Friday, April 5, 2013

Perspective


In all aspects of life, the person with the most varied responses wins. 
                                                                                                             Kelly Perdew

Why be flexible?  Being able to see a teaching situation from multiple perspectives helps teachers plan better and make better on-the-spot decisions.  Effective teachers change, adapt, and expand their repertoire and then choose from that repertoire based on both the big picture and the small details.  They are able to shift among different perspectives, stepping beyond and outside themselves to look at a situation from different views.  They see both the forest and each tree. They think both logically and intuitively.  They consider both the individual and the group.  They think about short range and long range objectives consecutively.  Sound tricky?  It is.  Helping teachers develop this flexibility can be an important coaching goal. 

To be flexible requires emotional safety.  The relationships of trust you have developed with the teachers you work with provides fertile soil for flexibility. 

Flexible thinkers are comfortable with ambiguity because they know it can lead to creative solutions.  They can live with doubt because they have the capacity to look at life from a solutions perspective.  Flexible teachers experiment with new ways and are willing to stretch themselves to gain new abilities. 

To help teachers be flexible, coaches might ask questions like these:

If you were planning this lesson just for (student), what would you do?

If you had twice as much time (or half as much!), what would you do?

Where might this lesson be leading?

What details might you need to think about?

How are you feeling about this idea?

How do you think (another teacher) would approach this objective?

What might be some of the results of…….?

What might students be thinking about this?

What might be going on here?

What’s the best (worst) thing that could happen?

If there were a silver lining to this situation, what might it be?

Asking questions like these supports a flexible approach that broadens thinking and can lead to creative solutions.  As you work to develop flexibility in both yourself and the teachers you serve, be bold.  Ask deep questions.  Remember that the more possibilities you consider, the greater the success. 
 

Since we’ve been thinking about questioning, this week you might want to take a look at some resources about the questions teachers ask:

A video about improving student participation with “talk moves”:


Information about asking good questions (scroll down to the section on “Questioning Sequencing and Patterns” – very helpful!):


A video about asking good question in science (boring presentation, good content and examples – hang in there!):


An article about using higher-order questioning to accelerate students’ growth in reading:


More about questioning:


That’s all for this week.

Happy Coaching!


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