Resolve to Be Curious

Eric Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, said, “We run this company on questions, not answers.”  This curiosity may account for Google’s success.  People perform at their best when their intellectual curiousness leads them to ask questions, to explore, and to collaborate.  Interestingly, studies have shows that an emphasis on learning produces better outcomes than an emphasis on outcomes.  For example, sales associates did better when posed with a challenge to learn about becoming a better salesman than when given aggressive sales targets to hit.  Cultivating an attitude of curiosity is a healthy organizational goal, and it is a healthy attribute to nurture as a coach.

Successful coaches perform at their best not just because they are educational specialists, but because their knowledge is accompanied by authentic questions.  Our questions, not our answers, signal our expertise.  We know enough to ask the right questions and we are curious enough to pursue them doggedly.

When coaching teachers who worked with a high Native American population, we noticed that one small group was persistently silent, despite encouragement from their teacher to collaborate.  Talking this through afterward, we asked, “But are they still learning?”  By pursuing our curiosity, we gained insight about cultural ways of communication among traditional Cherokee students.  It turned out these students were learning, despite their silence.  They communicated through gestures, head tilts, and eye movement – subtleties we had initially missed when we wondered about their collaboration.  Our curiosity led to important insights about culturally-sustaining instruction.

Sometimes coaches refrain from asking questions they don’t know the answers to because they fear they’ll be seen as incompetent, indecisive, or unintelligent.  Coaches may feel that they’re expected to talk and provide answers, not ask questions.  However, research* suggests that when we demonstrate curiosity, people actually view us as more competent, like us more, and trust us more.  Trust is an important element of a coaching relationship, and it appears that being curious strengthens this connection!

Cultivating curiosity in the teachers we work with is also a worthwhile endeavor.  Research demonstrates that framing work around curiosity (skills to pursue, situations to consider) rather than performance goals (hitting targets, proving competence) improves outcomes.  It helps to focus on curiosity.

The Poloroid instant camera was inspired by a 3-year-old’s question about why she had to wait to see the picture her dad had just taken of her.  “Why” leads to creativity and learning.  For students, teachers, and coaches, a spirit of inquiry promotes understanding.

In 2020, I want my coaching to be guided by curiosity – by what-if’s and how-might’s.  I’m excited to see how organizing my work around “Why?” will increase my productivity and effectiveness as a learner and as a coach. 

For the past few years, rather than crafting a precisely-worded resolution for the new year, I’ve selected a single word as guide.  This year, my word will be “Curiosity.”  Will you join me?

*Edmondson, A. (2008). The competitive imperative of learning. Harvard Business Review, 86(7/8), 60. 

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

Helping students sort fact from not-so-factual:

https://edsource.org/2019/stanford-researchers-design-new-lessons-for-students-to-sort-facts-from-lies-on-the-internet/620870

The value of vocabulary instruction:

https://www.smartbrief.com/original/2019/12/why-vocabulary-instruction-still-matters

I agree with Amy, who talks in the blog post about the value of Cognitive Coaching:

https://teachingislearningsite.wordpress.com/2019/11/13/school-leaders-as-coaches-who-mediate-thinking/

Easy author groups:

https://choiceliteracy.com/article/lunchtime-author-discussion-groups/

Getting started with culturally responsive teaching:

https://www.edutopia.org/article/getting-started-culturally-responsive-teaching

That's it for this week.  Happy Coaching!

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Coaching and the Amaryllis

Seeing potential is an important part of a coach’s role.  We look for an attribute that is ready to blossom.  In 1979, Elizabeth Appell* penned a poem to inspire and motivate learners:

. . . and then the day came

when the risk to remain

in a bud,

became more painful

than the risk it took to blossom . . .

Coaching means being a vulnerable learner.  It involves risk. Like all efforts for meaningful change, it requires a mindset that is open to uncertainty.  As coaches, we make teacher learning safer by looking for buds of potential – growth areas that are within a teacher’s ZPD.  When we find a teaching attribute “in the bud” and nurture it, we support the blossoming of skills that will enrich the teacher and the learner.  A teacher may point out her own budding practices where she’d like support, or we can find a bud by looking closely at current practice. 

