By ROBERTA LENGER KANG

We’re all familiar with the image of a coach standing on the sidelines, intently watching their team run a play on the field. When things get intense for the players, they look to the coach for guidance, encouragement, focus, and to see the lay of the land from a new perspective. 

In the realm of sports, the role of a coach is widely accepted. Coaches are seen as necessary in order for professional athletes to increase their performance at elite levels. But coaching shouldn’t be limited to athletics. Coaching in other fields can prove equally beneficial — just ask Atul Gawande, who explained the power of coaching in the operating room. 

In education, coaching takes traditional, procedural staff development to the next level by providing support when, where, and how teachers need it. And we should know — in the past year, we provided over 1,200 days of professional development to partner schools in the US, Istanbul, Saudi Arabia, and China.

Why you need a coach in your corner

We’re focused on supporting teachers towards transformation. Our five core principles fuel our coaching methods and maximize our ability to customize promising practices for each unique school setting, develop deep relationships with teachers and school leaders, and use data to inform our high-leverage strategies. 

Educators who seek out coaching know why it’s invaluable to have a coach in their corner: 

• Prior knowledge and experience: Teaching is disorienting. One moment you think you know where you are, the next you feel completely lost. Whether with a new class, a new grade level, a new curriculum, or a new test, teachers know that the only constant in education is change. But it’s impossible for a professional to be at the top of their game when the rules of the road are always shifting. Our coaches come equipped with prior knowledge and experience in the classroom, which allows them to help others be mindful of the potholes and pitfalls along the path that they’ve walked before. 

• Outside perspectives expose blindspots: Teaching is a personal profession. When teachers pour hours and hours of their personal time into developing the perfect lesson plan and spend dollar after dollar of their personal money on classroom supplies, they have a vested interest in the success of their lessons and their students. If anything goes awry in the implementation, teachers can take things personally. Coaching provides an outside perspective that helps to expose blindspots that distort or distract from the root of the issue. When teachers are supported by a coach who can offer alternative points of view, challenge assumptions or hold space for teachers to engage in critical reflection, they’re able to regain perspective and identify areas for growth. 

• Acknowledgment, empathy, and encouragement: Teaching is isolating. Most teachers will see over 100 students, and make over 1,500 decisions a day. There are overwhelming lists of papers to grade, parents to call, games to attend, and lessons to plan. In the midst of it all, they often feel isolated and invisible. Coaching can change that. Instructional coaching creates a unique opportunity for teachers to be seen and heard. CPET coaches focus on cultivating teachers’ strengths and acknowledge the progress teachers are making in their practice, make real connections over shared challenges, and encourage continued practice for future growth. These connected conversations create space for teachers to reflect, and develop an increased understanding of their experiences. 

• Targeted guidance: Teaching is strategic. When teachers realize they are in a safe space, they can begin to investigate their biggest challenges and are more open to receiving feedback. Coaches can provide targeted guidance to increase content knowledge and pedagogical skills, and this feedback can have an almost immediate impact on teacher practice and student performance. Feedback that’s offered to teachers leverages teacher strengths in order to build on areas for growth, and offers both broad and nuanced advice about how teachers can evolve their practice, whether it’s by using a new instructional strategy, customizing the curriculum, or helping reposition the relationship between teachers and students.

• Continuous improvement: Teaching is ever-evolving. “Teaching is a human profession,” said John Browne, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, “that means it will never be perfect, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.” Like doctors and lawyers, where every patient and every case is a little bit different, every class will present a new type of challenge for teachers. This is why coaching is essential. There are unlimited opportunities for professional learning and growth, and teachers who don’t engage in continuous improvement will not cultivate the skills necessary to meet the demands of the changing generations of students. Just like we want our doctors to be learning the most current medical procedures and our lawyers to be learning the most current legal precedents, we want our teachers to be evolving their practice through the latest research-based pedagogy. 

TAGS: CORE PRINCIPLES, ROBERTA LENGER KANG

By G. FAITH LITTLE

When designing professional development projects, we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified as we support educators. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Communities of practice, Contextualized practice, Critical reflection, Cultivating strengths, and Cycles of inquiry. As part of our series investigating each of these principles, let’s dig deeper into critical reflection. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)

Critical reflection includes meta-cognition, self-awareness, and considering multiple viewpoints — features which result in reflective action. Individuals who are able to reflect critically on their experiences are better positioned to learn from their successes and missteps so that they can be constantly improving their practice. The basic principles of critical reflection are all the more relevant today as we live in this fast-paced world, and we include opportunities for personal, professional, and peer-to-peer reflection in all of our workshop experiences.

What can reflection look like? 
​
A cornerstone of CPET conferences and institutes, critical reflection helps us begin each Chancellor’s Day with time, space, and guidance that positions teachers as experts who can articulate the needs and desired outcomes for their learning.

• At Inspire, teachers explore critical reflection using a creative modality that best connects with how they want to reflect on their teaching career — what drew them to the profession, what inspires them, and what they need in order to keep going. 

