The Art of Coaching

by Elena Aguilar

  Although we want to enact the scenario as realistically as possible, we also don't want to make it too hard or too easy. The coach needs to keep in mind the skills the client is practicing and stay within his ZPD. Furthermore, while a coach is in a role, it's also critical to keenly observe our client's verbal and nonverbal cues for indicators of how he is feeling. Role-playing can be mildly anxiety producing—clients can feel on the spot and exposed. As long the anxiety is low, it's OK. A coach can also diffuse anxiety by incorporating laughter, lightness, and a sense of play (it's called a role-play after all). Sometimes, if I'm asked to play my client's role, I share my own insecurity that I might not be able to model the skills. I laugh at myself and when I'm honestly stumped, I'll stop and even ask for the client's feedback. Role-play is practice, not performance.

  At the end of a role-play, the coach leads a reflection. Our goal is to support the client to articulate a couple of learnings and then we explore whether the client feels ready to use the skills we've been practicing. It's critical that when we reflect on the role-play we draw attention to what the client successfully did. We need to share concrete, positive feedback, for example: “When you asked me that question, I really felt that you genuinely wanted to know what I thought because of your facial expression, the way you leaned forward, and the way you framed the question. It was open and inviting.”

  Clients who are working on improving their communication skills often report that role-play is the most effective activity that I engage them in. I frequently hear: “When I had the real conversation with that teacher (or student or parent) it was easy!” Although apprehensive at first, I have converted many teachers and principals into regular role-playing because it is a transformative experience.

  Videotaping

  Using video is an extremely effective tool in facilitative coaching. In recent years, researchers have compared changes in teacher practice based on feedback from principal observations to what happens when teachers reflected on videos of their instruction. It probably won't be a surprise that the changes that result after teachers watch videos of themselves far outweigh those that result from principal observations.

  Although everyone's first response is usually, “I hate seeing myself on video!” I strongly encourage my clients to record themselves several times a year: teachers in classes, principals leading meetings or having one on one conversations with teachers, and teams of educators who want to examine group dynamics. It's essential to have a focus question or issue to explore, ideally that's connected to the goals in the work plan. For example, a teacher might look at patterns of participation in her class, how she gives directions, or her interactions with students. A principal might want to consider whether or not he is able to say everything he wants to say in a difficult conversation with a staff member or how another receives his communication.

  After the video has been shot the client can watch the video alone or with a coach. We look for data related to the question or issue that we identified but other reflections also surface. It's not unusual that the client observes herself in a way that she's never noticed before, saying, for example, “I can't believe how much I talked!” or “I never knew I did that …” Clients can feel embarrassed or frustrated by what they see; a coach might use a cathartic approach to help the client process and learn from the video.

  A confrontational approach may also be appropriate when debriefing a video. A client might avoid information, such as a preference for calling on boys or a tendency to speak louder and slower to English language learners (ELLs). With the data in front of us, a coach could confront the client to examine the data: “What did you notice about your voice when you called on your ELLs?” “I counted that out of twelve times you called on students, ten of those were male students. Were you aware of this?” Particularly when we notice inequities we need to raise these with our clients. When we do this, videotaping becomes an activity that crosses the boundaries between a facilitative and an authoritative activity.

  A few technical notes on videotaping:

  Sometimes I've held the camera, other times we've tucked it discretely on a shelf so that everyone forgets it's there.

  Make agreements about who will see the video and what will happen to it after. For example, “Only you will see this” or “We can save this for your portfolio” or “We'll erase it right after.”

  Also offer the option of deleting a video if, for example, the lesson went horribly wrong, or the principal completely lost her composure during a meeting. The client reserves the right to trash it. It is essential that the client have a sense of control over this learning.

  Surveys

  Surveys can be administered to all stakeholders. A teacher can survey her students or a principal might survey teachers and staff members. They can be a useful tool when a client's goals include areas of culture and climate, emotional intelligence, and building collaborative cultures. They can be a way for stakeholders to give input on decisions and general feedback. Surveys can be administered on an as-needed basis, or every quarter, semester, or year if a client wants to track changes over time.

  The survey should be co-constructed with the client and tailored to his specific concerns. The role of the coach is to help the client figure out what he wants and needs to know and then how to phrase questions that will elicit that information. It can help to have examples of surveys (Exhibits 10.2 and 10.3 at the end of this chapter offer sample surveys), but the client should also be invited to generate questions. A coach might help with wording—survey questions shouldn't be leading or limiting—but the client needs to feel that he's driving the inquiry.

  Surveys are usually most effective when responses can be anonymous. There are a number of online sites where this can be done. A coach can also administer a survey and transcribe the results. If a coach plays this role, it is extremely important that she protects the identity of the survey takers.

