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!