Learning Map for Chapter 2

Communication Skills

is about

Conversations that foster growth

prompted by

Questioning

fueled by

Listening

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2

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering.

—Margaret Wheatley, Turning to One Another

Like many other instructional coaches, Angela Adams never expected to leave the classroom. “I blissfully taught 6th and 8th grade science for 20 years and never gave a single thought to not teaching because I loved it so much,” Angela told me. “When I say [quitting] never occurred to me, I mean it liter- ally never occurred to me.”

However, in her 20th year of teaching, Angela “started paying attention to how many teachers were leaving the classroom” and realized they were “dropping like flies.” At first, she assumed teachers were quitting because of low pay, but when she talked with them, she discovered it was due to the day-to-day disappointments of the job. They had trouble controlling the kids, didn’t feel like they were making a difference, or weren’t teaching as much as they thought they’d be. Angela couldn’t change people’s salaries, but she believed she could help them with their classroom experiences. “As soon as I started talking to them, I thought, ‘Well, I could actually help with that.’”

Angela applied for and was hired as a lead coach for the University of South Carolina Teacher Induction Program. Her job, she told us, was “to stick with new graduates for the first three years they are in classrooms, a time period research tells us is crucial when it comes to staying in education.” But Angela quickly learned that her job involved a lot more than sharing effective instructional strategies:

The first year of the program is what we would call emotional engagement; it’s working with decisions such as “I’m calling off my engagement, I think I might be pregnant, I want to move out of my parents’ house”—you know, that kind of stuff, which everyone goes through no matter what their occu- pation is. . . . And then generally by year two we are moving to the instruc- tional coaching because we have normally gotten past the emotional stuff, then by year three our goal is to turn participants into teacher leaders. We

37

Communication Skills

38 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

want them to stay teachers forever and be the types of teachers who would

volunteer to be department heads or team leaders.

To help us understand what Angela does as a lead coach, she told us a story about her kindergarten teacher, Ms. Shepard. When Angela was 5 years old, her world revolved around Ms. Shepard. “I loved her so much,” Angela told us, “and I was pretty sure I could make her love me as long as I finished everything faster than anyone else.”

One day, after Angela rushed through an assignment and made a number of mistakes, Ms. Shepard asked her to redo the task. Instead of redoing the entire assignment, Angela cut and pasted the correct parts of her old assign- ment onto the new assignment. “Complete cheating,” Angela said. “The paper probably looked like a wolverine had gotten hold of it. I took it to Ms. Shep- ard. She took one look at it and said, ‘Angela, you are a problem solver.’ Then she took the paper and put it in the ‘done’ stack.”

Thirty-eight years later, Angela still thinks of herself as a problem solver. “It’s like a tattoo on your heart,” she says. Today, Angela tries to do for teach- ers what Ms. Shepard did for her when she was a little girl. “They are new and fresh, and what I have figured out is that we teach them the things that they will believe about themselves as teachers forever. I just want every teacher in every classroom to want to be there and to feel good about being a teacher.”

And she’s succeeding. Angela told me that over the first two years, 100 percent of teachers in her program—67 out of 67—continued in the classroom the following year. “A lot of the job is about relationships,” Angela told me. “It’s about late-night texts and teachers being upset, jilted, or whatever.”

At the Instructional Coaching Group, we have discovered what Angela did: Relationships matter. Coaches need to communicate effectively, show- ing that they are trustworthy and that they care. As Angela says, “Coaching can be taught and it can be learned, but caring about teachers, remembering what it was like to be a teacher—that is very significant.” Angela didn’t worry about resistant teachers. She worried about understanding what her teach- ers needed and responding appropriately in the moment. And to understand the teachers with whom she partnered, Angela had to ask great questions and listen.

Questioning

My life partner, Jenny, likes to ask a question that always opens up conversa- tions: “When you’re not working, what do you like to do?” When she asks that question, it’s like she’s switched on the light in a dark room. People come alive and tell her about the joy they get from taking photographs, surfing, mak- ing their own beer, or whatever it is they love to do. That is how questioning should work during coaching, and why questioning is one of the most import- ant coaching skills. I like to say that questions are to coaches what ice skating is to hockey players: if you want to play the game, you have to learn the skill.

