1. Create a casual, fun, and relaxed environment: With the important work required of teachers and the pressures they often face, following this principle carries more weight than ever before. Sharing ideas and discussing learning standards and instructional strategies are pertinent for this environment. But when it comes time for creation and critical thinking, don’t force everyone to execute these cognitive functions in a formal environment. This concept segues into the next key action.
2. Provide structured quiet time: Remember nap time for students? Well, we’re not quite going there, but we must utilize quiet time in an intentional way. Quiet time is best for reflection, contemplation, and creation. Quiet time can also mean alone time, depending on what your team members need. If you carve out an hour of time with your team, and your objectives for that meeting require complex thinking or creation, set aside at least thirty minutes for quiet time. A possible breakdown of this hour could look like the following.
▸ Establish objectives for collaboration. (Five minutes)
▸ Set the stage for problem solving, ask clarifying questions, share thoughts, and so on. (Ten minutes)
▸ Have quiet time for reflection, productive work, and creation. (Thirty minutes)
▸ Debrief quiet time, and share work with teammates. (Ten minutes)
▸ Conduct a closing circle to discuss next steps, actions to take, and responsibilities. (Five minutes)
3. Identify and share personality types: Coaches can find many assessments online, such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (www.mbtionline.com), CliftonStrengths (www.gallupstrengthscenter.com), and so on, that can help them decide on the best way to assess and illuminate personality types and strengths. Not only is this beneficial for advocating balanced collaborative processes, but it will also be pivotal in working one-on-one alongside teachers. Once teachers share their personality profiles in a trusting environment, you’ll begin to sense mutual understanding and respect among team members. We will fully utilize quiet time when we make connections between how we work best and how that intersects with our interactions with others.
In addition to the practical methods coaches can use to strike the right balance in their collaborative practices, coaches should also consider principles that will help keep their collaborative work on track.
Principles of Working as a Team
Obstacles like groupthink, one-size-fits-all collaboration, extroverted learning environments, and unconscious bias can quickly derail educators’ important work if they don’t have a set of guiding principles they can frequently turn to. When working with collaborative teams, I’m often reminded of a sport that only enters the limelight during the Olympic Winter Games: curling. Curling is a sport that, at first glance, makes you say to yourself, “They are sliding a stone across ice. How is that an Olympic sport? And what’s up with all of the screaming and the crazy-looking sweeper mops?” But after you watch a match, you learn to appreciate the value of this unique game. To succeed at curling, curlers must have three principles in place.
1. Focus: The gentlest touch of a stone can have a huge effect on the stone’s trajectory. It takes extreme focus and concentration for curlers to ensure they place a stone on a path to eventually land on its target.
2. Teamwork: All of the screaming that occurs is how players communicate with each other. A high level of strategy and teamwork goes into choosing the ideal trajectory and placement of a stone. Everyone has an important role in the game and must do his or her part in order for the team to successfully execute the play.
3. Peripheral vision: With the teammates’ laser focus on the stone, it’s amazing that nobody kicks a stone while sweeping. Curlers not only have a laser focus on the path of the stone but also possess excellent peripheral vision to make sure they avoid any obstacle (a player or a broom) that could alter the path of the stone.
Instructional coaches apply these principles to how they plan, collaborate, and execute their “plays.” Even while coaches remain extremely focused on the eventual goal and outcome, they must simultaneously stay on the lookout for potential obstacles in their periphery. Our actions must be truly focused and aligned with our vision.
Conclusion
Truly collaborative coaches are shining examples of how to champion diversity in our learning spaces, making teachers feel accepted, inspired, and supported. Additionally, many teachers and administrators tap successful coaches for knowledge and lean on them heavily as instructional experts, but in school cultures that continue to react to the urgent instead of prioritizing the important, their expertise often goes untapped.
Effective collaborative coaches don’t shy away from dissonance but take advantage of it as a natural process of promoting positive change. Good collaborative coaches don’t push their own opinions as the best advice but simply and humbly seek better ways of teaching and learning. Accordingly, they surround themselves with a diverse group of people with different experiences and thoughts in hopes of gaining new perspectives and new knowledge. Lifelong learning is more than just a catchy phrase to them; they live it out with purpose.
It takes a team of people with diverse talents and skills, and opportunities to dissent, for positive growth and development to occur and for the team’s plan to remain on the ideal trajectory.
TWO
TRANSPARENCY
Coaches are able to create trusting, positive, and sharing environments when they are transparent about their intentions, their goals, and even their own flaws and mistakes in teaching.
Instructional coaches start off at a disadvantage in some ways when teachers associate the coach’s role with change at the classroom level. Even inside a positive culture, if people think you, as a coach, might be attempting change to the structure of norms, defenses go up. But if teachers work in a climate where they feel coaches are trying to help them and learn alongside them, and when coaches transparently share their own flaws and weaknesses in teaching, teachers will open up to their coaches. Teachers will then want to listen and even welcome you with open arms. Author Simon Sinek (2009) articulates the connection between transparency and collaboration by making the distinction that a team is not just a group of people who work together but a group of people who trust each other. And trust can only exist through transparency.
Transparency drives action because it allows all stakeholders to drop their defenses and be palpably honest in their current understanding and practice. It advocates full disclosure and trust, which helps remove some of the most difficult barriers in communication and team culture. This chapter explores the transparency concept of naked service, offers a tool to help gauge transparency levels, and provides strategies to develop greater transparency with teachers.
Naked Service
In a culture of unconventionally high levels of transparency that enable us to redefine and rewrite the legacy and role of impactful teaching, everything is up for questioning, and nothing is off-limits. This higher echelon of transparency encourages principals, coaches, and teachers to quickly share failures and mishaps as often as they would want to share kudos and wins. Teachers have the ability to vocalize challenges in the classroom so they may receive support from coaches to help students achieve success. Everyone wins in this new realm of transparency. We must acknowledge, however, that this kind of transparency also requires a great deal of trust from all stakeholders due to the vulnerability this level of sharing creates.
Author Patrick