My Coaches' Couch: Teetering Between Coaching Moves

When it’s time to shift the weight of responsibility for improving instruction, alternating between recommending and questioning as coaching moves can provide a productive balance.

As teachers are getting more comfortable with new instructional approaches, they might still benefit from your recommendations. You can appropriately make suggestions during planning conversations, but using questions intentionally as a coaching move during debrief will give the teacher you’re working with the opportunity to gain her own insights through reflection.

It’s all too easy to continue recommending beyond the time when the teacher is ready to do the lifting on her own. You shift the weight of responsibility for improvement to her as you recommend less and question more. With a mixture of recommending and questioning, there’s a healthy back-and-forth action between who is providing the answers. Before long, the teacher will be doing all of the heavy lifting.

I talked with a coach this week who had introduced readers theatre as a strategy for improving reading fluency in a first-grade classroom. Students seemed enthusiastic about the activity, but the coach was worried that engagement would flag if the teacher continued using the same approaches each day. So she made suggestions about ways to group students differently to practice their parts, sometimes using partners, sometimes small groups, and sometimes alternating between boys and girls as the children chorally rehearsed the script. This suggestion mixed things up enough so that the whole-group portion of the lesson stayed interesting. When the coach and teacher got together again to talk about how the approach was going, the coach led with a question: “How else might you vary the introduction to the lesson to keep student excited about their practice?”

The teacher decided students would enjoy alternating between a high, squeaky voice and a low, booming voice. Then, with a stroke of genius, the teacher decided to have the girls use the low, booming voice and the boys use the high, squeaky voice. I was in the room when they tried it and I heard the children squealing with joy as they practiced their parts. Knowing her students well, the teacher modified this effective instructional approach to the delight of her students. The coach’s question paid off; the teacher had the knowledge to make this strategy work for her class.

As you plan for coaching conversations, consider the relative benefits that might be provided by recommending and questioning. Your recommendations might do the heavy lifting during the planning conversation, then questioning can shift the weight during debrief. Alternating between recommending and questioning can provide balance as a coaching cycle continues.