Recommendations: The Power of Choice

Recently, I met with a teacher and reflected on a mostly-successful lesson. She felt, however, that there were things she could be doing to enhance student engagement. She sensed that her pacing was somehow off, but couldn’t quite figure out the culprit. After listening and prompting, I asked, “Can I offer a suggestion?”

When teachers are coming up empty in their search for a more effective approach, coaches’ recommendations play a helpful role. Previous posts have discussed the importance of making recommendations that are specific in order to increase their effectiveness. Another way to get more uptake on your recommendations is to offer choice.

Offering choice develops feelings of power and efficacy. These are important aspects to consider if our coaching seeks to gradually increase teachers’ responsibility. Being asked to make a decision rather than being told what to do is an encouraging approach that exhibits trust in the teacher’s ability.

Another benefit of offering choice is that it usually increases motivation.* For example, when a teacher chooses among options presented for enhancing class discussion, she is more vested in making her self-selected option work.

Choice is likely to be motivating when the options offered meet teachers’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.** Offering choices that are relevant to teachers’ own goals enhances autonomy. For example, If a teacher is focused on a goal of increasing students’ reading fluency, recommendations for readers’ theatre or choral reading of poetry would likely be well-received; a recommendation related to comprehension might not be.

Offering choices that are within the teacher’s ability to implement enhances competence. For a novice teacher, recommendations regarding differentiation  through tiering might be viewed as overwhelming because the teacher does not feel capable of implementing them successfully. Suggestions to differentiated by providing open-ended tasks might be a more comfortable option.

Offering choices that are congruent with teachers’ instructional philosophy ensures relatedness. If a teacher values constructivist approaches to learning, she will be likely to appreciate suggestions for designing hands-on learning experiences but less-likely to implement recommendations that suggest a more teacher-directed approach.

Offering choice among recommendations that align with teachers’ autonomy, competence, and philosophy increases the likelihood that teachers will put the suggestions into practice. Having choice will be motivating and empowering, and successful implementation (because recommendations are within a teacher’s range of competence) will further enhance efficacy.

Because it’s difficult to consider all of these factors instantaneously and come up with more than one option that fits the criteria, it helps to plan ahead for a coaching conversation that will provide choice among two or more recommendations. The GIR conferencing guide, below, provides a template for planning for these choices.

If making recommendations is in your game plan for an upcoming coaching conversation, pause now to think about how you’ll take the factors mentioned above into consideration as you provide suggestions and offer choice in the collaborative quest for improved instruction.

* Malone, M. R. & Lepper, M. R. (1983). Making learning fun. In R. E. Snow & J. F. Marshall (Eds.), Aptitude, learning, and instruction: Cognitive and affective process analyses (Vol. 3, pp. 223-253). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

**Katz, I. & Assor, A. (2007). When choice motivates and when it does not. Educational Psychological Review, 19, 429-442.

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

More about teachers’ self-efficacy:

http://www.ernweb.com/public/teacher-self-efficacy-effectiveness.cfm?utm_source=March+Current+articles+2013&utm_campaign=current+articles+March&utm_medium=email

These blogs about giving students choice (what’s good for the goose is good for the gander!):

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/11/18/how-to-help-students-develop-the-motivation-to-learn/

http://personalmasteryandtechnology.weebly.com/32-increasing-motivation-through-student-choice.html

A podcast about an interesting science topic: “Taste with your nose”:

http://scienceunderground.org/science/ep-5-taste-with-your-nose/

A video clip modeling close reading during a teacher read aloud:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid2109637168001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAPmbRRLk~,C5G7jhYNtifLHMZ3Mk1et94EXmm8Be9z&bctid=4073220644001

That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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Recommendations that Stick

Changing the way we think and act is brutally hard – and trying to change someone else is even harder!  In her book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Marilyn Ferguson says, “A belated discovery, one that causes considerable anguish, is that no one can persuade another to change.  Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be unlocked from the inside.  We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.”

That gate swings open for a variety of reasons. And when it does, coaches want to be ready with recommendations that will stick.

This week, I talked with a group of coaches as they considered how to increase the likelihood that recommendations they make will be taken up by the teachers they are working with. We determined that making sure recommendations are concrete and purposeful was important.

Candace knew that an upcoming lesson would be more successful if the teacher showed students examples of what their final products might look like. She decided that having a few student samples that she could show the teacher would make this recommendation concrete. Making recommendations concrete ensures that our idea will mean the same thing to the teacher that it does to us. Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Made to Stick, remind us that concrete ideas are easier to understand and remember. Concreteness makes an idea “sticky,”  and sticky ideas are more likely to have a lasting impact. The coaches I was working with realized that making sure their recommendations were tangible, by providing a visual for teachers to connect with, would make them easier to implement.

Madelyn recognized a teacher she was working with needed to tie her assessment more closely to the objectives she had determined for a lesson. She felt an explanation of why this was important would make the recommendation more meaningful. Discussing the rationale increased the stickiness of Madelyn’s recommendation by employing higher-level thinking. As she engaged the teacher in dialogue, the reasoning for this practice was illuminated. And engaging in higher-level thinking about an idea makes it more memorable. As our coaching team discussed this example, we realized that providing a rationale for recommendations would make the suggestions more attractive and “stickier.”

