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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