Robert Hargrove (2003, p. 51)
The lens of systems thinking also makes some assumptions that can alleviate our anxiety when facing a seemingly disorderly system. It contends that change is a given, which is always a useful reminder. It also proposes that conflict and tension are necessary and natural, and that complexity and diversity are good, healthy things. Finally, it reminds us that all energy moves in cycles—the energy in a classroom, in a school, and in our education system is in some phase of a cycle. If we can identify the point, and understand conditions for change, we might be able to move it into a different phase of the cycle. This is what we return to reflect on in the midyear reflection. It is essential at this phase to pull out the lens of systems thinking and reflect alone and possibly with our client about our work on system change.
Common Challenges and Helpful Responses
Challenge: I've been working with a new principal for six months, and I can't see any growth.
Lens of Adult Learning. Although it can often feel to a coach like a client is stuck or isn't making the kind of growth we want to see, if a client isn't making progress, we need to start by carefully examining our own coaching. First, go back to the goals. Do they still seem realistic? How often do you return to the goals and plan coaching sessions around them? How often do you engage the client in reflecting on the goals? Do the goals need to be broken down into sizable chunks?
Let's take a step even farther back. How did this coaching relationship come to be? What was the client's willingness to engage in coaching? What did he understand that it would be and hope to get from it? What have you noticed about how he's engaged with it? Have you engaged the client in a reflective conversation about what he's learning or how he feels he's growing? What is at stake for him in this professional development—what does he hope to get from it? What tools could you use to help the client reflect on his learning and what might be getting in the way of even greater growth?
I have sometimes felt impatient to see change in a client—I want to see growth on my timeline! Sometimes I just haven't been looking in the right place, or for the right things. Sometimes I've seen few indicators of change, and then all of sudden the client experiences a growth spurt and I'm amazed. Change is hard to predict and sometimes tricky to spot.
And sometimes people don't change—they may not want to, the conditions for learning might not be present, they may feel as if the coaching is being imposed on them, and as a coach, we have to be OK with that. Our job is not to change people; it's to offer a safe learning space.
Challenge: I've been working with a new principal and it's been going really well. Our midyear conversation was deep and intense, but I'm getting uncomfortable: I think my client might be developing romantic feelings for me.
Lens of Emotional Intelligence. Transformational coaching goes deep. We explore the depths of a person's beliefs, values, way of being, and feelings. Particularly when our clients are in vulnerable stages of their lives—taking on a new challenge, for example, and if they are in situations in which they feel isolated and in need of support, as principals often do, it's not unusual that they can develop feelings for a coach.
The feelings themselves are fine—feeling drawn to someone who has shown you kindness and compassion, who has listened to you without judgment, and who is supporting you to make big changes in how you work is understandable. But this is the coach's job, not a personal relationship. We do this because we are committed to supporting a principal or teacher to be able to better serve children. Clients can misinterpret our work with other feelings that they project onto a coach. There is nothing wrong about the client having this experience, but it is crucial that professional boundaries are clear and respected.
It is also our job to use the Lens of Emotional Intelligence to notice, name, and address these feelings which are inappropriately projected onto a coach. What is underneath is an emotional experience which the client needs to address: he may be feeling lonely in his personal life or going through a difficult time with a significant other. He needs to acknowledge his feelings and figure out how he can meet these needs, but a coach should not engage in a romantic relationship just as psychologists should not do so with their clients, or teachers with their students.
Challenge: I'm almost through my first year coaching and I feel like I'm suffering from coaching fatigue—I'm tired of being in “coach mode” all the time. I feel I always need to model coaching behaviors—the communication skills, attitudes, and beliefs. I feel like I can't ever just say what I think or feel directly. When can I just be myself?
Lens of Adult Learning. This dilemma points to where the coach is in her own learning and development. Part of the reason I became a coach is because my inclination was always to be direct and upfront, but when I told other teachers what I thought, or what they should do, I didn't see the results I wanted. They generally didn't listen and my words didn't yield the impact I wanted. I knew that being directive and instructive wasn't the most effective way to change adult practice.
When I became a full-time site-based coach, I felt I needed to be someone I wasn't. I didn't want to phrase every statement as a question, as in,“ I wonder, what would happen if you didn't shout at your students every day?” I just wanted to say, “Stop shouting!” But it didn't work when I did that. I didn't earn anyone's trust.
Coaching is a set of skills and knowledge that can be acquired. They take practice, intentionality, and time to master. In the initial stages, we can get tired. It is important to recognize our own learning trajectories and be patient with ourselves.