By being concrete and providing rationale for their recommendations, coaches can improve the chances that their worthy ideas will stick!

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

This podcast on building a collaborative culture:

http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/sites/default/files/coloradopodcast_howtheyworked.mp3

What is “heavy coaching”?

http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/blog/taking-critical-stance

Ideas for student self-publishing to amp up engagement!

http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2015/03/16/high-school-teachers-guide-students-into-self-publishing

Use a “fail tree” with teachers or students to increase resilience and learn from each other’s mistakes:

http://hechingerreport.org/three-cheers-for-failure-wait-what/

Read aloud volunteers in middle school:

https://nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/letting-go-of-the-reins-ten-ways-to-host-a-read-aloud-volunteer-in-the-middle-school-classroom-by-brindi-anderson/

That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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Leaning Back: When Questions Don’t Work

This week I had several opportunities to coach novice teachers. At this point in the year, I thought that asking questions would be the coaching move to get me the most bang-for-my-buck. So I led with it. What happened reminded me of the importance of being flexible with my coaching plan and going where the teachers’ needs direct. I learned that when one move doesn’t bear fruit, I need to lean back in my coaching and try an approach that provides more scaffolding.

During separate coaching conversations, two teachers reflected with me on lessons that they called “boring.” Hannah’s was a 4^th-grade grammar lesson on complete sentences; Sarah taught a 3^rd-grade lesson using informational text. Each began the reflective conference with a statement about how the content of these lessons was unappealing to students.

My coaching antennae went up immediately. How would I help these teachers to see that there was nothing inherently boring about their lesson objectives, that it was the approach that needed adjustment? How best might they come to realize that if they thought the lesson was boring, their students almost certainly would? In previous conversations, I’d found these teachers to be reflective and have sound pedagogical knowledge, so I felt asking questions was the best approach to take.  

When I asked Hannah why she felt the grammar lesson was boring, her initial responses focused on fixes to that specific lesson, such as changes to the PowerPoint she was using. I recognized that these issues showed some insight about minor aspects of the lesson, but they didn’t get at bigger-picture ideas that would be more generalizable and thus have broader impact on student learning. So after fruitlessly asking several questions, I paused and said, “May I offer a suggestion?” Hannah said, “Of course!” She visibly relaxed and, with a deep exhale, opened herself for recommendations. She was off the hook! This seemed appropriate, given that my questioning was going nowhere. I then made suggestions about how group discussion was handled during the lesson. Because she went from table to table, having a conversation with each group, the time for table talk dragged on, becoming unproductive and leading to off-task behavior and signs of boredom. Hannah seemed to receive this recommendation with relief, ready to try something that would increase students’ attention and interest.

A similar situation occurred when debriefing Sarah’s lesson on using non-fiction books. She seemed sorry that students had to live through a lesson on informational texts, but emphasized that this was an important skill. She had a this-is-supposed-to-be-good-for-you attitude and pretty much said, “Non-fiction text is boring, but they really need to know this stuff.” My brain was screaming, “How could you think non-fiction text is boring!?!” and “If you thinks this is boring, what are you communicating to the kids?” But I think I did a pretty good job of masking my inner screams, and instead, I asked a few less-blatant questions. “What did you feel was boring about the lesson?” “What are some approaches you could take that might be more interesting for students?” She was coming up dry. Finally, after Sarah’s repeated references to the boring nature of the task, I explicitly dispelled her myth that students find informational text boring, saying that, in my experience, I’d noticed that young children usually seem curious about their world and excited to learn new facts about it – the kind of facts offered by these non-fiction texts. She reflected that, since she didn’t find informational books interesting, she assumed her students didn’t either. I shared some additional personal examples of children’s engagement with such texts, and she seemed ready to consider that perhaps it was her approach to the texts, rather than the texts themselves, that bored the students. After this prelude, Sarah was ready to listen to recommendations about doing less modeling of note-taking skills, with students doing mindless copying, and moving toward more active engagement as students learned how to extract meaning from non-fiction texts.

These experiences with Hannah and Sarah were a good reminder about the wiggly line in the GIR model. Just because a coaching move dominated in previous coaching sessions, that doesn’t mean it will be effective. Coaching isn’t a linear process. It is contextual, and there will be bumps along the way. On the roller-coaster ride of coaching for instructional improvement, sometimes you have to lean back and enjoy the ride!

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

A very short video clip with 2 pieces of advice for working with English Language Learners:

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=575

Just say, “No”:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/educators-time-management-strategy-just-say-no-elena-aguilar

Archive of an ILA Twitter chat about literacy coaching (also check out #ILAchat):

https://storify.com/ILAToday/ilachat

Reading conferences are like coaching:

https://teachingandlearningthoughts.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/reading-conferences-and-evernote/

Using mock trial: an investment of time well spent:

http://www.middleweb.com/21146/how-our-mock-trial-improved-argument-writing/

That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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