Many have written about the importance of effective questions. Jour- nalist Warren Berger writes that “the most creative and successful people tend to be expert questioners” (2014, p. 28). “All of our knowledge results from questions,” writes Neil Postman, “which is another way of saying that question asking is our most important intellectual tool” (quoted in Sattes & Walsh, 2010, p. 28). Steve Barkley, who has been studying coaching for more than 30 years, says, “Questioning is the most critical of all coaching skills” (2011, p. xiii).

Great Questions

The best questions are like fertilizers for the garden of learning. They generate more ideas and deeper thoughts, and they are intellectually pleasur- able to answer. A great question, Berger (2014) writes, “is hard and interest- ing enough that it is worth answering, and easy enough that one can actually answer it” (p. 8).

The best questions are short and clear and focus on the collaborat- ing teacher rather than the questioner. Great questions don’t show off the coach’s brilliance, but they can empower others to have brilliant insights. They affirm, foster hope, and encourage others to see their strengths and successes. They often evoke a positive future rather than digging deeply into what isn’t working. Great questions communicate respect, which means that they don’t carry an implicit criticism like “Why aren’t you giving students more feedback?” As coaching expert Julie Starr (2016) says, “Great questions avoid making somebody wrong” (p. 96).

Communication Skills 39

40 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

When coaches ask effective questions, teachers become clearer about their options, and that clarity increases their energy. Great questions help teachers see more clearly what they can and cannot do and pin down the spe- cific steps they will take to implement their plans.

Great questions are not one-size-fits-all. Coaches should choose the best question for a particular point in a conversation. Questions should be authen- tic; we sense when people are reading from a script, and most of us don’t like to feel like we are being manipulated. This doesn’t mean that coaches shouldn’t find and remember favorite questions, but they should ask them authentically. Like jazz musicians who authentically play memorized riffs while improvising, coaches should pick and choose their questions and ask them at exactly the right time. A good question can move a conversation for- ward and create the opportunity for others to broaden their awareness, think deeply, plan, learn, and grow.

Open and Closed Questions

While there are many different kinds of coaching questions, people usu- ally ask about one of three topics: how people act (“What is one step you can take to move closer to your goal?”), how they feel (“How did you feel when your students hit their goal?”), and what they think (“What surprised you this week?”). And within this framework, we usually ask two types of questions, either open (“How did you come to choose teaching as a career?”) or closed (“When do you want to start using the strategy?”). Both kinds of questions are useful, but to be effective, they need to be used in the right situations at the right time.

That coaches should ask open questions might be the most common piece of advice I saw in the more than 50 books I reviewed for this chapter. Interestingly, there is no universal, precise definition of open and closed questions. My working definition of open questions is that they can elicit unlimited numbers of responses. For example, if I ask you, “What would you do if you were Secretary of Education?” you may have a long list of ideas to share. By contrast, closed questions elicit a limited number of usually short responses. For example, if I ask you, “Would you like to be the Secretary of Education?” you only have three possible answers: yes, no, or maybe.

Communication Skills 41

Good open questions are both evocative and generative: evocative because they bring to light ideas, insights, emotions, and strategies, and generative because they can evoke an answer that leads to two ideas, then four, then eight, and so on. The best questions help us grow and see more than we oth- erwise would. When I ask an open question, I always feel a little excitement because I don’t know how my partner will respond. It takes some courage to step off the beaten path of a planned conversation and potentially go where you’ve never gone before.

Whereas open questions invite teachers to think broadly and imagine possibilities, closed questions ask teachers to focus their thinking. Closed questions are good for beginning a conversation (“On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your lesson?”) or bringing one to an end (“Is there anything else we need to discuss?”). They can also be used to confirm that we under- stand what a teacher is saying (“Have I got that right?”) or to confirm a teach- er’s commitment or confidence level (“On a scale of 1 to 10, how committed are you to the goal?”).

As their names suggest, open questions open up conversations and closed questions narrow them down. This doesn’t mean that open questions are better, just that the two types serve different purposes. It’s up to coaches to decide when one makes more sense than the other.

Real Questions

The secret to asking great questions is to ask real questions. This might seem like a Zen koan, but the truth is we often make statements that only look like questions because they end with a question mark. “Don’t you agree that your students need to have more input into what they learn?” isn’t really a question; it is advice dressed up with interrogative punctuation. As Susan Scott has written, “When someone really asks, we really answer. And some- how both of us are validated” (2002, p. 94).