A coach does need to show up 100 percent of the time as a coach. That means that she never engages in unproductive conversations such as gossiping or complaining; that she consistently speaks about children in a respectful, kind way; that she honors her word; that she keeps her commitments, and that she always behaves ethically. When a coach breaks her coaching stance, even momentarily, she risks losing credibility. Clients may begin to have doubts and unconscious concerns. This stance is hard for a coach to hold; we need to be mindful and notice when we're getting tired and need a break. For all these reasons, coaches need to be connected with other coaches (ideally in a team) and we need space outside of our primary work place to off-load emotions, say whatever needs to be said, and get support.
Challenges: I'm coaching a principal who is making huge progress. We have intense conversations and she's made many changes in her practice. However, none of the central office administrators think I'm doing anything of value. They are talking about cutting funding for coaching. I want them to see how valuable coaching is!
Lens of Systems Thinking. This is a common dilemma for coaches. Our “work” often happens in private conversations behind closed doors. It can be hard for others to “see” what we're doing, but it's critical to share our practice—especially with those who make resource and funding decisions.
This dilemma raises a systems issue. The question involves how different parts of an organization share work, what outcomes are expected from different members in the organization and what kinds of data sets are considered valid. What did central office administrators believe would be the outcomes from coaching? How were these articulated? What knowledge and understanding do they have about coaching? What access do you as a coach have to these administrators? What systems are in place for you to share your work?
Another paradox in this situation is that the central office administrators might be evaluating your principal, and your work with your client is, for the most part, confidential. So how can you share your coaching work and honor the confidentiality agreements you've set with your client?
This is a dilemma, meaning it's something to manage rather than solve. Coaches need to be proactive about getting central office administrators enrolled in coaching as professional development. We need to be explicit about how we work, what we do, how we plan our work, how we measure our work, and how we gather feedback and data on it; we need to ask
for time and audience with decision-makers so that we can help them understand what coaching is. With our client's permission, we can share work plans and progress reports. We also need to ask clients to share what they're learning through coaching and how they see their practice changing. It's very useful for coaches to gather anonymous survey data every year from clients which can be shared with administrators.
Whenever there's an opportunity, a coach can also informally engage a central office administrator in a coaching conversation. Often when they get a taste of the way we listen and ask questions, they start to “get it.” They get curious and sense the possibility that coaching offers. As the field of coaching develops, coaches in schools will benefit by exploring ways to make our work public.
Part Four
Professional Development for Coaches
Chapter 15
What Is Professional Development for Coaches?
Read this when:
You are a coach seeking to develop your practice and looking for some exercises and activities you can do on your own
You are in a team of coaches engaging in professional learning
You supervise coaches and want to design support structures and a course of professional development
The Importance of a Team
For a couple years, I belonged to a team of transformational leadership coaches in the school district in which I worked. Our manager was a brilliant master coach and every week we gathered for reflection and professional development. We used structures and protocols (many of which I'll share in this chapter) to learn, to push each other's thinking, and to refine our coaching practices. We delved into book studies, conducted action-research, engaged in inquiry cycles and developed curriculum for administrators. Our team space also provided the kind of relief and rejuvenation that we needed in order to do our work—the emotional support was invaluable and impossible to garner elsewhere. I became a transformational coach through this team, with the partnership of my coach-colleagues.
My hope is that all coaches have an opportunity similar to what I had. Coaches are by nature reflective, we relish interpersonal exchanges, and most seem to have an incessant yearning to learn. But the majority of coaches I have come across work in isolation—either at a site or deployed around a district. Coaches clamor for our own PD, supervisors nod their heads in agreement, but very few opportunities or structures exist for coaches in schools to develop their practices. In order for coaching to be maximized and to deliver on its potential, coaches will need formalized, systematized structures in which to learn together. As the field of coaching develops and as the education community recognizes the impact that coaches can have on student learning and school transformation, I hope to see robust, ongoing professional development for coaches. This chapter attempts to contribute to this end.
Administrators: if you have coaches at your site, this chapter might identify ways to support them.
Who Leads a Team of Coaches?
Perhaps it is an obvious fact, but the manager of a team of coaches should be a highly experienced coach with extensive knowledge of adult learning and team development. For example, a team of math coaches must be managed by someone with deep knowledge and understanding of math and math instruction, and also of coaching—someone at the modeling level on the transformational coaching rubric (see Appendix C).
The manager of a team of coaches ideally has a vision for coaching and works from a theoretically based coaching model. A coaching program composed of a hodgepodge of activities will not be as effective as one that has a clear foundation in adult learning and theories of change, and that aligns the elements of its program to this base. A coaching model should also be driven by an explicit theory of action. Coaching programs that struggle seem to be those in which these key elements are undeveloped or missing. Finally, a robust and effective coaching program must attend to the learning needs of its coaches.
