Saturday, July 19, 2014

Getting Motivated!

Some of the most well-worn books on my shelf are about coaching.  Cognitive Coaching, Talk About Teaching, Student Centered Coaching, and Sit and Get Won’t Grow Dendrites have all been helpful in my work.  But sometimes, a non-education book illuminates new insights about coaching.  Drive, by Daniel Pink, did that for me. 

In Drive, Pink describes his findings about motivation.  He learned that external motivation (pay, prizes, etc.) actually inhibits success on cognitively difficult tasks.  Pink makes the case that internal motivation is needed for success on work that requires creativity or higher-level thinking.  Employees tasked with such work are motivated by autonomy, purpose, and mastery.  They do best when they have some choice over their activities, tasks that directly connect to their world, and opportunities for success.  I like to think of these elements as the motivational C’s:  control, choice, challenge, connection, and construction of meaning. 

Giving the teacher control in coaching means, first and foremost, she determines whether she will participate in the coaching process.  At some schools that’s non-negotiable.  There’s an all-in policy, meaning everyone participates in coaching cycles at some point during the year (yay!), or sometimes the principal specifies that a teacher will be coached, possibly as part of an evaluation process (boo!).  Control can also be offered by opening up the whens and wheres.  When will you meet?  When will you observe?  Where will you meet?  What other classrooms would she like to observe? 

Choice goes along with control.  Let the teacher choose the focus for coaching.  Will it be writer’s workshop, annotation, or cognitively-guided instruction?  Will you create units together?  Revise lessons?  Focus on assessment?  The more choice the teacher has in the coaching process, the more motivated she will be and the more likely her instruction will change.

Creating an appropriate level of challenge is where the GIR Coaching Model comes in.  The amount of support you provide changes the challenge of the task.  If you keep recommending when your colleague needs you to thoughtfully question her practice and push her thinking, the challenge is low and thus the motivation is low.  However, recommending a specific strategy could provide just the right level of challenge if she is ready to try something that isn’t in her instructional repertoire.

Connection is built into coaching work.  In contrast to the hit-and-miss nature of whole group professional development, where some teachers will be able to immediately apply the learning to the classroom and others won’t, coaching should always have a direct connection to what is currently happening in that teacher’s class.  Giving the teacher choice and control within the coaching scenario further enhances connections to her day-to-day experiences. 

The final C is construction of meaning.  Constructivism argues that humans generate understanding through interactions between their experiences and their ideas.  Coaching creates opportunities for those interactions, as you and the teacher reflect together on teaching.   

Reading Daniel Pink’s ideas about motivation helped me make connections between what I knew about student motivation and what I’d experienced with teachers.  Whether in the classroom or in a coaching conference, I’ve found success as I’ve kept these 5 Cs in mind.

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

This video about classroom that are over-decorated and over-stimulating:



How summer and a personal writing notebook changed this teacher’s life:



And yet another summer reading list of professional books for teachers:



This blog about the effective vertical team meetings:


In this video presentation, Arne Duncan talks about the importance of offering leadership opportunities to classroom teachers:

http://vimeo.com/98670258


That’s it for this week.  Happy Summer!

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