My Coaches' Couch: Leaning Back: When Questions Don’t Work

This week I had several opportunities to coach novice teachers. At this point in the year, I thought that asking questions would be the coaching move to get me the most bang-for-my-buck. So I led with it. What happened reminded me of the importance of being flexible with my coaching plan and going where the teachers’ needs direct. I learned that when one move doesn’t bear fruit, I need to lean back in my coaching and try an approach that provides more scaffolding.

During separate coaching conversations, two teachers reflected with me on lessons that they called “boring.” Hannah’s was a 4^th-grade grammar lesson on complete sentences; Sarah taught a 3^rd-grade lesson using informational text. Each began the reflective conference with a statement about how the content of these lessons was unappealing to students.

My coaching antennae went up immediately. How would I help these teachers to see that there was nothing inherently boring about their lesson objectives, that it was the approach that needed adjustment? How best might they come to realize that if they thought the lesson was boring, their students almost certainly would? In previous conversations, I’d found these teachers to be reflective and have sound pedagogical knowledge, so I felt asking questions was the best approach to take.

When I asked Hannah why she felt the grammar lesson was boring, her initial responses focused on fixes to that specific lesson, such as changes to the PowerPoint she was using. I recognized that these issues showed some insight about minor aspects of the lesson, but they didn’t get at bigger-picture ideas that would be more generalizable and thus have broader impact on student learning. So after fruitlessly asking several questions, I paused and said, “May I offer a suggestion?” Hannah said, “Of course!” She visibly relaxed and, with a deep exhale, opened herself for recommendations. She was off the hook! This seemed appropriate, given that my questioning was going nowhere. I then made suggestions about how group discussion was handled during the lesson. Because she went from table to table, having a conversation with each group, the time for table talk dragged on, becoming unproductive and leading to off-task behavior and signs of boredom. Hannah seemed to receive this recommendation with relief, ready to try something that would increase students’ attention and interest.

A similar situation occurred when debriefing Sarah’s lesson on using non-fiction books. She seemed sorry that students had to live through a lesson on informational texts, but emphasized that this was an important skill. She had a this-is-supposed-to-be-good-for-you attitude and pretty much said, “Non-fiction text is boring, but they really need to know this stuff.” My brain was screaming, “How could you think non-fiction text is boring!?!” and “If you thinks this is boring, what are you communicating to the kids?” But I think I did a pretty good job of masking my inner screams, and instead, I asked a few less-blatant questions. “What did you feel was boring about the lesson?” “What are some approaches you could take that might be more interesting for students?” She was coming up dry. Finally, after Sarah’s repeated references to the boring nature of the task, I explicitly dispelled her myth that students find informational text boring, saying that, in my experience, I’d noticed that young children usually seem curious about their world and excited to learn new facts about it – the kind of facts offered by these non-fiction texts. She reflected that, since she didn’t find informational books interesting, she assumed her students didn’t either. I shared some additional personal examples of children’s engagement with such texts, and she seemed ready to consider that perhaps it was her approach to the texts, rather than the texts themselves, that bored the students. After this prelude, Sarah was ready to listen to recommendations about doing less modeling of note-taking skills, with students doing mindless copying, and moving toward more active engagement as students learned how to extract meaning from non-fiction texts.

These experiences with Hannah and Sarah were a good reminder about the wiggly line in the GIR model. Just because a coaching move dominated in previous coaching sessions, that doesn’t mean it will be effective. Coaching isn’t a linear process. It is contextual, and there will be bumps along the way. On the roller-coaster ride of coaching for instructional improvement, sometimes you have to lean back and enjoy the ride!