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:
Mentor
texts for “versus” tales:
Tips
for annotation:
The value of vocabulary instruction:
Helping teachers find their purpose:
That’s
it for this week. Happy Coaching!
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