 

• The Big Learning Challenge is unique among CPET conferences, and this year we integrated our reflection and planning throughout the project creation process. Teachers reflect on the content and skills connected to their project, the reading they complete, their discussions, and their final products.

 

• At In Practice, we create space for teachers to share promising practices with one another, while being critically reflective about their challenges through the use of curriculum inventories, graphing and mapping, music, poetry and prose, recipes, and reflection unbound (an extension of our Literacy Unbound initiative). 

Getting started: three ways to incorporate reflection

Reflection recipes
Teaching is like cooking: both an art and a science. Invite participants to reflect by making a list of ingredients from their year. Turn the ingredients from a list into a reflection recipe. What do they notice? What happens when they add a creative element to their practical list? Participants share their recipes, draw connections between experiences, and consider how they gain perspective on their school year as a result of this reflection.

Reflection inventory
Not all participants will be into the touchy-feely-artsy reflection. For those folks, we include a teaching career inventory as a means for reflection. Using a timeline template, participants review what they’ve taught over their experience as a teacher, what education they have pursued themselves, and their goals, and then consider next steps for their future as an educator. Teachers may want to sit in subject area groups to bounce ideas off one another.

Reading reflection
Following a period of research or reading, utilize our What, So What, Now What resource to help jumpstart your reflective process:

• What: What did I just read?
  
• So What: How does it apply to my teaching?
  
• Now What: How can I take this back to my classroom?

TAGS: CORE PRINCIPLES, CRITICAL REFLECTION, G. FAITH LITTLE, RESOURCES

By G. FAITH LITTLE

When designing professional development projects, we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified as we support educators. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Communities of practice, Contextualized practice, Critical reflection, Cultivating strengths, and Cycles of inquiry. As part of our series investigating each of these principles, let’s dig deeper into cycles of inquiry. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)

We believe in and utilize a cycle of inquiry with school teams as a powerful means towards transforming and improving practices and school structures. Our approach is inspired by the notion of social inquiry, as developed by John Dewey and C.S. Pierce, which privileges reflection and action, and articulates a process to identify a problem and investigate it through collaborative experimentation and exploration to develop a clearer understanding of an issue. 

We’ve got more to say on our foundations and theory, but my three-year-old nephew demonstrates the practice efficiently and effectively with his very favorite question: Why? 

We aren’t going to go swimming right now.
Why?
Because we’re going home.
Why?
It’s late, and you need to get dinner and a bath before bed.
[Pause] Is the pool open?
Yes, it’s open.
Can we get bath at the pool?
I suppose we can, yes. But what about dinner?
Why?
Because you’re going to get hangry soon.
What’s hangry?
Remember, when we don’t eat and then small things bother us, and then we get mad easily, and sometimes we throw a tantrum?
And we have to sit to think about it?
Yes.
[Pause] McDowell’s! (yes, he says McDowell’s) I see it. Maybe can we eat then go swim?
Why?
Then we can eat and swim and be happy to swim.

​​The conversation continued. We went swimming. On the way home we talked about swimming and why it makes us happy. My nephew asked, “Why?” at least a dozen more times. His pauses helped me see that he was thinking about the answer — he remains curious no matter the subject. 

Previously, I shared how our team goes about exploring our questions and challenges. Once a month, we gather together for Fiesta Fridays, which involve self-directed team-building activities that allow us to use play to surface larger challenges. Last year, our team began a cycle of inquiry focused on our Fiesta Friday experiences by using a simple structure to capture what we were curious about:

I am studying (topic): norms and consensus within the Fiesta Friday (FF) experience
because I want to find out how: FF partners should perform
in order to better understand: the goal of FF 
so that we will know more about: how well we are meeting that goal.

From this starting point, we introduced letter writing as a way of passing along our learning from one Fiesta Friday to the next. Planners from January’s experience wrote a letter to those planning February’s outlining their goals for the experience, how it connected to the previous FF goals, and what, if anything, they might have changed following the experience. After a few months, we had some data we could use to loop back into our original question about FF partners and FF goals. 

Our inquiry process is informed by Dewey’s and Pierce’s descriptions of three cyclical stages of the inquiry process: deductive: identifying an issue and developing a hypothesis or approach to try; inductive: testing a hypothesis and noting implications; and abductive: returning to adjust and hone a hypothesis or strategy based on experimentation.

With our partner schools, we see that by engaging in a cycle of inquiry to improve instruction, educators can identify the problems specific to their contexts and engage in a cycle of exploration to seek promising practices that address their particular needs, as opposed to relying solely on experts for “answers.” We turn the focus toward the questions that are bubbling up for teachers and for students. Where is the curiosity? What questions do their questions lead to, and what can they learn along the way?

During our inquiry process, we may refine the question or gather information that leads us to a new question, but we start with curiosity. We wonder. We ask, “Why?” We imagine. 

What are you curious about today? Perhaps you’re interested in giving it a little thought through writing:

I am curious about ___________________________________
because I want to find out (what/how/why) ___________________________________
in order to better understand (what/how/why) ___________________________________
so that we will know more about ___________________________________.