To ask real questions, we must avoid what are commonly referred to as leading questions—those that guide our conversation partners to a destina- tion we have chosen for them (e.g., “Don’t you think your students would learn more if they talked more?”). If we want to work in equal partnerships with collaborating teachers, we need to let go of the notion of leading them anywhere. When we ask questions that have solutions buried inside them, we

42 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

take the responsibility for solving the problem away from teachers, thereby silencing them and probably diminishing their motivation. As journalist Kate Murphy (2019) writes, “Real questions don’t have a hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, or correcting,” but rather allow “people to tell their stories, express their realities, and find the resources within themselves to figure out how they feel about a problem and decide on next steps” (p. 147).

Real questions, then, are questions to which we don’t know the answer; questions we ask because we are genuinely curious. Our curiosity shows teachers that they are important and we value what they have to say. Our curiosity also gives teachers the opportunity to be mutually curious and get wrapped up in the excitement of exploration. Michael Bungay Stanier (2020) advises coaches to be “relentless,” staying “curious long enough to allow the other person to create the insight and space to reach the heart of the matter” (p. 85).

Deeper Questions

A large part of coaching involves thinking along with teachers and some- times asking questions that let them think more deeply about a topic. A pow- erful question like Susan Scott’s (2002) “Is it OK if nothing happens?” invites others to think deeper and notice important new insights.

To think with a collaborating teacher, the coach first needs to know what the teacher is saying and thinking. This is not as easy as it sounds. Lis- tening and understanding are two different mental actions, and sometimes teachers move on to a new topic before coaches are sure what they mean. For this reason, coaches need to ask questions that clarify the collaborating teacher’s thinking. Sometimes this means specifying what a teacher’s words mean: “When you say engagement, what do you mean by that?” Other times, coaches need to listen for the message in the midst of a long, rambling state- ment. After a teacher has wound around a topic a fair bit, a coach may need to paraphrase what was said.

I often clarify what my conversation partner is saying for both our bene- fits. For example, I might ask, “Do you mind if I share what I’m hearing, and you can tell me if I’ve got it right?” When things are going well, my partner might say something like “That’s exactly what I’m thinking, but you said it better than I was able to.” Be sure to avoid using clarifying to redirect a

Communication Skills 43

conversation: if people think we are putting words in their mouth, they may see our listening as inauthentic and become uncomfortable. On the other hand, when people really feel heard, they relax, open up, and feel less pres- sure to push their message, making communication much more effective.

Some people refer to deeper questions as probing questions. However, like qualitative researcher Irving Seidman, I’m not fond of that terminology. “I always think of a sharp instrument pressing on soft flesh when I hear” the word probe, Seidman (2006) writes. “The word also conveys a sense of the powerful interviewer treating the participant as an object. I am more com- fortable with the notion of exploring with the participant than with probing into what the participant says” (p. 86).

Rather than probing, I prefer to think of the coach as inviting the teacher to go deeper. Deeper questions don’t probe; they invite collaborating teach- ers to unpack and explore their thoughts and statements. This can be accom- plished by making simple suggestions or asking simple questions like “What else? Tell me more.” Even a single response question (“Never?”) can take a conversation deeper.

Asking and Responding

To ask good questions, coaches need to be intentional, choosing the right kind of question—open or closed—and the right topic (as noted earlier, usu- ally thoughts, feelings, or actions). Though coaches must be curious, they need to ensure their curiosity doesn’t lead them to ask questions that distract teachers from the topics they want to explore.

Coaches should ask short, simple questions that keep the focus on teach- ers’ concerns. Many coaching experts suggest an 80-20 rule—coaches should talk no more than 20 percent of the time, freeing up the teacher to fill the other 80 percent.

Coaches need to make it easy for teachers to answer questions. To do this, they should acknowledge what teachers say using nonverbal gestures to com- municate that they’re listening. Often, these gestures are simply the natural result of a genuine desire to hear what their conversation partner has to say. Coaches should communicate that they are on the teacher’s side by using words such as we, us, and together.

44 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

In their research on therapeutic relationships, William Miller and Ste- phen Rollnick (2013) distinguish between consonant conversations, where “there is a sense of moving together smoothly, like two dancers gliding across a ballroom floor,” and dissonant conversations, where “counselor and cli- ent seem to be struggling against each other, grappling for control, like two adversaries in a wrestling match” (p. 43). “When a relationship is going disso- nant,” they say, “it is important to understand why”:

To use the term “resistance”... seems to suggest that things are not going smoothly because of something that one person [the client] is doing. We advocate a more relational view, in which client resistance behavior is, at most, a signal of dissonance in the relationship. In a way, it is oxymoronic to say that one person is not cooperating. It requires at least two people to not cooperate, to yield dissonance. (p. 45)

Blaming the other person turns our focus away from the one factor we are able to control with respect to resistance: ourselves. Rather than asking why people resist, a better question might be “What am I doing that is creating resistance?” or “How does the design of our professional development pro- duce resistance?” In fact, rather than fighting resistance, a better strategy is to seek consonant conversations or what we might call alignment, conversa- tions that are in sync.

