift, thinking this could be a good day after all. Then the presenter begins to outline the topic. This topic, he explains, is research based and designed to help students achieve at high levels. As he explains this great new strategy that all teachers need to use, you whisper to your friend, “Isn’t this what we’ve been doing for the past two years?”
She whispers back to you, “Duh! Wasn’t this our school’s focus all of last year?”
As the day continues, the presenter provides details about a teaching strategy that you are not only familiar with but one on which you have received other professional development and on which you’ve focused in your own classroom for an extended period of time. You get frustrated that the presenter never acknowledges the work you and your colleagues have been doing on this strategy. You look around for your principal, but he is not present in the workshop. You get bored with the repetition, and by lunch time, you shut down. After lunch you consider skipping the afternoon session but realize you might “get into trouble,” so you show up, only for the presenter to repeat part of his morning session again.
When the day ends, you are tired, even though you’ve done nothing but sit and listen all day. You are annoyed that you wasted an entire day away from your students for nothing new. You are angry that your principal wasn’t there to realize that the entire workshop was a repeat of what your school had already been doing. And you realize that you and your friend didn’t even have any time to talk about lesson plans together throughout the day, so now you must spend time outside of your professional development day collaborating for upcoming lessons.
Now imagine a different senario: You are a teacher, and you’ve determined that one of your professional goals for the year is to learn about different ways to structure student talk so that all your students use academic language in meaningful ways throughout class. You have been reading books, articles, and blogs about the topic. You’ve tried a few ideas in your classroom, but you are feeling stuck with the lack of progress. Then you realize there is a resource on your campus that you haven’t turned to yet: the instructional leadership coach.
You schedule a meeting with the coach to talk about your goal and what you’ve done. Your coach asks you a number of reflective questions that get you thinking about your students’ strengths and areas of need in the upcoming unit. Together you collaborate on a structure you can build into your next lesson plan. At the end of your planning session, which was guided by your coach’s questions that forced you to think deeper about the topic, you feel okay but not quite confident. Your coach offers to come co-teach the lesson with you, so you both can see the students in action. You happily accept his offer, and you plan who will do each part of the lesson to try out this new student talk structure.
After the lesson, you meet to discuss what went well and what didn’t work. Your coach was able to capture the specific language he heard some of your students using during the lesson, which helps you see that the strategy was successful for a large group of students. Together you discuss what revisions you should make to help the students who haven’t yet been successful. You commit to trying the revisions the next day, and your coach offers to come back to observe. You invite him back anytime because you appreciate a second set of eyes and ears in the room. After the next lesson, he shares with you his observation notes and asks you questions to consider for next steps. Through his questioning, you make decisions about how to move forward with your structured student talk strategies, and you have evidence to support the progress you are making on your professional goal.
Based on the two scenarios above, which teacher learned something that impacted his or her instructional practice? Which teachers’ students benefited from the learning that took place? Which scenario had instructional leadership coaching built in?
These scenarios are based on real experiences I’ve had. Obviously the second scenario is more beneficial for the teacher as well as the students. In the first scenario, the adults sit passively, with no choice in their own learning and no support or accountability afterwards. In the second scenario, the adult learner has a voice and choice in the learning topic and the outcome, there is support and reflection built in through the coach, and the learner is more committed to a successful outcome, using the new strategy.
These scenarios illustrate why schools and districts need to offer instructional leadership coaching. If the goal is to impact student learning, the first step toward that goal is to make positive changes to the teaching practices used in classrooms. Teachers already work hard on their own. As leaders (be it a teacher leader, coach, or an administrator), we want to enhance the great work our colleagues are already doing through a side-by-side coaching approach that provides instructional leadership support.
Principals and teacher leaders with instructional leadership coaching skills can provide that side-by-side support to the hard work teachers do. While principals typically have many additional duties on their plates, few would argue about the importance of supporting teachers so that all students can be more successful. And in the age of budget cuts, many schools and districts do not have the ability to hire instructional coaches to serve in this role. It is therefore even more important that site leaders (principals, assistant principals, deans, and teacher leaders) build their own instructional leadership coaching skills.