TAGS: CORE PRINCIPLES, G. FAITH LITTLE, INQUIRY

By G. FAITH LITTLE

When designing professional development projects, we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified as we support educators. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Communities of practice, Contextualized practice, Critical reflection, Cultivating strengths, and Cycles of inquiry. As part of our series investigating each of these principles, let’s dig deeper into communities of practice. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)

Identifying members of your community with an interest in professional development can be a first step in building an internal coaching structure within your school, and if you’re already humming along with a teacher coaching practice, looping back to some basics can help you identify additional teachers to invite into a growing community of practice.

Step back
We often become so familiar with our own school and colleagues that we miss a new or forming interest — especially when it’s late in the school year and we’re sure we know everyone well enough to ascertain who is interested in receiving or leading PD and who isn’t. However, if we step back, we may see something new. At the next grade level team meeting, take a breath and look around as if it were the beginning of the school year. During your next staff meeting, imagine the people around you have changed over the school year (they probably have) and look and listen for new evidence of the desire to grow professionally.


Look
Take a look over a list of your staff and identify which teachers have tried something new in their classroom. What might happen if you invite them to share with one other teacher, in their department, or with the larger community? Where do you see teachers gathering in pairs or small groups? Do they share a common interest that could translate into professional learning? For instance, back when the first Harry Potter book came out, teachers reading the book decided to gather together to form a book club that spent the first half hour talking about their own experience of the book and the second half talking about how they could spark their own student’s imagination through creative writing prompts. Look around. Where might professional learning groups be a logical next step to what is already happening?


Listen
Perhaps it’s more likely in your situation that teachers aren’t forming their own learning groups naturally. Take a moment instead to listen for the needs you hear being voiced. Do you hear struggles in the form of complaints? There’s not enough time. / How am I supposed to fit [this] in? / I’ve tried everything with [this kid]!

What teacher do you know who has struggled through this same problem in the past? Consider asking the teacher who overcame the struggle to invite the teacher in the midst of the struggle to problem-solve together. Listen to the whole staff: do you have results from any recent survey you can dip back into for a sense of the needs across your team? Identify several needs and offer a problem of practice protocol in your next email to staff or invite teachers to form small groups that engage with a protocol to address their concerns.

Maybe it’s time for a new survey focused on asking questions directly about PD needs and especially about the interest of teachers to collaborate and learn from one another. It’s a great time to listen for needs that you want to meet over the summer and going into 2019-20.

The reality is that communities of practice are everywhere. Sometimes we can see them clearly and other times we need to step back, look, and listen to see where they may be forming or where we can invite them to form between folks who don’t realize that just across the hall is someone else with the same interest or struggle. Wagner describes it like this:

[Communities of practice] are a familiar experience, so familiar perhaps that it often escapes our attention. Yet when it is given a name and brought into focus, it becomes a perspective that can help us understand our world better. In particular, it allows us to see past more obvious formal structures such as organizations, classrooms, or nations, and perceive the structures defined by engagement in practice and the informal learning that comes with it.

TAGS: COMMUNITY, CORE PRINCIPLES, G. FAITH LITTLE, RESOURCES

By G. FAITH LITTLE

When designing professional development projects, we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified as we support educators. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Communities of practice, Contextualized practice, Critical reflection, Cultivating strengths, and Cycles of inquiry. As part of our series investigating each of these principles, let’s dig deeper into contextualized practice. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)

Contextualized practice — what does it mean?
Contextualized practice means that our processes, activities, and strategies are situational, and will change based on the environment or circumstances. The idea that “one size fits all” is a myth in clothing and a myth in professional development. Our work responds to the needs of the community as we build relationships and engage community members as collaborators and co-architects of our PD plans and processes.

What does it look like in real life?
It looks messy. Though contextualized, it doesn’t mean we’re working without a plan, goal, or strategy. It does mean, however, that we show flexibility in how we implement our plans based on the experiences we have and the people we’re working with. We may find that a project needs adjustment after realizing initial goals were overly ambitious, or that necessary skills are not yet in place.

In real life, we take into account what we know and understand about the project and the people in order to plan our approach, and we continue to mold and shape our processes to meet the needs that emerge throughout the project. This can sometimes lead to changes in goals, responsibilities, or ways of working — and we know that it takes time to realize these nuances within a project. We are committed to this approach because without it, we don’t believe that impactful learning occurs.

What needs does it address?
First, it’s responsive to the needs of our partners and their goals. Because our processes aren’t prescriptive, we seek to match the values and priorities of each project rather than prioritize our own set agenda. Second, it positions us as a true partner at the start of each project, co-constructing with educators, schools, and learning communities. Rather than informing what people should do, we serve as thought partners, imagining what we could do.

What are key practices or strategies?

• Reflective listening
  
• PD planning
  
• Goal setting
• Relationship building
• Reading the room
• Needs assessments
• Matching needs with strategies/approaches

Can coaching be effective without this principle?
The answer is simply, no. If we are not customizing our practices and approaches to work with each individual project, we aren’t meeting the needs of their unique community.


TAGS: CORE PRINCIPLES, G. FAITH LITTLE