Coaches can use the Partnership Principles to get in sync with others. When teachers feel they are equally important in a conversation—when they are heard, have a lot of autonomy, work on real-life issues, and partner with a coach who wants to learn from them—there is a good chance the conversa- tion is in alignment. When coaching is working well, collaborating teachers freely say what they think, and the conversation productively moves in the direction they want it to move in.

Research shows that when a coach and teacher are in alignment, their brain waves are literally in sync. Summarizing the research of several neu- roscientists, Kate Murphy (2019) explains: “Our brains not only sync up the moment someone tells us something, the resulting understanding and con- nection influences how we process subsequent information. . . . The more you listen to someone, such as a close friend or a family member, and the more that person listens to you, the more likely you two will be of like minds”

Communication Skills 45 (pp. 25–26). This is one reason why listening is such an important part of

coaching.

Favorite Questions

In the second edition of An Introduction to Coaching Skills (2017), Christian van Nieuwerburgh suggests we gather our favorite questions. “As a coach, you find your own questions which are consistently helpful at different points in the conversation,” he writes. “Very often, however, the most helpful question will emerge from a coachee’s response if a coach is listening genuinely” (p. 50).

I’ve included many of my favorite questions throughout this book and especially in Chapter 4. In addition, you can download a more extensive list of my favorite questions at www.instructionalcoaching.com/bookstore/the- definitive-guide-to-instructional-coaching.

Listening Listening as Improv

Kate Murphy (2019) proposes improvisational comedy, or improv, as a good analogy for listening. To deepen her understanding of this connection, she interviewed Matt Hovde, the artistic director at the famous Second City comedy club in Chicago. Hovde told Murphy that listening is “a fundamen- tal skill” for improv actors, who “train ourselves to be very sensitive to what’s happening on stage: to listen to what our scene partners are saying and what they mean, because if we miss those details, scenes will make less sense and will seem less magical or funny to an audience” (in Murphy, 2019, p. 106). Because improv performers don’t know what they are going to do until some- one else on stage says or does something, they need to constantly watch and listen so they can respond appropriately.

This makes them a lot like coaches. Just like improv actors, coaches must listen, draw from their experience, think quickly, and do the best they can in any given moment. However, coaches are not trying to entertain an audi- ence; they are trying to set up the conditions for people to think and grow. To

46 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

“think with” teachers, coaches need to know what collaborating teachers are

thinking, and they won’t know unless they listen to them.

Internal and External Dimensions of Listening

I find I am better able to improve my listening skills when I reflect on the internal and external dimensions of listening. Internal dimensions are the ways we control our thinking to better hear conversation partners; exter- nal dimensions are the words and actions we say and do that our partners observe during a conversation.

Internal

The internal dimensions of listening involve the internal monologues we engage in when we are listening and the thoughts that are too deep within us to be expressed as words. We need to become aware of those deeper thoughts, often referred to as tacit knowledge, or those unconscious ways of thinking can make it hard to hear others. To listen effectively, we need to mentally pre- pare ourselves to hear our conversation partners.

Focus. How we control what happens in our heads has a big impact on how well we listen—that is, on whether we are really focused on the other speaker. We all know we need to give our full attention to others, but most of us need to work at keeping our attention centered on what our conversation partners are communicating at any given time.

One reason we struggle to listen is that our brains move at a much faster speed than our conversation partner’s speech. Kate Murphy (2019) refers to this disparity as the “speech-thought differential”: “The average person talks at about 120–150 words per minute, which takes up a tiny fraction of our mental bandwidth powered by some eighty-six billion brain cells,” she writes, so “when someone else talks, we take mental side trips” (pp. 70–71).