Choose the Coach ADVenture
If you have just arrived from the Introduction and are curious about those to whom Mr. Fox reaches out for help as he dives into planning a PD day with his staff, or you’ve come from Chapter Seven where Mr. Fox was learning how to listen, keep reading about Principal Fox.
If you’ve just arrived from the Introduction, where you learned that Ms. Martinez worked with her own coach, skip down a bit to continue the journey with Principal Martinez.
Principal Fox
When we last left Principal Fox, his request to hire an outside consultant for an upcoming professional development (PD) day had been denied. His boss advised him to consider his site’s needs and his teachers’ expertise when planning a PD day that would benefit them directly.
Principal Fox decides to try a new approach for planning this PD day. He goes straight to his teachers, specifically his grade-level leaders. He calls a meeting with the leaders of each grade level and begins by asking them each to name what they believe the school’s focus has been this year. (He read about this idea in Lead Like a Pirate: Make School Amazing for Your Students and Staff by Shelley Burgess and Beth Houf.) As they go around the table sharing, it becomes evident that each teacher has a different idea. Some ideas that are shared include support for English Learners, student talk, academic language, increasing parent engagement, and math.
After listening to each person, Principal Fox takes time to address what they all just heard. He says to the group, “Wow. This is an important learning opportunity for me. Hearing you each mention something different makes me realize we need to work on clarity. Our school needs a clear direction and a focus on which we are all working together. It seems like our upcoming PD day might be a good time to get some clarity. What do you think?”
For the next hour, the group discusses activities they could do with the entire staff during the PD day. Teachers who have never spoken in front of their peers are volunteering to facilitate parts of the day. Principal Fox feels uncomfortable releasing so much control over to the teachers, but as they continue to plan, he sees their excitement, and their energy helps him realize how valuable this PD can actually be for the entire staff.
After the meeting, Principal Fox takes time to reflect in his office. He realizes that hiring an outside consultant would have been a really bad idea for his staff right now. Instead of bringing in yet another new idea, he has crafted an agenda for the PD day that was co-created with his teacher leaders. It considers where they have been, what their students need, and for what their teachers have been asking: time to collaborate around a common focus. He believes that after this day, his site will have clarity around one or two key initiatives on which their entire site will focus and that his teachers will have time with their colleagues to collaborate on planning lessons to meet their students’ needs.
To learn more about how Mr. Fox’s PD day goes, go to Chapter Three: What Is the Role of an Administrator as Instructional Leader and Coach?
To learn alongside Mr. Fox as he learns to build capacity and share responsibility, go to Chapter Four: What Is the Role of a Teacher Leader as an Instructional Coach?
Principal Martinez
Ms. Martinez, the principal of Learning for All High School (LAHS), considers herself a strong instructional leader. She knows a lot about pedagogy and feels that one of her most important roles as principal is to serve as the lead learner on her campus. When she first got her principalship, she reached out to a mentor who could serve as a coach for her.
Meeting monthly with her coach, Ms. Martinez came to realize how she needed to do more than be visible on campus; she needed to be in classrooms and teacher meetings, working alongside teachers and providing meaningful and timely feedback about instruction in order to see improvements in student learning. Ms. Martinez and her coach discussed how she could communicate her role as a coach with her staff and what her schedule would look like. In her principal meetings, she got the sense that very few of her colleagues were in classrooms regularly and that they filled up their days with office work. Unfortunately, she knew of one colleague who sometimes left school even before the students did, so he could make a standing golf game. Ms. Martinez knew that her frequent presence in classrooms would be a change for her teachers, and she wanted to effectively communicate what she would be doing and why.
Through multiple conversations, her coach asked her reflective questions that pushed her thinking further and helped her design her approach. She began by sharing an article on pedagogy with her staff at a meeting. As they discussed the article, Ms. Martinez explained that she took her job very seriously because she was ultimately responsible for ensuring that all LAHS students learned and achieved at high levels. The only way she would be comfortable speaking about that would be to see student learning in action, which would mean that she would be visiting classrooms regularly. While in classrooms, she would be noticing the effective pedagogical strategies used by the staff as well as where and when students were successful. She explained that she would share her observations with the staff, so they could continue to have instructional discussions personally as well as in their PLCs and as a whole staff.
