Learning Map for Introduction

Seven Success Factors for Instructional Coaching

is about

What has to be in place for coaches to flourish

Partnership

Communication

based on

connecting through

ensuring success through

using an

System support

Instructional playbook

Leadership

employing a

Coaching process

2

Data

involving gathering

Introduction

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.

—Atul Gawande, Personal Best

Megan Greene will never forget her first week as a K–6 instructional coach in Franklin, Indiana. As she watched all her colleagues get ready for their classes, she sat at her desk not knowing what to do. She missed being in the classroom, feeling at home with her students and doing what she thought she did best in the world.

When Megan was in high school, she didn’t really know what she wanted to do for a living. She had good grades, played sports, and had friends, but, in her words, she “was nothing to write home about.” In the end, she decided to attend Ball State University, famous for its educational program, and study to become a teacher.

Something clicked when Megan started her studies. “I was no rock star,” Megan says, “but when I stepped into the classroom, I knew that the passion was there, and I had such a strong desire to grow as a professional.” When she finally became a teacher, Megan felt for the first time that she was doing something well: “My work and students brought joy to me that didn’t com- pare to anything else,” she says. For 15 years, Megan’s classroom felt like home, and she flourished.

When a job posting came up for an instructional coaching position in Megan’s school district, her coworkers told her it was the perfect fit, but she decided that she couldn’t give up the classroom. Then two new positions were posted for instructional technology coaches, which seemed an even better fit for Megan—after all, she loved to learn, loved technology, and loved the idea of helping teachers use technology effectively in the classroom. This time she couldn’t resist, so she applied for one of the positions and was hired. After 15 years in the classroom, she was going to be an instructional coach.

Administrators knew that their coaches and principals would need pro- fessional development for their coaching to be effective, so they asked all coaches and principals in the district to attend the Instructional Coaching Group’s five-day Intensive Instructional Coaching Institute in Lawrence,

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4 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

Kansas. (We—and when I say “we” in this book, I’m referring to my ICG col- leagues and myself—don’t use the term intensive lightly here; the institute addresses much of the content in this book.)

While Megan was grateful for her administrators’ support, she still wasn’t sure she’d made the right decision. She loved the chance to be with her col- leagues and appreciated the content and activities the institute offered, but at the end of the day, she felt lost. Sometimes, after putting on a brave face during the workshop, she would go up to her room feeling so confused and sad that she would burst into tears.

Not long after returning from the workshop, Megan told her husband she was seriously considering quitting her coaching job because she really wasn’t sure she could succeed. He reminded her that she had always found a way to move forward before. That night, Megan made up her mind: No matter what, she wasn’t going to quit. She would give coaching her best.

Back at school, Megan started by going into classrooms and asking teach- ers how she could help, explaining that they would be helping her by letting her help them. She also sought out the support of other coaches in her dis- trict who were experiencing doubts and insecurities about coaching similar to hers. Bit by bit, teachers became more comfortable in their coaching roles. Megan soon found teachers who were willing to move through the Impact Cycle (see Chapter 4), and she started to implement many of the ideas she’d learned at the institute. “Ultimately, coaching changed my life and literally hundreds of other lives in just one school year,” she says.

The results clearly show that Megan was a successful coach. She com- pleted 46 deep coaching cycles, with 100 percent of participating teachers expressing interest in completing another cycle and saying they would rec- ommend coaching to colleagues. Four veteran teachers with over 35 years’ experience each completed a cycle. A total of 556 elementary students and 2,630 secondary students were affected. At the end of the year, Megan wrote us to describe how she felt about being a coach: “I could not be more thankful for the people who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. I’m no lon- ger lost—I’m reborn!”

Like Megan, thousands of educators go from teaching to coaching only to find themselves doubting their decision. Unfortunately, as we will see in future chapters, not all stories end as happily as Megan’s. When coaches don’t

Introduction 5

receive support or learn and practice the knowledge and skills they need, they often aren’t successful. Coaching is a completely new position for most people, so they need guidance if they are to have the impact they dream of having.

