The Coach ADVenture. Amy Illingworth
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