She began to visit rooms and provide feedback in person as much as possible and in writing when she couldn’t connect with a teacher within twenty-four hours. She also made sure to highlight teachers’ strengths in her messages.
To learn more about how Ms. Martinez defined her role as instructional coach, go to Chapter Three: What Is the Role of an Administrator as Instructional Leader and Coach?
To learn more about how Ms. Martinez approached coaching, go to Chapter Six: What Does Coaching Look Like?
Chapter Two
What Are Instructional Leadership Coaching Skills?
Change begins with a culture where everyone is elevated to the status of learner.
—Sarah Brown Wessling
As we saw in Chapter One, instructional coaches can collaborate with teachers to help them develop and hone strategies that impact student learning.
Instructional coaches need knowledge of adult learning theory, an understanding of coaching models, clarity on educational pedagogy and student learning, and the ability to build trusting relationships with colleagues. An instructional leader is an educator who knows content and pedagogy and who is able to have constructive, evidence-based feedback conversations with other educators about content and pedagogy to improve student learning. These conversations may be one-to-one after a leader visits a classroom formally or informally, or they may be within a professional learning community (PLC) or grade-level meeting where teachers are collaborating on designing instruction based on students’ needs.
It is important for instructional coaches to understand the differences between how adults learn and how children learn, but when I made the transition from teacher to coach and then administrator, I didn’t know much about adult learning theory. Over time I learned through reading the research and through some of my own missteps from bad meetings or workshops I attended, that I felt as if the presenters were speaking down to me.
Adults come to any new learning situation, whether it is a workshop, a staff meeting, or a coaching conversation, with many years of experience and internalized motivations to learn. If the new learning is not set into the adult’s current context, it seems irrelevant to the adult learner. Think about the scenario in Chapter One when the teachers attended the mandatory professional development workshop. The teachers had previous knowledge of and experience with the “new strategy” being shared by the presenter. Their background knowledge, however, was never acknowledged nor taken into consideration during the presentation. They left feeling frustrated and without any new relevant ideas that could impact their students’ learning.
As an instructional coach, it is important that you understand these elements of adult learning theory and build them into any learning opportunities you plan with your staff.
Instructional coaches must also understand coaching models. If you Google “instructional coaching models,” you will see about eight hundred thousand hits. Within those findings, you will see names of well-known authors Jim Knight and Elena Aguilar, two experts in this field from whom I have learned a lot through their books, articles, blogs, and tweets. Through my readings of Knight’s work, I have recognized the value of listening and understanding a theory of action, the concept that builds the what and why of coaching. Through Aguilar’s work, I have learned the importance of emotional intelligence, relationship and trust building, and how equity can bring about a new level of coaching conversations.
As an instructional coach, you need to know what coaching model you will use. Ideally, you will be situated within a system that supports instructional coaching and provides you a model. In the real world, many of us must attempt to do this work in isolation because our system hasn’t caught up to us yet.
We will talk more about designing your own coaching model and theory of action in a later chapter. For now, take a moment to reflect on these questions:
Why do you want to be an instructional coach?
What is your school’s or district’s vision for coaching?
How will your teachers, students, school, or district benefit from instructional coaching?
Will everyone receive the same amount and level of coaching? If not, how will you differentiate?
Is working with you as a coach voluntary or mandatory?
Once you’ve established your instructional coaching model, you also need clarity on educational pedagogy and student learning. As a site or district leader, it is important that you determine what your instructional focus will be for the year. This focus should be based on your goals (through your site plan, strategic plan, Local Control Accountability Plan if you are in California, etc.) and should be clearly communicated to your staff. Throughout this book, you will read about examples where a goal was or was not communicated clearly to staff members and the benefits and challenges that occurred as a result. Focus and clear communication are essential!
We can’t have a goal to “improve student achievement” without narrowing our focus. What part of student achievement do we want to improve? Is there a specific content area where our students struggle? Within that content, which skills or strategies do our students find challenging? What data are we using to make these determinations? This becomes a skill in and of itself as you learn to drill deeper into data, manipulating it until you can answer all your questions. From the statewide test results that are published in a newspaper down to the individual student report level that differentiates a student’s strengths and areas for growth, data tells us a lot when we know where and how to look.
