Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Value of Specificity

As a coach, you spend a lot of time making recommendations, and you want those recommendations to be meaningful and powerful.  For teachers who need a lot of support with a new instructional approach, your recommendations will likely be as effective as they are specific. 

EFFECTIVENESS = SPECIFICITY

Recently, I coached a coach who was feeling frustrated.  “Her classroom management just isn’t improving,” she said, bemoaning the stagnant state of this novice teacher’s skill.  “Every lesson that I’ve observed, I’ve talked to her about it.  I’ve told her that if she focuses on the classroom management, the other pieces will fall into place.”

“What specific recommendations have you made about classroom management?”  I asked.  The coach quickly saw where I was leading.

“I guess I haven’t really gotten specific,” she said.  We then talked about specific recommendations she might make, including having a class discussion about how misbehavior impacted learning for the whole class, dropping the pitch of her voice to get students’ attention, and practicing her ‘teacher look’ in front of the mirror.  When the coach provided these very specific recommendations, it made a difference quickly.

Specific recommendations also made a difference with a teacher I was coaching.  Discussions in her classroom were falling flat; ineffective questioning patterns produced student disengagement, and student-to-student talk was almost non-existent.  After observing this teacher in action, I made a very specific recommendation:  DO NOT REPEAT STUDENT ANSWERS.  When I discussed this recommendation with the teacher, she acknowledged that she had recognized this problem herself, but found herself repeating all the time because students' voices were soft and didn’t carry well in the room.  I made another specific recommendation:  ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO SHARE THEIR ANSWERS ‘LOUD & PROUD.’  Using this catch-phrase, with a little explanation, would help students feel ownership for their responses.  As the teacher prompted loud and proud responses and quit repeating students’ answers, dialogue in the classroom took a turn for the better.  Specific recommendations had made a difference.   

Very specific recommendations like these can get a teacher pointed in a positive direction.  Of course, when less support is needed, recommendations can be more general, or another form of coaching, like asking questions, may be more appropriate.  When teachers are looking to you for answers, however, a coach’s specific recommendations can really hit the mark.


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

A template for a pre-reading anticipation guide, useful in any content area:



A podcast about working with English Language Learners and their families:



A blog post about the power of collaboration:



National Geograhic’s Photo of the Day – great for descriptive writing practice:



This TED talk focuses on why and how some teachers are giving the math curriculum a makeover:




That’s it for this week.  Happy Coaching!

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