One
of my favorite things about coaching is the chance to collaborate. With some teachers,
my primary role as a coach is that of thinking partner. Many of the teachers I work with have a
lot of experience and expertise; they are just looking for a thinking partner
to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off of. Even for less confident teachers,
this is our goal as we near the end of a coaching cycle. We are leading toward
collaboration and interdependence.
Recently,
I was Karen’s thinking partner as she planned a writing project for the end of
the year. She wanted the project to be both fun and meaningful. She already had
ideas about having students create a memoir of sorts – an opportunity to
reminisce about their time in fifth grade. We brainstormed together a list of
prompts to start students thinking. What was their funniest memory from the
year? Their proudest moment? Their favorite book? Then we generated sentence
starters to get anyone unstuck in the event of writer’s block. The coaching
conversation was a creative and productive time together.
I
love the idea that coaching creates think tanks. Whether I’m collaborating with
one teacher, a team, or the whole faculty, a lot of good thinking gets done
when we put our heads together. Before next school year starts, I think I’ll
hang a sign outside my door:
This idea of thinking together and the movement from coaching to collaborating is demonstrated in the GIR coaching
model. Whether we work through all the phases to get there or are collaborating
right from the start, coaching conversations foster a healthy interdependence that
keeps the good thinking going!
“Interdependence
is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a
social being.”
~Mahatma
Gandhi
This week, you might want to
take a look at:
A video example of coaching for
collaboration:
Get students started with the art of
memoir:
Ending the year by
planning for next year’s reading workshop:
If
you are helping teachers beef up
their nonfiction libraries, the Nonfiction Detectives blog is a good resource:
Food for thought about reading in the disciplines:
That’s it for this week. Happy
Coaching!
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