Stephanie, a second-grade teacher, had been focused on student participation.  When I met with her, she said her new goal was to have “every student fully engaged.”  That was an ambitious aim for us to work toward!

When I reviewed the lesson plans of Tina, a fourth-grade teacher, I saw she had included thought-provoking questions.  However, these questions hadn’t made it into the actual lesson.  Here was a bud we could nurture!

Like the buds on my Christmas amaryllis, teachers budding skills can blossom when they become the focus of a coaching cycle.  Given abundant light and nourishment, teachers’ budding skills become blossoms that benefit student learning.

*Appell, E. (1979). “and then the day came.” Retrieved from http://anaisninblog.skybluepress.com/2013/03/who-wrote-risk-is-the-mystery-solved/

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

Books and ideas for teaching compare and contrast:

https://www.readbrightly.com/books-to-teach-compare-and-contrast/

Binary thinking will not generate effective educational solutions:

https://www.instructionalcoaching.com/the-binary-myth/

Video as a tool for coaching feedback:

https://stephanieaffinito.blogspot.com/2019/11/thinking-about-feedback.html

EdCamps and other unconference experiences:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/47940/how-teachers-can-learn-from-one-another-at-unconferences-meet-ups-and-edcamps

That’s it for this week.  Happy Coaching!

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Believe!

It’s the holiday season, and children are encouraged to believe in something unimaginably good – a jolly saint who delivers gifts around the world. Most children want to believe because of the magic of the idea, and some hold on to the belief surprisingly long.  The light in their eyes tells us that believing brings hope and joy.

Believing can bring hope and joy for coaches and for the teachers they work with, too.  To coach others is to believe in their potential.  Without that hope, we wouldn’t be doing the work!  Our job is to see teachers not as they are, but as they could be, and then to help them become.  This potential is not a myth; rather, it is reality waiting to unfold.

To coach in this way, we need to believe that people can change. They can switch out old for new.  One critic of this position said, “You should know that leopards don’t change their spots!”  A man replied, “You should know that I don’t work with leopards. I work with men, and men change every day.”*

When we look at a teacher and see his future, better self, we can coach him in a way that brings that vision to reality.  It is our opportunity to think of all the teachers we work with as they can be, to see them in this way.

To achieve their potential, teachers need to be told they are valued. They need to be told they are worthwhile and capable.  They need to be praised for what is already working (but only if we speak truth).  Letting a teacher know she is valuable and valued can help her take the next step in envisioning the teacher she wants to be and becoming the teacher she has the potential to be.  

I have worked with novice teachers who come in full of confidence; they are ready to change the world!  However, the world holds harsh realities: piles of paperwork, extra duties, behavior problems, parent concerns.  The light in their eyes begins to dim. They sometimes stop believing in themselves. 

Evelyn was a novice first-grade teacher whose eyes were beginning to dim.  She had the heart and the mind for the work, but she was drowning in classroom management issues that kept her brilliant lesson plans from becoming a reality.  I wish I could say that this was an easy fix. But it wasn’t.  It was a slow, difficult process of becoming.  It was experimentation and adding routines.  It meant changing her posture, her tone of voice, and even they way she moved around the room.  It meant changing the way she responded to both acceptable and unacceptable behavior.  None of these changes came easily, but Evelyn and I held onto the vision of what she would become.  Eventually, the learning she visualized as she created those expert lesson plans became a reality.  What a celebration it was when Evelyn was able to stop worrying about classroom management!  She became the teacher she had always had the capacity to be.  

By seeing teachers as they can become, coaches work toward a brighter future.  Our joy will be great as we see the teachers we work with becoming who they envisioned themselves to be.

*Bill Sands, The Seventh Step (1967), 9.