With a clear focus in mind, we need to determine which instructional practices will help our students grow in the specific area we have selected. These are the instructional practices in which we provide professional development and support for teachers. Once teachers have been exposed to a new practice, instructional coaching can be the follow-up support to help teachers learn to master the practice with their students. It may seem simple enough to just tell people what the initiative is, but the knowing-doing gap between what we think teachers know (because they sat in a workshop listening to someone talk about an idea) and what they do (when we observe them and don’t see that workshop idea in action) can be wide. A combination of adult learning theory applied to your professional development and individualized instructional coaching can close the knowing-doing gap.
Consider the following questions from your own context:
What is (are) your school’s student achievement goal(s)?
What are your district’s student achievement goals?
What specifically do you want to see students saying or doing that they aren’t yet saying or doing?
What instructional moves can teachers plan to help students meet those goals?
What supports have you provided teachers around those instructional moves?
Does your system have clarity around what the instructional moves look and sound like in planning and delivery?
The teacher from the second scenario in Chapter One had a clear focus: He wanted to improve his students’ use of academic language during structured talk opportunities. With this clarity, he was able to research possible strategies and ask his instructional coach for specific support. The coach was able to collaborate with the teacher to provide the support the teacher wanted and needed in order to help his students be more successful.
A Word on Observation and Notetaking Tools
As a coach, you will be observing a lot of lessons. Don’t feel you have to be a content expert in every subject taught at your school. Your role as a coach is to facilitate the growth and development of peers, who do have the content expertise, and to support their learning of new pedagogy that will help them reach their students. A variety of tools are available for taking notes during an observation, so choose one that meets the needs of your coaching work. If you are working with a teacher who is struggling with classroom management, for example, you want to be able to take note of what student behaviors occur, which of those behaviors the teachers addresses, and any behaviors the teacher does not address. It might be helpful to keep track of which students shout out answers or get out of their seats and how the teachers addresses misbehaviors. [See Appendix A for sample note-taking guides.]
You could be in a very different coaching situation with a teacher who wants to improve her questioning techniques. A simple T-chart note-taking guide might work well. If you keep track of the teacher’s questions on the left and how students responded on the right, you can use your notes to have a coaching conversation with the teacher. As a coach, I would often write down as much as possible while observing in a room, then I would make a copy of my notes for my discussion with the teacher. In this case, I might ask the teacher to read through the notes, then I might ask some of the following questions:
What types of questions did you ask?
What kinds of responses did you hear from students?
Which student response demonstrated mastery (or what you wanted to hear)?
What type of question got that response from students?
What student response surprised you?
Was there something you wanted to hear from students that you didn’t hear in this lesson? If so, how might we craft a question or task to elicit that response?
Sometimes you begin a new coaching relationship by observing a classroom just to get a feel for the teacher’s style and how students respond to him or her. I often have colleagues ask me, “What do you look for in classrooms? How do you notice so many different things?” First, I remind them that I have had many years of practice as an instructional coach. It takes a long time to hone your observation skills. This coaching work is an evolving process for us all!
Before I share with you some of the things you might observe in a classroom, let’s take a moment for a quick journey together. Let’s visit a classroom at Principal Martinez’s high school from our Choose the Coach ADVenture. Imagine that you and I are doing a walkthrough with Principal Martinez. She decides to take us into a tenth-grade math class. Here is what we observe:
As we walk into the classroom at 10:25, we notice there are thirty-two students. The students are sitting in desks that have been moved to form groups of four. The students have notebooks open in front of them as well as their math textbooks. The teacher is standing in front of the class using her iPad to write and project her work on the front board for students to see. On the board is a problem the teacher has just finished working on. Nothing else is written on the board. At 10:30 the teacher tells the class they should work on the next problem. She says they can work with their group. The students begin to work. At 10:31 there is total silence in the room.
I walk up to one student, lean down, and whisper, “What are you learning today?” The student looks up at me and whispers, “Math.” I continue, “Yes, I know we are in your math class, but what specifically are you learning today?” The student begins to squirm, and he points down to his notebook and says, “We are doing this.” I look at the book, and I see quadratic equations. I whisper, “I see that this section is about quadratic equations. What can you tell me about quadratic equations?” The student mumbles something I can’t hear, then the student sitting next to him pipes up with a definition of quadratic equations. I thank that student, and I step back from the group.