Technology can make us take mental side trips, too, by diverting our attention from conversation. Our smartphones and other devices are, in fact, designed to distract us (Eyal & Hoover, 2014). The little bing we hear when we get a text sends a dopamine hit to the happy place in our brain, and the more we use our phones, the more we crave that hit. Unfortunately, the quick moment of pleasure we get from reading our texts can damage our relation- ships if we’re not careful. As Sherry Turkle says in Reclaiming Conversation

Communication Skills 47

(2015), “Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt” (p. 40).

While turning off our devices might be the first step toward focus, the second step is turning toward our conversation partner. We need to shut down the distracting voice in our head that fills us with irrelevant questions, assumptions, predictions, and other distracting thoughts. To really listen, we need to ask a question, let our conversation partners talk, and keep our men- tal focus on what they say. To paraphrase Stephen Covey (1989), we need to stop listening to reply, and start listening to understand.

Notice. Coaching expert Christian van Nieuwerburgh (2017) describes noticing as an important communication skill. In part, noticing means focus- ing on our partners: We need to pay attention to their nonverbal commu- nication, noticing when they light up as they talk about a topic, when they hesitate or look somewhat confused, when their body language is inconsis- tent with the words they are saying. We should also be watching for strengths that come out in what a person says, so that we can highlight those strengths when appropriate. Indeed, nonverbal communication can reveal something about how aligned our learning partner is with us.

We should also pay attention to what is going on inside ourselves during a conversation, which we can do by reflecting on a few questions in the moment: “Do I feel like I am in alignment with the teacher?” “Do I feel com- fortable or uncomfortable?” “Am I struggling to communicate, or am I find- ing it easy to find the right words?” “Do I feel like the teacher trusts me and feels safe with me, and are we both focused on the same goal?” Of course, we also shouldn’t go so deep into our reflections that we stop noticing our con- versation partner.

Don’t make assumptions. Another way to keep our minds focused on what people really say is to not make assumptions. It is easy to understand why we tend to assume things: as human beings, when confronted with infor- mation, we automatically try to make sense of it. Unfortunately, we too often forget that assumptions are just guesses and start to take them as truths—and that can cause a lot of trouble. As Miguel Ruiz (1997) has written, “We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking—we take it personally— then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our

48 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

words . . . . We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing” (p. 63).

Let’s consider a coach who is working with a teacher who isn’t implement- ing the strategies she had told the coach she would implement. Whenever the coach asks about the strategies, the teacher redirects the conversation and, as a result, the coach is worried she has wasted her time working with the teacher. In such a situation, it is easy for the coach to make all kinds of assumptions—that the teacher is a resistant person, or doesn’t like her, or is lazy. Any of these assumptions would significantly interfere with the coach’s ability to listen when she talks with the teacher.

A much better approach is to become aware of the assumptions you tend to make and stop making them. Instead, ask questions to find out what the teacher really thinks. If you talk with the teacher about a strategy and ask questions, you may find that she doesn’t understand the strategy and is afraid of messing up in front of her students, or that she’s facing personal issues that make it hard for her to implement anything new right now.

“Have the courage to ask questions until you are clear as you can be,” writes Ruiz (1997), “and even then do not assume you know all there is to know about a given situation” (p. 72). To listen effectively, we need to unclut- ter our minds so that our assumptions don’t interfere with our ability to understand the words, intentions, and actions of collaborating teachers.

Surface mental models. Our mental models can also keep us from hearing what others have to say. Peter Senge (1990) defines mental models as “our deeply held internal images of how the world works” (p. 174). Others use terms such as paradigms, mindsets, or internal stories. Whatever you call them, it is important to recognize mental models because they shape what we say and do. To control our mental models, we first need to interrogate our- selves to surface them. According to Senge, we need to “[slow] down our own thinking processes so that we can become more aware of how we form our mental models and how they influence our actions” (p. 191).

When we become aware of our mental models, we can listen with a clear mind, unencumbered by our assumptions. Consider, for example, the dif- ferent ways coaches think, act, and talk if they have a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. As Carol Dweck (2007) has famously explained, people with a fixed mindset believe their “qualities are carved in stone” (p. 6), whereas

Communication Skills 49

those with a growth mindset believe that “basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts” (p. 7). Annie Brock and Heather Hundley (2016) further propose that coaches with growth mindsets will likely foster more growth than those with fixed mindsets.

Let go of control. One particularly distracting way of thinking is driven by our desire to get others to agree with us and do what we think is best. If we really want to hear others, we need to let go of the need to control conversa- tions and let collaborating teachers speak and act as they choose.