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

Use this coaching menu or let it inspire your own:

https://www.northernhighlands.org/cms/lib/NJ01000179/Centricity/Domain/5/Instructional%20Coaching%20Menu.pdf

Preparing readers for winter break:

https://choiceliteracy.com/article/preparing-students-for-winter-break-reading/

Using mentor texts for revision:

https://choiceliteracy.com/article/scaffolding-revision-with-a-mentor-text/

Binary thinking will not generate effective educational solutions:

https://www.instructionalcoaching.com/the-binary-myth/

Judgment is a relationship killer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=UZtY7S5RRAc&feature=emb_logo

That’s it for this week.  Happy Coaching!

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Thou Shalt Not Steal (a teacher’s agency)

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how coaches are sometimes thieves.  We sometimes steal the power in a conversation. We sometimes steal teachers’ agency. We sometimes discount the teachers’ own knowledge, stealing their efficacy.  When we do this, we unwittingly steal power from the coaching cycle itself.  We make coaching less about the teacher and more about us.  The problem is, it is often very hard for us to recognize our own kleptomania.

Like any addiction, admitting the problem is the first step to solving it.  We have to be able to step outside ourselves during a coaching conversation and view it from a bird’s-eye view, watching what we are doing.  So hard, when you are trying to be tuned into the conversation.  So hard, when you are doing on-your-feet-thinking about best instructional practices.  But I invite you to tune in, for a bit, to yourself as coach. 

You were hired as a coach because you have knowledge of content and pedagogy.  You know how to teach effectively.  Your job is to help others in their pursuits of improvement, and you have a lot to give.  How can you enter the coaching space with both expertise and humility?  Remind yourself that you know a lot, but you don’t know everything.  Look to the teachers you are working with to find out what they know that we don’t yet know.  They know about their students.  They know about their class’s history.  They know about themselves as teachers.  That is a lot of knowing!

A friend recently told me about her own child’s elementary school art teacher.  Let’s call the child Emily and the art teacher Mrs. Bard.  Emily was working on a drawing during art class, sketching it out with a pencil before applying paint.  Mrs. Bart, wanting to teach about perspective, erased a line and redrew it at a different angle.  The drawing was certainly improved in the process.  When Emily brought the finished painting home, her mother praised the outcome.  Emily responded, “It’s not my drawing, it Mrs. Bard’s.”  Emily lost ownership of her own work through that erased and redrawn line. 

I’ve cautioned against a similar practice during writing workshop.  “Make sure the pen stays in the child’s hand,” I’ve said, wanting writing conferences to be meaningful for students.  But I have sometimes been guilty of “stealing the pen” during a coaching conversation.  Sometimes my comment erases a teacher’s valuable perspective, replacing it with my own view. 

How can you acknowledge that you are a learner, too?  Your stance as co-learner is evident in your language: in how you make recommendations, in the types of questions you ask, and in the authenticity of your praise.  We can say, “I wonder what would happen if…..” and truly wonder.  We can ask, “Have you tried…..” because we want to know how past practice is informing present decisions.  We can say, “That’s such a smart idea!” when it is!

We thrive as coaches when we keep learning.  If we don’t change, we will always be doing the same thing.  That’s a statement of the obvious that we don’t want to become obvious to others in relation to our coaching.  Self-examination may help us uncover unhealthy coaching habits that inhibit the learning of the teachers we are working with – and also our own learning.  We thrive, day by day, as we learn about and from the teachers and students we are working with.

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

Use this coaching menu or let it inspire your own:

https://www.northernhighlands.org/cms/lib/NJ01000179/Centricity/Domain/5/Instructional%20Coaching%20Menu.pdf

Mentor texts for “versus” tales:

https://choiceliteracy.com/article/mentor-texts-for-versus-stories/

Tips for annotation:

https://www.middleweb.com/41618/making-annotations-with-less-pain-more-meaning/

The value of vocabulary instruction:

https://www.smartbrief.com/original/2019/12/why-vocabulary-instruction-still-matters?utm_source=brief

Helping teachers find their purpose:

https://blog.teachboost.com/helping-teachers-find-their-purpose-through-self-awareness

That’s it for this week.  Happy Coaching!

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