We all know folks who are born with innate talents. Yay for them. The rest of us need all the help we can get. Professional coaching has become a very accepted and productive strategy for improving professional skills. Today, given state and local mandates for improved educator effectiveness, teachers and principals everywhere should be accessing professional coaching as a means for polishing existing talents and learning new skills.
There was a time when a baccalaureate degree led to a teacher’s license and periodic post-graduate course credits or course equivalency units sustained that license for the duration of an educator’s career. Historic professional development entailed an educator’s attending classes and writing a paper or creating a project or taking a test. Not so much today. The definition and display of professional competence has and is changing dramatically. In Wisconsin, my home state, educator effectiveness is a rated composite of observed educator behaviors and the measured value of student performances on mandated tests and student learning objectives (SLOs). The pathway for today’s educators to learn their new effectiveness competencies is through a much more dynamic professional development (PD) scenario than yesteryears’. Contemporary PD leads to outcomes that are measured and an educator’s measured outcomes must meet “or exceed mandated performance standards to sustain an educator’s professional employment. “Be an effective professional or leave the profession” is the new credo.
Professional coaching serves two powerful purposes for today’s educator. First, professional coaching is the bridge between learning and performing new effectiveness standards. Using the language of instructional design, coaching supports the guided and independent practice of new learning. And, second, professional coaching elevates the level of the educator’s practice; it moves the measurement needle to higher levels of effectiveness. Professional coaching of educators is all about effectiveness training.
When an educator agrees to be coached, she should expect three things from her coach. Her coach must be a critical observer and a laser-pointed critic who causes her to open her professional work to her own objective reflection and improvement. Anything less is a waste of time. There have been too many evaluators in the past who sat silently in the back of the classroom for a mandatory 45-minute observation or two and spent the majority of their time watching a child of interest or reading bulletin boards only to submit a milquetoast evaluation that neither identified professional strengths nor exposed weaknesses. For too many educators and for too long a time, milquetoast accurately described their professional evaluations and professional improvement plans. No longer.
Today’s professional evaluators are evaluating effectiveness of the teacher in executing a set of district adopted teacher practices and in causing children to achieve prescribed levels of results on academic tests. Principals are being evaluated in the same manner using adopted administrator standards and their ability to cause their faculty to cause children to achieve or improve their achievement on academic tests; the latter may seem like a stretch but it is a real part of the evaluation design.
State and local authorities have pointed to professional development as the means for assisting teachers and principals to become increasingly effective. Many state plans for professional development include references to “professional coaches” as resources for teachers and principals. Most state and district plans are indistinct in prescribing the role or expectations of a professional coach. It is the “open door” for coaching that allows teachers and principals to connect with “their coach” and create a very personalized professional development plan for their “improved effectiveness.”
The following portrays what a coach should tell a teacher (or principal) in establishing a coaching relationship.
Coaching as Critical Observation
Her Coach says, “I am your critical observer. Both words are essential. I will be critical and I will observe everything. I have a singular agenda. Your district adopted Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching as its template for educator effectiveness. My job is to cause you to be a very competent practitioner of that Framework. I have no other agenda; I just forgot every other effectiveness template except Danielson’s.
I will be critical in my observation. When you show me your instructional design, I am looking at how well you know the children you are instructing and not just their names. I am looking for your knowledge of their learning preferences and their learning needs and how well you personalize your design for their individual success. I am looking at your unwrapping of their grade level standards and your schedule of incremental learning objectives. I am looking at your array and use of varied formative assessments and reteaching activities, when needed, and learning extensions for children who learned from your initial instruction. I am watching you through Danielson’s eyes and I am watching you through your children’s eyes. And, I am a critical watcher.”
http://danielsongroup.org/framework/
Coaching as Focused Criticism
Her Coach says, “I will start with the black and white. The black is my telling you where you are not coherent with Danielson and the white is where you are. I will not generalize, but will identify the element of the domain as it relates to your work and tell you how effectively you are portraying that element. I will not shirk from calling the ‘balls and strikes.’ We will not mince words.
I tell you now and will remind you every time we talk that I am your Coach. I am employed by the school district, but I report to you alone. What I tell you is for your professional improvement; it is not connected in any way to your professional evaluation. That is your principal’s assignment.
As I describe specific areas of your work, you must listen carefully and ask for any and all clarification you need to understand what I am telling you. I will check your understanding, just as an effective teacher checks a student’s progressive understanding, but you also have a responsibility to seek clarification.
It is essential that we both understand that professional criticism is a good thing when it is designed for professional improvement. Criticism is not mean-spirited or demeaning; it is descriptive of your work. Professional criticism is highly personal, because it is all about you and your work, and it is highly impersonal, because it is transitory. Everything that you take as a negative criticism can be turned into a plan for improvement and cause you to be highly successful.
Finally, even on your best day I will make a criticism. It is what I do. Teaching is so complex and children so diverse that every practice can be improved given these changing variables.”
Coaching that Causes Objective Reflection
Her Coach says, “For every criticism I make, we will create a plan for your improvement. This is the coaching loop. ‘I observe, I criticize, we talk and plan and design new practice, you teach, I observe, I criticize…’ This loop works as long as you are able to engage in objective reflection. I can do all that I do and we can make wonderful plans, but you must understand that is your objectivity in reflecting upon your work and my coaching of your work that will increase your professional effectiveness over time. Your improvement is within you and we need to find it and develop it together.
If you are game, we will begin today. If you are game, we will work together throughout the school year and for years to come.”
It is probable that the world of professional development experienced a true paradigm shift when governmental mandates changed to include educator effectiveness models. The old paradigm that said “professional development is static and passive” also told the educator “you are an individual who can successfully satisfy these rules without much assistance.” The new paradigm that says “professional development must improve an educator’s measured performance of exacting standards and practices” opens the door for professional coaching. And, that door stands wide open with a sign that reads “Coaches Enter Here.”