As my career developed, coaching continued to play a central role. In the 1970s, I was an elementary science specialist working with 240 teachers in Weymouth, Massachusetts on how to implement hands-on science lessons. We didn’t call that coaching either, but it was. We had no model, so we built one. From a pretty ugly start to a nicely refined model, my colleague Jack Hackett and I shaped a method to help elementary teachers add skills to their repertoires.
Through years as an administrator and college professor, coaching was always with me. From schools with excellent instruction to those that struggled, from large urban districts to small rural schools, I continued coaching and working with coaches. This book is based on those experiences. It is not about the instructional strategies themselves but the process of teaching others to discover those skills and add them to their teaching. It is about fulfilling that dream of lifelong learning for teachers, coaches, administrators, and, most of all, the students they serve.
As I was getting ready to leave the first school in which I taught, I was getting a little emotional trying to thank Matt Schnur for helping me get better. He just asked me to “pass it on.” I have tried to make that a hallmark of my career—to get better and to pass it on. Coaching can be formal or informal, but helping each other get better truly is a part of lifelong learning for those of us who profess to be educators. It is the very heart of teaching. The worst teacher you have ever seen can get better and so can the National Teacher of the Year. Too often, we as teachers stay within our silos; instead, embrace your skills and share your strengths with a colleague. Getting better is the only thing.
How to Use This Book
This book is a comprehensive resource for coaches and leaders who want to use coaching to improve instruction in their schools or districts. Chapter 1 provides rationale and research on the efficacy of coaching—one of the only ongoing and embedded professional development devices that creates significant and sustained change in teachers’ skillsets. Chapter 2 focuses on the coaching cycle, a course of events that work together to guide teachers through the change process. Chapter 3 describes methods and techniques that coaches employ to communicate with teachers and help them through the process. Considerations for developing or improving a school- or districtwide coaching program are the subject of chapter 4. Peer coaching, both as a program in itself or as a tool for a coach to extend his or her reach, comprises chapter 5. Finally, chapter 6 explores the responsibilities of coaches or administrators who supervise coaching programs. Readers can investigate these chapters sequentially or seek out topics of particular interest. In addition, the appendix presents forms and other practical resources that coaches and leaders can use in their daily work with teachers. On the whole, this book will guide you as you gain the knowledge and implement the practices that constitute coaching for significant and sustained change.
Chapter 1
Coaching and Change in Education
Coaching is about change. The purpose of any coach working with a practitioner—whether an athlete, a musician, or a classroom teacher—is to improve performance. There are, of course, many ways to improve performance, but coaching provides a personalized, one-to-one, focused plan to get better. It is a highly effective and highly versatile method of improving teaching and learning. In a school setting, a coach might help teachers practice new instructional strategies, master a recently adopted curriculum, incorporate new technologies, work on areas of concern in their evaluations, improve classroom management—the list goes on and on.
The next few pages set the stage for this book by reminding educators that change is constant in our profession, that new skills are required to stay current, and that change is difficult. This chapter will also describe why coaching is the vehicle for the needed change and what effective coaching looks like in schools.
In 1969, I was a second-year teacher in upstate New York. The National Science Foundation scheduled a conference in August at a resort in the Catskill Mountains. I asked my principal to send me to the conference, but he responded that it was too expensive and such privileges were reserved for senior teachers. I begged! The answer was still no. I paid for the three-day conference out of my own pocket. I drove my old Plymouth and crashed on the couch in another teacher’s room.
I loved the sessions (and the vendor’s chocolate treats) and brought home a thick folder of great ideas. This folder, I thought, contained the ideas that would make me a terrific teacher! I started the year planning to implement new strategies any day now. The folder next surfaced on my desk in late October (oops!), but I renewed my commitment to try out some of the strategies to engage my students in learning. It surfaced again when I cleaned my desk at the end of the semester. Wow, what great ideas were in that folder! At the end of the year I threw it out, because if I hadn’t tried out a single new idea from that folder in a year, I wasn’t going to.
Most of the thousands of teachers with whom I have worked relate to this story. Seminars and conferences generate ideas and strategies but attendees rarely incorporate them into everyday practice.
Change Is a Constant in Education
In my foundations of education class, we studied a history of educational change. From John Dewey to Benjamin Bloom, there seemed to be a small book full of change. To review this history in a broad sense, three leading thinkers are key. Dewey (1938) brought interactivity into the didactic world of teaching and learning. Ralph Tyler (1949) provided the first critical understanding of curriculum and assessment. Bloom (1956) edited a taxonomy of educational objectives that transformed how educators structure learning. As educators gained knowledge about how learning takes place in the brain, accepted the differing ways people think, and reviewed research about teaching and learning, the rate of change accelerated. Schools, districts, states, and nations began to call for accountability, which brought additional change.
Every part of schooling is in flux. Curricula at every level are constantly shifting through several iterations of curriculum mapping, into multiple variations of state standards, the Common Core State Standards, and other guiding documents. Each of these has required teachers to learn new skills, work cooperatively in new settings, and apply new teaching strategies. Teachers have also needed new skills and processes to incorporate new knowledge about the brain and diverse learners. Schools have codified models of instruction to define good instructional practices and standards for evaluation. The political and social climate puts additional pressure on schools and teachers. The goal has always been to graduate students who can contribute to the work force and function in society. As workforce needs shift away from repetitive labor toward technical work that requires more education, so do the desired results of schooling. Education is an institution of change which now comprises a library.
And yet, despite all of this knowledge—about how we learn, how curriculum should be constructed, and how we should teach—individual classrooms stay the same. There are still college classrooms where professors lecture about hands-on learning. There are still middle school classrooms where the teacher holds a mathematics textbook and asks students to copy down algorithms as she copies them from the book. Many classrooms—maybe even most classrooms—do not reflect the latest knowledge or best practices in education.
Changes in Instructional Practices Are Needed
Despite the continuous transformation of many aspects of education, further change is needed. There is a significant perception that public education is doing poorly (Harvey, 2018). School