Focusing Professional Development for Coaches
Professional development for coaches must focus on refining coaching skills. Deepening a content coach's knowledge of specific instructional practices and curriculum is important for content area coaches but they also need to learn coaching skills. If a coach is an expert on early literacy practices but knows nothing about how to get a reluctant teacher to try them out, this knowledge is useless. A content coach must also learn how to engage teachers in conversations about the equity issues that surface in their classroom and about how to interrupt those inequities. These are not skills that most of us inherently have and as soon as we begin coaching, we recognize the need for a vast skill and knowledge set.
Often the question comes up about what makes a great coach. The answer is a coach engaged in ongoing work on him- or herself. The answer is not someone who asks great questions … All our “doing” is affected profoundly by the way in which we “be.”
Frank Ball (2008, p. 33)
Ideally, coaches would work together in teams under the guidance of a master coach. However, if these conditions don't exist, coaches can partner with and support each other. Coaches can establish structures such as peer coaching to learn from and support each other. This chapter offers many ways for coaches to reflect on our practice and improve our skills.
Professional Development for Coaches
To plan PD for coaches we follow the same steps as when planning PD for any other adult learner. First, we need to know what kind of coach we're developing—which coaching model will be used and how the coach's work will be defined. We also need a way to assess a coach's skill set and knowledge base. Finally, we need to identify which learning activities could best help a coach develop her practice.
Start with the End in Mind
In order to design a professional development program for coaches we need a comprehensive definition of a school-based coach. While we have standards that describe the skills and knowledge components for students, teachers, administrators, and teacher leaders—there is no general equivalent for coaches. (However, a set of standards for middle and high school literacy coaches has been created—see the recommended resources in Appendix E.) Therefore, first we need to articulate the requisite skills, knowledge, capacities, and perhaps dispositions for coaches working in schools.
The International Coach Federation (ICF), the world's largest nonprofit coaching organization, offers a useful starting point. Although not grounded in an education context, this organization's professional coaching core competencies identifies a lengthy set of foundational coaching skills and dispositions that all coaches could work toward refining. However, school-based coaches need an additional set of competencies that reflect the context in which we work and a commitment toward a transformed education system.
In Appendix C I offer a transformational coaching rubric for self-assessment and reflection and as a framework for professional development. This rubric proposes a set of essential competencies and establishes a starting point for a discussion on what an education coach should know and be able to do. A coach could use this in a variety of ways: to reflect on her own capacities and identify areas of growth, to support a peer coaching arrangement, or as an evaluation tool with a supervisor.
With a rubric or set of coaching competencies, a coach can identify her strengths and areas for growth. The following section describes activities that can help refine a coaching practice. These incorporate various aspects of coaching including the practical and technical, activities, questioning skills, and techniques to develop a grounded and calm presence.
Learning Activities
The activities suggested in this chapter are aligned with the six domains of coaching in the transformational coaching rubric. The first two learning activities—role-plays and consultancies—are highly effective and can support development of all competencies on the rubric. However, they require a team. These two exercises are extremely high leverage in developing coaching capacities.
Role-plays. A role-play creates a real or fictional coaching scenar
io to act out with a colleague. Exhibit 15.1 offers an example of this process. On my website there are scenarios that could be used and tool to assess role-plays. The best role-plays are usually those in which a coach poses her own authentic challenging situations.
Exhibit 15.1. Role-Playing
Three people are ideal for a role-play—one person is the coach, another is the client, and the third is the observer who scripts the conversation and takes notes.
To prepare:
Select roles—coach, client, and observer.
Determine the scenario for a role-play. This could be a past coaching conversation where you felt stuck or a future coaching conversation that you'd like to practice.
Coach explains the scenario and provides necessary background information. Coach might ask the “client” to be a specific way (“be resistant to my suggestions”). Coach might also ask the observer to pay attention to specific areas on which he or she wants feedback (on questioning strategies, nonverbal communication, and the like).
Role-play for ten minutes.
Observer shares observations with the coach in response to the feedback he or she requested. Share specific quotes whenever possible.
Coach and client reflect on role-play and observations.
If desired, coach can practice again on the same issue trying different strategies, or participants can change roles and practice the same scenario again.
The Consultancy Protocol
Another extremely useful structure is the consultancy protocol shown in Exhibit 15.2. This is a structured process to help someone think through a dilemma or problem. The purpose of using this structure is for the presenter to share her dilemma and get multiple perspectives that can help deepen her understanding and uncover ways to work through the issue.
The Art of Coaching Page 32