The Power of Specificity

The first thing Sage, an ELA teacher, said when we sat down for a coaching conversation was, “It’s not working!”  I heard her exasperation, but I had no idea what the frustration actually was. Because of the ambiguity of her statement, I was stumped. Ambiguity prevents progress. We had to name specifics before we could move forward.
 
Broad statements like Sage’s label a situation rather than describing it. But vague thoughts could mean all kinds of things; they don’t get us closer to a goal. To think things through and come up with possible solutions, we need details. We need to push beyond broad descriptions and know what it looks like and sounds like. Even for the teacher, who was in the classroom and saw and heard it, naming what happened, putting words to what was sensed and noticed, begins to unravel the mystery.
 
When a teacher feels crunched for time, she might be ambiguous as a matter of efficiency, summarizing rather than offering details. I think that’s why Sage jumped in with a summation that expressed her emotion. As her coach, I needed more. Sage’s statement told me that her brain had recognized a pattern, but I needed specifics. The first step was simple: Keep listening.
 
Keep Listening
 
Rather than jumping in with a question, I leaned forward in my chair, prepared to listen hard. After a pause, Sage started filling in details about her eighth-grade students’ writing challenges. She was focused at the sentence level because she’d noticed many incomplete sentences in her students’ writing. Sage said they’d spent a week’s worth of lessons focused on nouns and verbs and how they combined to form compete sentencea. But, she said, it still wasn’t working.
 
My silence had encouraged Sage to fill the gap and begin reflecting. Sage had offered details as she kept talking. Now I had context, but Sage still landed back on the vague frustration, “It’s not working.” I hoped that asking questions could get us to specificity.
 
Ask Questions
 
“Tell me what that means,” I said. “What is it that students are not doing that you want them to do? Or what are they doing that you don’t want them to?”
 
I soon had a fuller picture. After Sage thought she’d addressed the sentence fragment concern, many students went to the opposite extreme, stringing fragments into run-on sentences. No wonder she was frustrated! But now, at least, she’d named the challenge. We were getting there. But we could get even clearer by looking at examples.
 
Ask for Examples
 
When I asked for examples, Sage pulled up Google docs, and we scanned them for complete sentences and those that were not. Then she pulled out a pile of paper strips that had served as exit tickets, and we sorted them according to the sentence strengths and errors.
 
As we looked at student work, we put our brains together and began considering possible next steps. Looking at examples had gotten us to the needed level of specificity so that we could find solutions. Encouraging a closer look at evidence helped us pinpoint students’ confusions. This information was helpful as we considered next steps. Specific examples clarified our understanding.        
 
From Ambiguous to Specific
 
It’s really tough to know what to do when we hear ambiguous statements that can be interpreted in many different ways. A math teacher who says, “It’s not working,” has an entirely different concern than Sage did. He might be concerned that students can plug numbers into algorithms but don’t have conceptual understanding. Sage’s starter statement could mean a million different things. We have to get specific to get solutions.
 
Sage’s opening, broad statement served as a fine starting point. Listening, asking questions, and considering examples got us where we needed to go. With a clearer understanding of the challenge, we could check our brains for possibilities and reach out for other resources. Now we had a job we could go to work on.
 
When a teacher is feeling stuck, help them get specific. Saying the details out loud and considering examples moves us in a productive direction. Identifying a specific problem helps us identify specific solutions. And teacher buy-in for coaching increases when we zero in on a teacher-identified need.
 
 
(Stay tuned! Next week we’ll think about the coach’s specificity.)
 
p.s. The demo lesson I wrote about recently for turned out to be a great learning experience – for me! More later on that, too.
 
This week, you might want to take a look at:

Overcoming risk avoidance:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/my-student-is-risk-averse/
 
 
Benefits and questioning strategies for reading historical fiction:
 
https://www.middleweb.com/52006/humanizing-the-past-with-historical-fiction/
 
 
Fostering reading identity:
 
https://ccira.blog/2025/03/18/reading-identity-matters-a-broad-view-of-foundational-skills/
 
 
Quick focused-attention practices (like brain breaks, but quicker!):
 
https://revelationsineducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Cohort-6-Focused-Attention-Practices.pdf
 
Get ready for National Poetry Month in April - How poetry can build emotional intelligence:
 
https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-poetry-supports-sel-elementary-school/
 
 
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
 
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! You can use the code: MAR2025 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!
 

Coaching the Question behind the Question

When someone asks a question, there’s usually at least one unspoken question hiding underneath it. Developing the ability to listen for those underlying questions—and probing and responding to them—is a valuable coaching skill. When you do this, you create an opportunity for the asker to connect more deeply with their own wisdom and self-awareness.
 
