The Coach ADVenture. Amy Illingworth
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?”