Conversations, especially coaching conversations, can be ambiguous and messy. If we embrace the partnership approach, we won’t know (and shouldn’t think we know) what the teacher will say after we ask a question. Not knowing what will happen during coaching can feel stressful, and some- times we may become overwhelmed by the temptation to take the conversa- tion to a destination we choose. But if we do that, we aren’t truly listening.

Demonstrate empathy. To demonstrate empathy, we need to under- stand the emotions and perspectives of others. We don’t usually feel our part- ners’ emotions as deeply as they feel them, but we can still feel something of what they feel and communicate to them that we understand. At the very least, we shouldn’t ignore—or, worse, negate—our partners’ emotions. Along with feelings, we need to understand our partners’ perspective, which means we need to understand their needs. If we can both understand our partners’ emotions and needs and communicate to them that we understand, our lis- tening will be much more effective.

External

The external dimensions of listening are those that our coaching part- ners see and hear. It is not enough just to hear what people are saying; we also need to show that we are listening. Our actions, sometimes even more than our words, need to communicate that we hear what our conversation part- ners say. People who are sharing important information will be much more open if this is the case.

Be aware of nonverbal communication. One way to communicate that we are listening is to ensure that our body language shows we are focused on our conversation partner. We should make a respectful amount of eye con- tact (recognizing that eye contact is perceived differently within different

50 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

cultures). We should turn our body toward our partner and take an open stance rather than sit with our arms crossed. Good listeners refrain from dis- tracting gestures like clicking a pen, looking out the window, or checking a watch during the conversation. (If you’ve got a smartwatch, it can be espe- cially challenging to not look at it when it vibrates or beeps.)

Be careful about taking notes. On the one hand, writing down what people say is a way of validating their ideas. On the other hand, if we focus too much on our notes, we may miss what people say or give the impression that we’re not listening. My advice is to be judicious about when you take notes and to ask for permission. For example, when my conversation partner and I are exploring possible teaching strategies she might implement, I usually ask, “Do you mind if I make a list of the strategies we discuss?”

If you take notes on a tablet using a stylus and notetaking software, you can email the notes to your collaborating teacher as soon as the coaching con- versation ends. In general, I advise against using any device with a keyboard to take notes, as it can make eye contact harder and serve as a physical barrier between coach and teacher.

Refrain from interrupting (unless absolutely necessary). Unfortu- nately, it has become more and more acceptable to interrupt in our society. On sports and political programs, for example, interruptions are the norm. Too often, the loudest and pushiest voice wins. But the ubiquity of interrupt- ing doesn’t make it an effective communication strategy. Indeed, I believe it is very destructive: when we interrupt, we are saying we don’t think what the other person says is important—or, perhaps worse still, that we’re more important than they are. Interrupting is clearly not consistent with the Part- nership Principles.

Even if we think we’re helping the other person, it’s usually a good idea not to interrupt. As Christian van Nieuwerburgh (2017) explains, we shouldn’t complete people’s sentences or fill in the words they are trying to remember. Instead, van Nieuwerburgh writes, the goal of a coaching conversation should be to create a safe space for people to think. When we stop interrupting, we can, to quote Susan Scott (2002), “let the silence do the heavy lifting”—and let learning begin.

Despite these caveats, there are times when interrupting is necessary. If teachers spend a lot of time talking about a topic, for example, they may

Communication Skills 51

need to be reminded that there are only 10 minutes left until the bell and a goal hasn’t been set yet. Other times, you may need to interrupt to clarify terminology or paraphrase just to make sure you understand what the other person is saying. In these moments, I suggest you do what Michael Bungay Stanier (2020) proposes: just tell them that you’re interrupting. Say, “I’m just going to stop you for a moment” or “I’m going to hold you there.” If you’re in the room with the conversation partner or on video chat, you can hold your hand up to signal the interruption as well. Once the other person has stopped, say what you see: “I can hear there’s a lot going on. In the interest of time, I’m going to force the issue here” (p. 105).

Although learning to interrupt effectively is important, refraining from interrupting except when absolutely necessary is more important. I have talked with many coaches who have identified not interrupting as an area for improvement after watching themselves on video. So far, no one has said, “You know what I need to do? I need to interrupt more.”

Our goal as listeners is to ensure that our words and bodies communi- cate to our conversation partners that they have our attention. We must do everything we can to help people feel they are heard. Nonverbal communi- cation and effective paraphrasing is never enough. What matters most is that we authentically want to hear what people have to say because we truly want them to flourish. Turning our attention to others is a powerful way to com- municate that we have their best interests at heart. If our listening is guided by a genuine, respectful curiosity and benevolence, most of the skills and techniques of listening will naturally occur as we turn toward our conversa- tion partners.