For example, if a teacher says, “I’m wondering about how to mix up my lessons a bit.” You might reply, “I’m curious if you can say more about where that question is coming from?” When I had this conversation with Zane, a first-year high-school algebra teacher, he told me some students were engaged, but others, particularly those in the older grade levels, sometimes had their heads on their desks during class. Zane’s underlying question was, “How do I keep students engaged?” This led to a discussion about “thinking classrooms,” where students work, standing in small groups, to solve problems at the whiteboard. No one could have their head on the desk in that scenario! Zane had read about the practice in teacher preparation classes but hadn’t put it into practice yet. Our conversation nudged him in that direction.
 
Elise, a third-year middle-school English teacher asked the question, “Do you think I should give students choice about their argumentative writing topic?” I asked what she’d done in the past. She told me even though she loved the idea of teaching the argumentative writing unit because it had always been her favorite as a student, she hadn’t yet taught it. Then she told me she worried that students would pick topics that their parents would complain about. The question-under-the-question was, “How do I avoid parent complaints about students’ writing topics.” Because Elise had mentioned that they had an English department meeting coming up, I suggested she ask colleagues about whether there had been trouble in the past. We also talked about other steps she could take to offer choice and assure that parents understood the purpose and the process.
 
As teachers unpack their own thinking, we might respond by paraphrasing or summarizing: “I think I’m hearing…and I’m also hearing…” and then asking, “Do you want to say more about either of those?”
 
Conversations like these, that probe for underlying questions, can deepen knowledge for the teacher as well as the coach. These conversations encourage critical thinking and support insight. The coach’s follow-up can explore opinions, ask for predictions, investigate processes, make connections, uncover patterns, and encourage the teacher to look ahead. As we surface new questions, we uncover concerns, provide perspective, and sometimes challenge assumptions. Don’t stop with the first teacher question. Stay with the question. Recognizing the deeper questions beneath the conversation, actively exploring them, and responding thoughtfully is a fruitful coaching skill.
 
This week, you might want to take a look at:

Reframing turns a problem into an opportunity for impact:
 
https://www.middleweb.com/51881/energize-your-teaching-by-reframing-perspective/
 
 
This podcast is about PLC conversations that increase collective responsibility:
 
https://barkleypd.com/blog/creating-plc-converstions-that-increase-collective-responsibility/
 
 
Using mentor texts (and their authors) to teach the writing process:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/mentors-for-process-and-habits/
 
 
What are trauma-informed practices?
 
https://www.turnaroundusa.org/video/edutopia-presents-how-learning-happens-getting-started-with-trauma-informed-practices/
 
 
Fostering reading identity:
 
https://ccira.blog/2025/03/18/reading-identity-matters-a-broad-view-of-foundational-skills/
 
 
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
 
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! You can use the code: MAR2025 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!

Coaching with Demo Lessons

Modeling is the most supportive coaching move in the GIR model, During modeling, the teaching responsibility is on the coach, with the teacher as active observer. When coaches model, they demonstrate techniques and instructional practices to scaffold implementation. Modeling is a differentiated coaching activity can be a way to address a teacher’s specific needs and goals.
 
Although we usually think of modeling as a way to work with an individual teacher in a teacher’s own classroom, there are other formats for modeling. I’ve written before about Lesson Study, where teachers collaboratively plan a lesson and then one of them teaches while the others observe before debriefing to elevate their own and students’ learning.
 
In my work with National Writing Project, I became familiar with another way to model, the “demo lesson.” During a demonstration lesson, one teacher models a lesson, or part of a lesson, while other teachers pose as the students. It’s a way to see strategies in action and experience them from the learner perspective.
 
Some of the benefits of this structure are that many teachers can observe at once and the timing is flexible. This structure is especially suitable for use during a professional development day, when teachers are on site but students are not.
 
For example, Dan, a teacher and coach, led a full-day professional development for the 14 teachers in the English department at his school.* As part of the PD day, Dan did a demo lesson. First, Dan named the literacy practices he was promoting, then modeled a lesson that included them. Dan paused the modeled lesson occasionally to describe what he was doing and why, a practice that might not be used when teaching the lesson to students. Throughout, Dan attempted to connect the model lesson to what teachers would experience in their own classrooms. During the professional development day, teachers later discussed how to incorporate the new practices into their curriculum. This example from Dan’s school demonstrates benefits of the structure and how challenges to implementation might be overcome.
 
Next week, I’ll be teaching a demo lesson as part of a conference session at a Writing Project conference. After briefing participants on the format and giving an overview of the strategy (using mentor texts to teach grammar), I’ll launch into a lesson that I recently taught to 7^th graders. Afterward, teachers will have a chance to share their thoughts, including adjustments they might make when teaching a similar lesson in their classroom. I’ll let you know how it goes!
 
During demo lessons, participants experience strategies first-hand. They analyze the strategy and discuss why it works and how it can be adapted. Rather than being prescriptive, demo lessons are designed to be collaborative, inquiry-based, and reflective. Modeling is a highly-supportive coaching move, and demo lessons offer another way for coaches to offer this support.
 