  If the coach will transcribe the data, then before the survey is administered, the coach and client need to agree on what the data report will look like. For example, if a group of stakeholders—students, for example—will respond to a set of short-answer questions, the coach can summarize those statements or quantify them in some way, such as, “25 percent of students mentioned that the project was too difficult.” The coach could also transcribe each comment and provide the raw data. What is important, again, is that the client makes this decision and that it is communicated in advance to the survey takers. They need to know how their feedback will be shared.

  Debriefing the survey is the most critical step. Clients usually need time to read and silently process the data, and then discuss it with the coach. After a number of experiences with surveys, I've concluded that a client should never be given the data to process alone—for example, do not e-mail the client the transcripts and agree to “talk about it tomorrow.” The experience for the client is often difficult and raises many emotions. It's the coach's responsibility to guide the client through this. In the debrief, a coach might use a number of approaches—she might empathize with the client and be supportive, provide cathartic ways to move through the emotions, and incorporate catalytic approaches so that the data leads to learning and growth. Surveys can be a catalyst for tremendous change in beliefs, behaviors, and being, but they must be facilitated well and the client must want to do them.

  Positive Self-Talk

  Lisa was a skilled novice principal who took on an exceptionally difficult school. The task was overwhelming and she worked eighty to ninety hours a week. In March of her first year, in a moment of exhaustion and self-doubt, Lisa confessed that she didn't know if she was going to make it through the year. “I want to be performing at this level,” she said, her hand held at shoulder height, “But I'm performing at this level,” her hand plummeted to the ground. “I feel inept,” she said. At that moment, her office door opened and the secretary reminded Lisa that she hadn't yet made an important call. Lisa looked at me, her eyes welling wit
h tears. This was after an extremely challenging day. “See what I mean?” she said. “I promised I'd call by 4:00.” It was now 4:30.

  I decided to get tough. “Lisa, you're going to have to squash those kinds of thoughts. You recognize how hard everyone here is working and show your appreciation all the time, but you don't do that with yourself. You have to start, right now. You are going to forget things, you're going to make mistakes. You can repair this mistake and I know you will. But if you beat yourself up all the time, you're going to drown. Everyone is doing the best they can, yourself included. Say that to yourself, now,” I ordered. She did.

  Lisa was sabotaging herself with her negative self-talk and she wasn't seeing the things she was doing well—of which there were many. I suggested one of my favorite assignments. At the end of each day, for one week, I asked her to write down three things that went well and identify her role in them. I asked her if she'd be willing to share these with me. She agreed. The following week Lisa reported that she'd had a much better week. “So many things went well,” she shared. “I don't even know if good things have been happening all along and I just didn't notice them, or if it was just a good week. I don't care. I feel much better.” Her list ranged from small things like, “The bathrooms were cleaned on time because I asked the custodians to check in with me at noon,” to “Everyone who came to the parent meeting participated and left feeling inspired because I used different speaking structures to ensure equitable participation.” Lisa continued this daily practice for the rest of the year, sharing that it made a pivotal difference in her self-perception, mood, and energy levels.

  This cathartic strategy can be used with clients who are struggling to see their successes. Another way to reach a similar outcome is to ask a client to set his watch or cell phone to ring every two hours. When the timer goes off, he identifies what he's doing well or what's going well at that moment. This is just another way to take note of the positive moments in our day and those moments when we're doing good work which we often miss.

  Our brains are programmed to notice what's not working. They are “like Teflon” to positive experiences and “like Velcro” to negative experiences (Hansen, 2009). As coaches, we support clients to shift their awareness. It is a key strategy for building resiliency.

  Writing

  Michelle was an experienced teacher who was transitioning into a number of leadership roles in her school when I coached her. We met for ninety minutes every Friday after the kids left; Michelle often arrived late and frazzled. “I have a hard time focusing on our reflective conversations,” she confessed soon after we'd started working together. “My mind is going a million miles an hour.” I appreciated her candor and asked if she knew of any strategies that helped her mind settle. “Writing!” she told me, “I love to write and it really helps me sort my thoughts out, but I never have time for it.” I proposed that we start each session with fifteen minutes of reflective writing—I could supply prompts or she could journal. As with all other activities, I always say something like, “Let's just try it. Who knows? It might help, maybe not. Let's try!”

  Michelle was eager to write and we quickly saw the impact of using a focusing strategy at the beginning of our meetings. Journaling also allowed Michelle to identify the specific issues she wanted my support on. After a while, Michelle began to add ten minutes of writing immediately after our meetings—she'd journal on our conversation or record ideas that had arisen. Michelle attributed a great deal of the growth she made in the year I coached her to the reflections and learning that came from her writing, coupled with the space to engage in a conversation about those ideas.

