Talk is Not Collaborating

Musical augmentation changes a melody by increasing the value of each note. Lengthening the notes opens the music to “add dignity and impressiveness.” Augmentation creates a sense of majesty or expansion. Collaboration, like musical augmentation, can increase the value of each contribution and expand ideas.
 
Coaches are not always collaborators. At times, they best serve as mirrors or sounding boards. But it’s important to understand elements of collaboration for those times when you do act as a collaborative partner and for when you support the collaboration of others.
 
What is Collaboration?
 
Collaboration is pushing an idea forward together. Collaborative conversations connect thoughts and build momentum. We take an idea and jointly make it better. Collaboration is a collective discussion about how to do something. It’s a lot of back and forth. We pull each other up. We talk with each other, not at each other.
 
Collaboration is not like an ineffective turn-and-talk, with each saying their own piece and then it’s done. It’s not like toddler play, with two-year-olds side-by-side narrating their own Duplex constructions. It’s more like preschool sociodramatic play: “Okay, I’ll be the mom and you play sister, and we’re going to the store.” When we collaborate, we’re in the adventure together.
 
How Can Coaches Create Collaboration?
 
Time and expectations help collaborative relationships form. To support collaboration, we can:

 
·       Promote a spirit of inquiry
·       Prioritize pausing (before and after comments)
·       Paraphrase what we are hearing
·       Ask for clarification
·       Share ideas as possibilities rather than answers
·       Assume that everyone is bringing their best self
 

We can keep conversations on target. If an unhealthy culture of complaining exists, we can listen for a potentially-solvable problem. We can create flexible agendas. We can listen with openness. Whether it’s just you and one other teacher or you’re working with a whole team, these practices help to create collaborative relationships.
 
Once collaborative relationships and norms have been built, collaboration can happen anywhere, anytime, in the nooks and crannies of the school day and also in the scheduled, focused times we have together.
 
Collaboration is More Than Talking
 
Collaboration is a think tank. It is productive talk where the sum is more than the pieces. It’s hard to say where one person’s idea ends and another’s begins. The ideas are our ideas. As we process together, our goal is not just to fill in a lesson template. We combine our experience, knowledge, skills, and strategies, back and forth, back and forth, to think through all the pieces, consider research and resources, and be open to different options. We discuss thoroughly and create potential plans and solutions.
 
Collaboration might be embedded in our coaching work with individual teachers and teams. It might also be the eventual goal of our coaching work – to create interdependence, as illustrated in the GIR model (below). Like musical augmentation, collaboration can increase the value of each individual note, creating a satisfying expansion as the finale of a coaching cycle.
 
This week, you might want to take a look at:

This video on helping students create ABC priority lists:
 
https://www.edutopia.org/video/developing-executive-function-priority-lists/
 
 
Helping students build their own stories of perseverance:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/everybody-wants-to-be-a-hero-and-needs-a-guide/
 
Ideas for coaxing poems (April is National Poetry Month!):
 
http://www.poemfarm.amylv.com/search/label/Coaxing%20Poems
 
 
Teach thinking by supporting noticings:
 
https://tomakeaprairie.wordpress.com/2017/09/14/thinking-about-thinking-the-power-of-noticing/
 
 
Ideas for better partner and small group conversations:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juR87aAg4vM
 
That’s it for this week.  Happy Coaching!
 
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Want more coaching tips? Check out my book, Differentiated Mentoring & Coaching in Education: From Preservice Teacher to Expert Practitioner, available from Teachers College Press!  I’m so excited to share it with you! TODAY you can still use the code: MAR2024 for 20% off. Click  here  and I’ll email you the free Book Group Study Guide that includes questions, prompts, and activities you can use as you share the book with colleagues.  I hope you’ll love this book as much as I loved making it for you!