All instructional coaches need a tool to help them know where to start and what to do, and it is my hope that this book can be that tool. I wrote this book to summarize what I have learned over more than 20 years studying instructional coaching and in my ongoing work with over 150,000 instruc- tional coaches on six different continents. (You can read a summary of my findings at www.instructionalcoaching.com/research.) I’ve organized what I’ve learned into seven Success Factors that every coach, coaching director, and administrator should understand and be able to apply to create a pow- erful coaching program (see below). These factors are essential not only for coaching to be effective, but for any change initiative to succeed.

1. The Partnership Principles

2. Communication skills

3. Coaches as leaders

4. The Impact Cycle

5. Data

6. The instructional playbook

7. System support

This book is divided into three sections: Who You Are, What You Do, and Where You Work.

Who You Are

Factor One: The Partnership Principles

In Chapter 1, I explain that the way coaches interact with others fre- quently determines whether their coaching is successful. If coaches see themselves as superior to others, they may find that others are not interested

6 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

in hearing what they have to say. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology organizational development specialist Edgar Schein (2009, 2013; Schein & Schein, 2018) has explained, people often resist ideas shared with them if they perceive that the status they think they deserve is not being acknowledged.

Carl Rogers first popularized the phrase “way of being” in his 1980 book of the same name. Put simply, “way of being ” refers to how we are in the world with others, including whichever set of principles we live by. (And whether we realize it or not, every one of us lives according to a set of principles.) The following seven Partnership Principles (described at greater length in Chap- ter 1) form one such set that can serve as a foundation for mutually humaniz- ing learning conversations:

1. Equality:Ibelievethateveryonehasthesameworth.Noindividualor group is more valuable than any other.

2. Choice:IrecognizethatIwillonlygetcommitmentfromotherswhen I honor their autonomy. As Tim Gallwey says, “When you insist, I resist” (2000, p. 14).

3. Voice: I act in ways that make it easy for my conversation partners to share their ideas, thoughts, and emotions because I want to know what they have to say.

4. Reflection: I understand coaching as a meeting of the minds that can involve (a) looking back, to consider how something did or didn’t work; (b) looking at, to consider how things are going; or (c) looking ahead, by using what I know to make future improvements (Knight, 2011).

5. Dialogue: I ensure that my coaching partners’ ideas can shape my thinking as much as or more than my ideas shape theirs. This means I let go of the need to be right so that I can do what is right.

6. Praxis: I understand that we learn best when we apply ideas to our day-to-day experiences. Learning happens best through action.

7. Reciprocity: I go into every conversation expecting to learn from my conversation partner. As Robert Half is often said to have stated, “When one teaches, two learn.”

Factor Two: Communication Skills

Coaching is, above all, a conversation or series of conversations focused on professional growth. For this reason, coaches need to understand both the nature of the teacher’s personal experience of change and the communica- tion habits and skills that make talking about change possible.

As I explain in Chapter 2, all change is self-change, and coaches are more successful when they stop trying to motivate others and start trying to create the conditions in which others can recognize and realize their own immense potential. Done well, coaching fosters hope and empowers others to motivate themselves. Such coaching requires what Christian van Nieuwerburgh (2017) calls “managed conversation[s]” (p. 5). Three skills are especially important for these conversations: listening, questioning, and balancing telling with asking.

Factor Three: Coaches as Leaders

The difference between coaches who have a positive impact and those who do not comes down to leadership. In Chapter 3, I describe what lead- ership looks like for successful coaches and what coaches can do to become powerful forces for good in their schools. Leadership is more complex than we might think, especially for coaches who engage in equal-status, peer-to- peer conversations with others. Leadership among peers in complex organi- zations involves much more than a persuasively delivered call to action.

I divide leadership into two parts: leading ourselves and leading others. To lead ourselves, we need to know our purpose and principles, how to use our time effectively, how to take care of ourselves, and how to develop habits that enable us to do these things. To lead others, we need to make good decisions, interact with others in ways that expand our capacities, foster deep knowl- edge and deep implementation, and create alignment with others.

Often we think of leaders as almost superhuman. These heroes—Dr. Mar- tin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and others—seem like saints who have accomplished so much that we could never approach achieving similar results. And yet their fights—for freedom, health, equality, respect, goodness—are fights all of us can join. When a coach’s kind- ness and empathy help a teacher find self-efficacy, when a teacher’s high

Introduction 7

8 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

expectations compel a student to believe she can be more than she realizes, when a coach’s commitment to self-improvement helps him better coach teachers so that students improve—in all these cases, coaches and teachers are engaged in the same struggle as our saintly heroes: the fight to make the world a better place. To lead with the Partnership Principles in mind is to hold up hope that the world can and will be better.

