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.