The three of us walk around the room, and I ask a few more students what they are learning and have similar conversations. At 10:45 we exit the classroom and step outside to debrief what we saw. I ask you and Principal Martinez what I always ask when I leave a room: “What can we celebrate? What is going well for students in that room?”
Principal Martinez shares with us that the teacher is using the adopted curriculum, which has been a struggle in this department. She also shares that she likes the fact that the students are sitting in groups. I pause here to push back on the language of “I like . . . .” I explain to you both that if we were giving this teacher feedback right now, and we said, “Your principal likes when the students sit in groups,” she would have it in her head that she needs to have group seating whenever the principal comes in. Instead of worrying about how to impress the principal, I want the teacher to know why group seating is beneficial for student learning; therefore, if we were talking to her, I might say, “I appreciated that your students’ desks were moved to create a group structure. When students have opportunities to work with their peers, they can develop their speaking and listening skills, their use of academic language in context, and their ability to problem solve and collaborate.”
After we share some celebrations, I ask you and Principal Martinez, “What else did you notice? What wonderings do you have?” We were only in the room for about fifteen minutes, so we can’t make assumptions, but we can generate wonderings about which we could talk to the teacher in a future coaching conversation. You look to me and say, “I wasn’t a math teacher; I’m just not sure what to look for in a math class.” I thank you for your honesty and remind you that you have pedagogical knowledge and that even without content expertise, there is a lot to see in a class; for instance, how many students spoke during the fifteen minutes we were in the room? You say that the only student voices we heard were when I spoke directly to students. “Exactly,” I say. So that makes me wonder about when and how students are given the opportunity to speak in this class. It also makes me wonder if there are roles or a structure for group work. When the teacher told the students to begin working, she said they could work with a partner, but none of the students did that. Have they had prior partner or group experiences in this class? Are there group roles that students know or to which they could be exposed that would help them work together as a group?
This is just a snapshot of what I look for and think about when I visit a classroom. Below is a list of possible instructional, environmental, and cultural items you might observe in a classroom:
Instructional
Number of students present
Number of girls vs. boys (though I caution you to be careful with this as we move into a less binary gender world)
Number of students by race or ethnicity, English learner status, etc.
Break down of minutes of teacher talk, student talk, and silence
Learning tasks—What are students actually saying or writing?
Daily objective or learning target—What is stated or posted about the day’s learning?
Text—What text(s) are students seeing, using, reading, or viewing?
Cognitive load—Who is doing the thinking?
Academic language—What academic language do you see or hear students using in their writing or their original speech?
Standards—Do the learning tasks align with grade-level standards? Do they align with school and district curriculum expectations?
Environmental
Room setup—Students’ seating arrangement, teacher desk, other furniture, etc.
Print-rich—Are there books, posters, or charts visible in the room?
Student work—Is there current student work visible in the room?
Cultural
Representative—Do the posters, pictures, or books in the room reflect the culture of the students? Do they reflect diversity?
Risks—Do students feel comfortable taking risks?
Relationships—Are students smiling? Does the teacher address students by name? Do students address each other by name? Do you hear respectful language spoken?
The best advice I can offer a coach in an open-ended situation like this is to stick to your school’s focus area(s). You can walk into a classroom and notice a million different things, but you will not be an effective coach if you attempt to talk about one million ideas with a teacher. You want to narrow your lens, so you can coach into a familiar area.
Another tool in the instructional coaching toolbox is the ability to build trusting relationships with colleagues. It is well worth your time to invest in getting to know your staff early on and letting them get to know you. Discover and celebrate their strengths. Once people know you are there to support them and are not “out to get them,” they will work with you to learn more to benefit students. We will explore the importance of taking time to listen as you build relationships in a future chapter.
Armed with adult learning theory, an understanding of coaching models, clarity on educational pedagogy and student learning, and the ability to build trusting relationships with colleagues, you can start your instructional coaching journey!
Choose the Coach ADVenture
If you have just arrived from Chapter Six, and you are curious about how Mr. Fox develops instructional coaching skills to work with his primary teachers, keep reading.