To Sum Up

To be effective coaches, we need to build relationships and trust—and to do that, we need to ask great questions and listen effectively. Great questions keep the focus of a conversation on the teacher; as Warren Berger (2014) writes, a great question “is hard and interesting enough that it is worth answering, and easy enough that one can actually answer it” (p. 8). Great questions authentically arise out of a coach’s curiosity and interest in another person’s well-being, in contrast to leading questions, which people use to lead others to destinations they have chosen for them. Great questions are short

52 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

and appropriate to the moment—open questions to broaden conversations and closed ones to focus them. A great question should open up a conversa- tion the way a light bulb opens up a dark room.

Listening can be understood as having internal and external dimensions. The internal dimensions of listening involve our internal monologues during conversations. Some important internal dimensions of listening include our ability to maintain our focus, notice our conversation partners and ourselves, avoid making assumptions, surface our mental models, and let go of the need to control our conversation partners. External dimensions of listening, by contrast, are what our conversation partners see and hear us say and do. These include our nonverbal communication, looking like we are listening, and not interrupting unless absolutely necessary.

Reflection Questions

1. Howdoyourespondwhenteachersappeartoberesistingchange?Do you need to change anything about how to interact when you encoun- ter resistance?

2. Is there anything you can do to increase teachers’ hope?

3. What is your experience with change?

4. What do you think are the qualities of effective questions?

5. What do you do to create a safe place for your collaborating teachers

to think?

6. Whichquestionshavebeenmosteffectiveforyou?

7. Onascaleof1to10,howeffectivelydoyoulistentoyourconversation

partners?

8. Whatareoneortwothingsyoucoulddotodaytoimproveasalistener?

9. Do you do more telling than asking?

10. When you explain strategies, what can you do to move away from giv- ing advice and toward a mutual exploration of ideas?

Going Deeper

• The books that most influenced what I have written here are Christian van Nieuwerburgh’s An Introduction to Coaching Skills (2017) and Wil- liam Miller and Stephen Rollnick’s Motivational Interviewing (2013).

Communication Skills 53

• Many of the ideas in this chapter are from my own book Better Conver- sations (2015).

• Beth Dankert Sattes and Jackie Acree Walsh’s Leading Through Quality Questioning (2010) offers a great overview of the literature on question- ing, along with many practical suggestions that any coach can use.

• Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit (2016) has become an incredibly popular coaching book (maybe the most popular of all time), in large part because it describes seven effective coaching questions that any coach can use.

• Tony Stoltzfus’s Coaching Questions: A Coach’s Guide to Powerful Ask- ing Skills (2008) is packed with dozens of great questions that could become part of any coach’s question bank.

• Frank Sesno’s Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change (2017) provides another perspective on lis- tening by offering a journalist’s insight into questioning.

• My current favorite book on listening is Kate Murphy’s You’re Not Listening (2019), which offers an interesting and helpful overview of recent thinking about listening.

• Elena Aguilar’s body of work is essential reading for any coach, and I could mention her work at the end of any of these chapters. Personally, however, I found her insights about questioning in The Art of Coaching to be especially helpful as I thought deeply about what good questions look like and how they can be asked respectfully and artfully during coaching and all other conversations.

• My all-time favorite book about listening and other communication topics is Margaret Wheatley’s Turning to One Another (2002). Wheat- ley reminds us that “we can change the world if we start listening to one another again” (p. 3).

What’s Next?

The easiest way for you to improve your coaching skills is to record a video of yourself in conversation. Watching a video of any conversation with anyone— your partner, child, colleagues, friends—can be helpful and sometimes even revelatory, but video of yourself coaching can be especially powerful. If your

54 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

collaborating teachers agree to be recorded, I suggest watching at least one coaching conversation a week to assess how effectively you communicate.

Video can also be a big part of professional learning when coaches get together in PLCs or other groupings. Coaches can practice real-life facil- itative coaching by using a coaching model such as the GROWTH model described in John Campbell and Christian van Nieuwerburgh’s The Leader’s Guide to Coaching in Schools (2018), the seven questions in Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit (2016), or Sir John Whitmore’s GROW model in Coaching for Performance: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Lead- ership (2009).