What You Do

Factor Four: The Impact Cycle

The Partnership Principles suggest a way of being for coaches, but coaches also need a structure for coaching conversations. The Impact Cycle, a deceptively simple instructional coaching cycle, is one such structure and the focus of Chapter 4 in this book. There are three stages to the Impact Cycle— Identify, Learn, and Improve (see Figure I.1):

1. Identify: Coaches partner with teachers to identify a clear picture of reality; a powerful, emotionally compelling, easy, reachable, and student-focused (or PEERS) goal; and a strategy the teacher will implement to try meeting that goal.

2. Learn: The coach describes the strategy to be implemented, often with the help of a checklist, and shows the teacher one or more models of the strategy to ensure that the teacher is comfortable with it.

3. Improve: The coach partners with the teacher to make adaptations until the PEERS goal identified in the first stage is met.

Factor Five: Data

My friend John Campbell, one of the leading coaching pioneers in Aus- tralia, is responsible for one of my favorite quotes about coaching: “If there’s no goal, it is just a nice conversation.”1 If John is correct, and I believe he is, then data, which I describe in Chapter 5, are essential. They help us to paint a clear picture of our destination and reveal whether we are on or off track. I suggest that data be gathered for two main foci for coaching—engagement and achievement:

1When I asked John about this quotation, he was quick to tell me he first heard it from coaching expert Tony Grant.

Introduction 9

FIGURE I.1

The Three Stages of the Impact Cycle

IDENTIFY

IMPROVE

LEARN

1. Engagement:Datacanbegatheredonatleastthreekindsofengage- ment: behavioral, cognitive, and emotional. Behavioral engagement measures whether students are doing what they are supposed to be doing—that is, whether they are on task. Cognitive engagement mea- sures whether students are experiencing the learning their teacher intends for them to experience from an activity. Finally, emotional engagement measures the extent to which students feel they belong in their school, are physically and psychologically safe, engage in positive and meaningful experiences at school, have friends, and have hope.

2. Achievement: To measure achievement, teachers must first identify what students need to learn during a unit or a lesson and then use dif- ferent kinds of assessments (e.g., selected-response or short-answer

10 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

tests, checks for understanding, rubrics). Sometimes an informal con- versation is enough to identify achievement goals, but teachers usually need more precise methods of gathering data to make the adaptations necessary for students to meet those goals.

Factor Six: The Instructional Playbook

Goals are essential, but they don’t mean much without a pathway to reach them. For this reason, instructional coaches must have a deep knowledge of high-impact teaching strategies. Coaches partner with teachers to identify, explain, model, and adapt teaching strategies so teachers and their students can meet goals. These high-impact strategies are often organized, summa- rized, and described in what I call an “instructional playbook” (described at greater length in Chapter 6).

In my opinion, every instructional coach needs to have an instructional playbook consisting of three sections:

1. A short list of the high-impact teaching strategies that coaches most frequently use with teachers

2. A set of one-page documents summarizing the purpose, research, and essential information for each teaching strategy

3. Checklists for the strategies that coaches share with teachers

The playbook is a living document that should be used to organize learning about teaching strategies. Coaches should revisit all aspects of the playbook frequently, revising the contents as they identify new and better strategies.

Where You Work

Factor Seven: System Support

When coaches flourish, it is often because they work in settings where leaders are intentional and disciplined about providing the support neces- sary for coaching success. Without such support, coaches often struggle to have any impact at all. In Chapter 7, I describe what a supportive coaching system entails.

Introduction 11

Districts that support coaches ensure that everyone involved under- stands what coaching is and why it is necessary to address the complexities of the stages of implementation. They also hire great coaches, clarify their roles and how they are to use their time, and explain what is and is not confidential during coaching. Successful districts also create structures and cultures that promote learning. Finally, in settings where coaches are most effective, prin- cipals explicitly support coaches and, in fact, are often coaches themselves.

Final Sections of Each Chapter

Each chapter of this book concludes with four sections:

1. To Sum Up: A quick summary of the main ideas in the chapter.

2. Reflection Questions: Questions for self-reflection or group discus-

sion about the chapter.