If you’ve just arrived from the Chapter 3 and want to learn how Ms. Martinez helps her teachers understand her coaching role, skip down a bit to continue the journey with Principal Martinez.
Principal Fox
Our elementary principal colleague, Mr. Fox, just wrapped up his first coaching cycle with a fifth-grade teacher. While he was excited after this successful interaction, he was still nervous about trying a coaching cycle with a primary-grade teacher. Before attempting that, Mr. Fox decided he needed to practice observing and providing more strength-based feedback in his primary classrooms.
For two weeks, Mr. Fox visited his primary classrooms every day. He began to leave small notes, highlighting a strength he observed. Then he added a reflective question at the end of his notes. At the end of the two weeks, one of his grade-level lead teachers asked to meet with him.
The teacher came into the meeting looking nervous. Mr. Fox asked her, “What’s up?” The teacher said, “Some of the teachers are wondering why you are picking on the primary grades.”
Mr. Fox was dumbfounded. “Picking on them? What do you mean?”
The teacher went on to explain that the staff had been comparing notes, and they realized that he had spent a week and a half working with one fifth-grade teacher then at least ten days observing all of the primary teachers every day, while he hadn’t been to some of the other upper-grade teachers at all. She said that the staff was feeling like he was out to get the primary teachers and that his notes were beginning to sound like they had done something wrong.
Mr. Fox tried to explain what he was doing and that he was learning how to be an instructional leader. But at the end of the conversation, both he and the teacher felt uncomfortable. He didn’t think anything had been resolved, and he was now nervous to visit any classroom.
To learn about Mr. Fox’s next steps to address his teachers’ concerns, go to Chapter Twelve: How Do Coaches Address Challenges and Roadblocks along the Way?
To learn about those to whom Mr. Fox turns for advice, go to Chapter Nine: Who Is in Your PLN?
Principal Martinez
Our high school leader, Ms. Martinez, had recently had a few teachers question her coaching. They wondered how it was going to affect their evaluations. After visiting classrooms with her coach (in this case, me, in the above math example) and discussing the issue, Ms. Martinez decides it’s time for a frank conversation with her staff. Rather than speak to over one hundred teachers in a faculty meeting, Ms. Martinez decides she will visit each department. In order to continue to build the capacity of her AP’s, Ms. Martinez will take with her the AP who oversees each department for each meeting.
In each meeting, Ms. Martinez explains the same basic concept. First, she reminds her staff that she is a lifelong learner and that she is constantly striving to be a better leader for them and their students. She explains that she has been working with a coach to enhance her skills and shares what an amazing learning experience it has been for her. Next she shares that since one of her passions is instructional leadership and one of her primary responsibilities is to ensure that students are learning and achieving, she and the AP’s have been working on a variety of ways to visit classrooms more frequently and to provide relevant feedback to teachers. She asks a few teachers if they would be willing to share their experience with her coaching conversations with them. Because Ms. Martinez made a point to focus on one teacher in each department for her coaching, she has at least one volunteer in every meeting. When the staff hears one of their colleagues express that they valued the one-to-one time with the boss and the specific feedback and ensuing conversation, some of them become much less tense about the new observation schedules.
After meeting with each department, Ms. Martinez schedules a follow-up meeting with her site union representatives. She wants a chance to debrief with them and to see if they have any feedback to share with her. During that meeting, Ms. Martinez hears that while many teachers understand and support the additional coaching attempts, there are some who are concerned about retaliation and evaluation ramifications. When Ms. Martinez presses the reps to be explicit about whom and what situations to which they are referring, she is not given specifics. Ms. Martinez reiterates that their administrative team’s coaching philosophy is grounded in a strength-based approach and that they are all working to help all teachers continue to improve their practice in order to better serve all students. If she, or any AP, had concerns about an individual teacher’s performance, that would be made clear in a conversation. If anything was leading towards a negative evaluation, the teacher would know and understand that ahead of time, and they would be welcome to invite a union rep to attend any evaluation meetings.
After her meeting with the union reps, Ms. Martinez debriefs with her AP’s. As a group, they feel the coaching message was well-received by most of their staff. They plan to continue to build relationships with key teacher leaders and to start asking other teachers how they prefer to receive feedback.