  For clients who are receptive, writing can be a powerful way to record thoughts and events, process feelings, and clarify issues. Using writing as a way to visualize can also help concretize a person's goals. A teacher can be prompted to write about how she'd like to feel at the end of the school year, or what she'd like to see during tomorrow's science lab. A principal might write about how he wants to see teachers collaborating or engaging with parents. These exercises help bring out unconscious beliefs, creative ideas, and stumbling blocks. They give the coach more “data” to engage a client on, more information about how our client thinks and feels, and more information is always good.

  Exploring Metaphors

  I had coached Tina for a year and planned on working with her for another. One morning she casually told me about a documentary she'd watched the previous night. The show explored the process of returning an injured, orphaned baby river otter to the wild. The naturalist slowly taught the otter to survive on its own, allowed it a larger and larger terrain to swim in, and finally, one day, released it into the Amazon. At this point in the telling, Tina's voice filled with emotion. “I'm that baby otter, but I'm not ready to be released yet.”

  We spent quite a while exploring the symbolism in this story and how it applied to Tina. “Tell me more about what the naturalist did,” I said.

  “He was so gentle with the otter. He encouraged and it and waited for signs that it wanted to go. He didn't make it do things it didn't want to do, he just kept expanding the space it could swim in,” she said.

  “How do you think the otter felt when it was released?” I asked.

  “Good, I imagine. I think it felt ready. It just swam off and wasn't concerned about how far away the scientist was,” she said.

  “How did it know it was ready?” I asked.

  “It didn't have to think about what it was doing. It could swim and fend for itself without having to plan every step.”

  “What could that mean for you, as a principal? What could that feel like?”

  Tina spoke about what she'd want to be able to do in order to feel ready. She was very clear about what she wanted me to do and about the kind of encouragement she needed. For one thing, she couldn't identify the gradual release model that I was using in my coaching and she wanted me to make this explicit for her, which was very useful feedback to get. For the rest of that year, we both used the metaphor of the river otter to contextualize our work. This reference allowed Tina to hold a big picture understanding of coaching, to access her own confidence and agency, and to be clear with me about what she needed. I affectionately called her my “baby otter.”

  Exploring the symbols and representations that clients bring up in coaching is a powerful way to help someone gain deeper self-understanding. Metaphors, images, and allegories can be used to describe feelings or experiences. We want to grab onto these offerings if they are put forward and dig into them, for they offer a glimpse into someone's subconscious, a different perspective on how someone sees herself, and a high-leverage point from which to work.

  Metaphors, analogies, and similes “seem to sit at a subtle boundary between the verbal and the visual aspects of our minds,” write Schwarz and Davidson (2008, p. 129). This is an area rich with creativity, where we can see solutions to a problem and where we can access different skills and abilities. Metaphors also reveal how we're defining a problem, and how we make sense of and represent our experiences at a given moment in time. When we hear our clients use metaphors, it is important to pause, listen carefully, and explore. We want to understand their thinking as best as we can, but also, in the act of asking for explanation, we create a catalytic space for our clients to explore their feelings. Exploring metaphors can help us discover solutions we hadn't considered.

  Asking clients to think metaphorically can help them access their knowledge and capacities. Carla was a successful principal reassigned to a struggling school in our district. Although she felt confident she'd be able to manage it, before school started she experienced a wave of intense anxiety. “Respond to this question really fast, Carla,” I said one morning as we walked through the halls. “If you could transform into any animal right now, what would you be?”

  She laughed. “I'd be my cat,” she said. “My cat is calm, sweet and caring, and playful at times. But she also notices everything and if necessary, she
'll pounce.” As we talked about cats and the feline attributes that Carla could emulate, Carla became more energetic and her confidence resurfaced. Using a metaphor was a way to bypass some thoughts and feelings that were blocking Carla. Imagining her cat became a way that she was able to quickly access her skills when she felt nervous, and referencing the cat was a way that I could remind Carla of this shift.

  Exhibit 10.1 offers question stems to explore metaphors and symbolic thinking.

  Exhibit 10.1 Question Stems to Explore Symbolic Thinking

  The following questions attempt to access the right side of the brain, the creative side that thinks in symbols and metaphors. Information from this side can be very revealing and helpful in coaching. You don't need to ask all of them—be selective.

  If you could be any animal right now, what would it be?

  What animal is like your problem?

  When you're at work, what kind of animal do you feel like you are?

  When you're in a nonwork environment, what kind of animal do you feel like you are?

  If you could transform into another person—past or present, famous or not—who would that be? Why?

  What famous historical person would be able to tackle your problem? What would he/she do?

  If you could have any kind of superpower, what would it be?

  Imagine your school is a kind of water-traveling vessel such as a boat or a ship. What kind do you envision and where are you on this vessel? What are you doing?

  Think of all the different forms of water that you can: glaciers, lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, the ocean. Which one of these most resembles what change feels like to you?