3. Going Deeper: Suggestions for additional resources to extend learn-

ing about the ideas in the chapter.

4. What’sNext?:Somequicksuggestionsforhowtostartimplementing

the ideas in the chapter.

To Sum Up

The following seven factors must be in place for instructional coaching pro- grams to flourish:

1. AcoachingwayofbeinggroundedinthesevenPartnershipPrinciples of equality, choice, voice, reflection, dialogue, praxis, and reciprocity.

2. Using effective communication habits and skills to ensure that teach-

ers experience productive coaching that leads to powerful, positive

changes for student learning and well-being.

3. Leadership, which involves coaches leading both themselves and

others.

4. An effective coaching process such as the Impact Cycle, which moves

through three stages: Identify (develop a clear picture of reality, a goal, and a strategy to be implemented to reach the goal), Learn (provide clear explanations that often involve checklists and modeling), and Improve (make adaptations until the goal is met).

12 The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching

5. Gatheringandanalyzingengagementorachievementdatawithteach- ers so that they can set goals and monitor progress.

6. Ensuring that coaches have a deep knowledge of the instructional practices they share, possibly by creating an instructional playbook.

7. System support, meaning everyone in the system works together to

support the coaching process so that teachers can learn and grow and students can excel.

Reflection Questions

1. ShouldyouworkfromthePartnershipPrinciples?Ifso,doyouordoes anything else need to change? If not, what principles should drive your actions? Is anything keeping you from working from the Partnership Principles?

2. Howimportantiscommunicationforafulfillinglife?Whatisonestep you can take toward becoming the communicator you want to be?

3. Whatisonethingyoucandotodaytoimproveasaleader?Whyisthis important? Are you going to do it?

4. What needs to be in place for you to learn and implement the Impact Cycle?

5. Whatdatadoyougather?Howreliablearethesedata?Doyouneedto expand the kinds of data you collect? Do you need to change anything about the way you collect data?

6. Do you have an instructional playbook? If not, do you think you should? How deep is your understanding of the teaching strategies you share?

7. Howmighttheadministratorsinyourschoolanddistrictbettersup- port coaches?

Going Deeper

Since the seven Success Factors discussed in this book are largely the culmi- nation of the research and analysis my colleagues and I have conducted during the last two decades, I hope readers will forgive me for mentioning some of my own books here. (In future chapters, many helpful books by authors other than myself make up the bulk of the Going Deeper recommendations.)

Introduction 13

• The Impact Cycle: What Instructional Coaches Should Do to Foster Pow- erful Improvements in Teaching (2018) is the most complete treatment available of the Impact Cycle at the heart of instructional coaching. The book contains detailed chapters about each stage of the cycle and doz- ens of resources that coaches can use.

• Better Conversations: Coaching Ourselves and Each Other to Be More Credible, Caring, and Connected (2016) provides readers with an over- view of useful conversation beliefs and habits for coaches. Since conver- sation is what coaches engage in the most, I think this book is essential, but I also hope that it will inspire coaches to communicate in ways that are more respectful, affirming, and loving.

• High-ImpactInstruction:AFrameworkforGreatTeaching(2013)ismy most complete discussion of effective instructional practices organized around four areas: content planning, formative assessment, instruc- tion, and community building.

• TheInstructionalPlaybook(2020),whichIcowrotewithAnnHoffman, Michelle Harris, and Sharon Thomas, provides the tools people need to create an instructional playbook.

• Focus on Teaching: Using Video for High-Impact Instruction (2014) explains why video is essential to effective professional development and how any professional developer can help teachers use video to improve their practice.

What’s Next?

When coaches first start to learn about the seven Success Factors, they may be overwhelmed by all the books, materials, and other information they encounter. Not surprisingly, they often ask a simple question: “Where should I start?” I believe coaches need to start by developing a deep understanding of the beliefs at the heart of instructional coaching: the Partnership Princi- ples, which are the focus of the next chapter.

You can find additional materials to support your practice at www.instructionalcoaching.com/bookstore/ the-definitive-guide-to-instructional-coaching.

In addition, I have written a reflection guide designed to enhance and extend your understanding and application of the ideas and strategies in this book. Find it at www.instructionalcoaching.com/bookstore.