To learn about Ms. Martinez’s next steps to build teacher leadership, go to Chapter Four: What Is the Role of a Teacher Leader as an Instructional Coach?
Chapter Three
What Is the Role of an Administrator as Instructional Leader and Coach?
Leadership is not about building trust so that the hard work of improvement can happen later. It is about tackling the work in ways that build trust through learning and making progress together.
—Viviane Robinson, Student-Centered Leadership
Today’s school administrators wear many hats. Since my first days in administration (many years ago), there has been much talk about the principal as the lead learner, the instructional leader of a school. As I support new leaders today, however, I’ve noticed that many struggle to fit in the role of instructional leader—and may ignore the role of coach completely. These shortcomings typically stem from the reality that it is challenging to balance all the elements of a complex job (see the time management chapter for some tips on this later) and from a fear that they don’t know enough to coach teachers.
If you are an administrator who wants teachers to see you as an instructional coach, start by defining your coaching work and sharing your definition transparently with your teachers. We will talk more about designing your own coaching model in a later chapter. For now, take a moment to reflect on this question, as it will be one of the first things your teachers will need to know: How will your instructional coaching differ from evaluation?
You need to be able to answer the question clearly for your teachers. No matter what you say, if they don’t trust you, they won’t believe that your “coaching” will be any different from an evaluation.
Building trusting relationships takes time. It can take months or even years for a teacher to trust a new administrator. Many teachers have worked with anywhere from one to twenty administrators (especially if you include vice/assistant principals) throughout their careers. Often they have been at a school longer than anyone on the administrative team, so their skepticism or uncertainty about a new administrator isn’t unexpected or unreasonable. Building trust starts with the administrator, which is why I encourage all administrators to be visible on campus, in classrooms, and at school events—especially if they are new to a school.
No matter how long you’ve been at your school, make time to meet new colleagues. Get to know your teachers by asking about their work and their personal lives. And always make a point to greet everyone by name.
Active listening will help you in this endeavor of building relationships. Do a lot more listening than talking as you get to know others. When people truly feel heard, they feel closer to the people who took time to listen to them. Over time, your efforts will lead to trust. Active listening will also help you in your role as an instructional coach.
When people truly feel heard, they feel closer to the people who took time to listen to them.
As a new principal, I immediately began visiting classrooms and leaving little notes, celebrating something I saw the teacher doing well for students and posing what I thought was a reflective question (more on this in a later chapter). I was surprised when my teachers began freaking out about my little notes and asking everyone else before finally asking me, “What are you looking for?” At first, I didn’t understand their concern or confusion. I was looking for good teaching, of course! Then I realized that I had not shared my definition of good teaching; in fact, I hadn’t even clearly defined it for myself or provided guidance on how to make good teaching a measurable goal. I quickly backtracked and began to have instructional conversations with teachers, so we could craft a common understanding of some big instructional buzz words, such as student engagement, wait time, and checking for understanding. This took time, and I realized teachers would need to visit one another’s classrooms to find and agree upon a common language. Our lesson studies really helped us build this language—live—while we were lesson planning and delivering lessons together. (You’ll learn more about lesson studies in Chapter Eight.)
As a staff, we determined which instructional strategies were going to help our students learn and make progress. We did this through district- and site-based professional development. We also read and used research, professional articles, and books as our references for high-leverage strategies that would support the students we served. As we began to practice those strategies together, I was able to become an administrator who provided instructional coaching for the staff in a focused way.
Lead by Walking Around
Every new school year, new leadership position and interaction provides us with the opportunity to build or strengthen relationships with individual staff members and students in our schools. The time to step away from your office and lead by walking around is now.
During my time as a site leader, I made a point to visit each teacher’s classroom during the opening setup days before students returned to school. While these visits took me out of the office and away from the nonstop stream of emails and phone calls that would await my return, they were a powerful way for me to build new relationships or renew past relationships with each staff member. Not only could I check in with people about their summer and their family, I was also able to check out their room setup and offer my support physically, emotionally, or professionally. These short personal visits helped me learn more about my staff members as individuals and as members of our learning community.
