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:
Preparing readers for winter break:
Using
mentor texts for revision:
Binary thinking will not generate
effective educational solutions:
Judgment is a relationship killer:
That’s
it for this week. Happy Coaching!
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