*Gallucci, C. DeVoogt Van Lare, M. Yoon, I, & Boatright, B. (2010). Instructional coaching: Building theory about the role and organizational support for professional learning. American Educational Research Journal, 47(4), 919-963.

This week, you might want to take a look at:

Besides hand-raising, how do you gauge (and encourage) participation?
 
https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-to-rethink-the-objectives-of-classroom-discussion
 
 
Keeping writing authentic in the age of AI:
 
https://www.edutopia.org/article/teaching-authentic-writing-age-ai
 
 
Go back to the familiar to teach new literacy elements:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/when-learning-gets-tricky-go-back-to-the-pigs/
 
 
Better partner and small group conversations:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juR87aAg4vM
 
Why teachers should care about PLCs:
 
http://www.allthingsplc.info/blog/view/378/why-this-why-now-why-bother
 
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
 
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! You can use the code: MAR2025 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!
 

Coaching Question: “What do you want to do more of?”

As I waited for Hannah to return from dropping the kids off so that we could have a coaching conversation about the science lesson I’d just observed, I wondered what I could do to make sure our thoughts were steered in a positive and productive direction. The lesson had held many bright spots, but the last tem minutes had been very rushed, and I was afraid that’s what Hannah’s mind would be dwelling on. Truthfully, there were a couple of recommendations that lingered in my mind, too, but I felt confident in Hannah’s own ability to figure things out. She’d shown me that before.  In the last minute before Hannah returned, I jotted down a question I don’t think I’ve asked before: “What do you want to do more of?”
 
After taking some time together to celebrate things that went well, I felt we were ready for a constructive conversation about change. So I asked my question: “What do you want to do more of?”
 
I was taken off guard by Hannah’s response. Since we’d just been talking about some things that went right, I expected her to choose one of those that she could build on. But Hannah took this as the opportunity to talk about running out of time and rushing through the lesson’s closure. She said she wished she’d gotten to the notebook activity, where students would sort the new science words they were learning and match them to their meanings.
 
“Why do you feel that part of the lesson was important?” I asked.
 
Hannah said that’s when they would really be using the words they’d just learned, so that they’d remember them.
 
“Well, you can’t go back and make more time in the lesson,” I said. “But reflecting back, when you saw you were running out of time and wouldn’t be able to do that activity, how might you have gotten the new words into their heads again?”
 
Hannah recalled part of the closing conversation where she asked a follow-up question to get a student to name the process he’d been describing, using the new vocabulary word. “I really forced him to say the word,” she said.
 
“Yes, more of that!” I affirmed. Then I reminded Hannah of the research about how many repetitions it takes for a new word to enter long-term memory. “They need to hear you say it and say it themselves, lots and lots and lots of times,” I added.
 
“I think it would have helped if there’d been a list of the new words for them to refer to,” she said, her eyes gesturing toward the wall. “Then they probably would have used the words more.”
 
“During this unit, you’ve really been emphasizing the new vocabulary to label concepts they’re learning about. Have you got an anchor chart of those words somewhere?” I asked, looking around the room.
 
That is when the conversation really started to get productive. Hannah did have a list of the words. All of the vocab words for this science unit were grouped, with headings, and posted on the inside of the classroom door.
 
Some back-and-forth conversation got Halie to the idea that, since she always taught science right before lunch or at the end of the day, the words on the door could be the chance for the perfect exit ticket. Hannah spontaneously generated some questions she could have students think about so that, by having students touch one of the words on their way out the door, she could gather some helpful formative data. “Point to the word that you want to learn more about,” or “Which word are you most confused about?” she could ask. She quickly had a list of out-the-door questions for her students.
 
This was the energy-generating moment that I always hope for in a coaching conversation. Although my question, “What do you want to do more of?” hadn’t generated the kind of response I’d anticipated, it had been the spark for this productive exchange. I had expected my question to point us to something that went well that she could build on – something that would surely be within her ZPD, since she’d already demonstrated it in a small way. Instead, Hannah’s rumination on what didn’t go as planned led to valuable outcomes.
 
Isn’t it wonderful when we’re surprised with the generative outcome of a coaching conversation? Neither one of us would have come to the door-as-exit-ticket idea on our own, but together, we’d created a plan that Hannah was excited to try. That is the value of collaborative coaching.
 
This week, you might want to take a look at:

Teacher reflection boosts resilience:
 
https://www.middleweb.com/51924/how-teacher-reflection-aids-growth-resilience/
 
 
Less is more with mentor texts:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/mentor-texts-and-important-reminders/
 
 
Switching up routines to beat spring teaching blahs:
 
https://www.middleweb.com/51943/when-students-attention-wanders-switch-it-up/
 
 
A podcast episode on listening (my favorite quote: “Listening—to loved ones, strangers, faraway places—is an act of generosity and a source of discovery.”)
 
 https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/411697251/the-act-of-listening
 
 
March madness with a book twist: 
 
http://marchbookmadness.weebly.com/
 
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
 
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! You can use the code: MAR2025 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!