Saturday, September 21, 2013

Choosing a Focus for Coaching

Improvement Begins with I.

Coaching is about improvement.  Coaches wouldn’t exist if somebody didn’t want something to change.  But coaching works best when the somebody who wants something to change is the same person as the one who is supposed to be doing the changing!  In teaching, that means instruction is most likely to improve if the teacher owns the desire for change. 

My experience is that it’s often the best teachers who are most interested in improvement (there’s a message in that!).  We shouldn’t be deterred from working with these outstanding teachers.  As Charlotte Danielson has said, “Because teaching is so demanding and complex, all teaching can be improved; no matter how brilliant a lesson is, it can always be even better”*

Whether we’re working with expert teachers or novices, having them choose the focus for our coaching cycles makes coaching more effective.  Brenda Powers** suggested that working on a problem someone else hands you is “not going to add much zest or pleasure to your teaching.”  If a teacher is working on something she cares about it’s always going to be a better problem to think about than anything suggested by somebody else.

Instructional frameworks can be helpful in determining a coaching focus.  I like Charlotte Danielson’s work.  Although her Framework for Teaching is now being used extensively as an evaluation instrument, the title of her book is Enhancing Professional Practice – and that’s just what we as coaches want to do.  She talks about teaching in terms of four areas, or “domains”: Planning and Preparation, Classroom Environment, Instruction, and Professional Responsibilities.  I find that the descriptors of proficient and distinguished practice align well with research about effective instruction and with my own experience.  During an initial coaching conversation, the framework helps us choose a narrow, manageable focus for our work.

As coaches, our work is improving teacher effectiveness – and that is just the work that many teachers would like support with.  In these times when the stakes are high around teacher evaluation, coaches’ support in helping teachers improve their practice is a valuable commodity.  While some bemoan the emphasis on teacher effectiveness, I believe that, if our framework for evaluation is appropriate, it will be a good thing for kids.  And it might just open a door or two for you as a coach.  Once you step inside that door, allowing the teacher to choose the focus (putting the “I” in “improvement”) will heighten the value of your work together.   


* Danielson, C. (2012).  Observing Classroom Practice. Educational Leadership, 70(3), 32-37

**Choice Literacy Newletter, 8/31/2013.  Downloaded from choiceliteracy.com. 


This week, you might want to take a look at:

The Danielson teaching framework rubrics, available free at: 



Other teacher effectiveness resources from Danielson on her site at:


Listen to this informative podcast about close reading:



A blog post about what close reading isn’t:



A video about using counting collections in grades K-2:




That’s all for this week.  Happy Coaching!

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