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1 Cover
Foreword
Frederick M. Hess
Michael Sonbert is a hard-ass. You should know this before you buy his book.
If you’re looking for the usual upbeat, jargon-laden, happy talk about coaching and school improvement, you’ll want to look elsewhere. In my experience, most professional development and instructional coaching makes it all sound so easy. If you think the right thoughts, believe this research, use these protocols, and hold regular meetings, you’ll see wondrous results.
Michael Sonbert calls BS on all of this. After all, these approaches rarely deliver the promised results.
Sonbert believes, I think rightly, that it’s not all this hoopla that matters, but the discipline, rigor, and precision that you bring to what you do. He wants you to do the hard things—to focus explicitly and precisely on how a teacher engages a student, introduces a concept, or makes sense of why something didn’t work.
Like everything else that matters, this sounds easy, is hard to do, and is bloody hard to do well. That’s why, for all the time and money spent on preparation, training, PD, PLCs, workshops, instructional coaching, and the rest, most schools don’t do this stuff very well.
And that’s why I’m writing this foreword. I’m generally a skeptic when it comes to PD and instructional coaching. I don’t usually endorse books like this—I’m more likely to ignore them, or to mock them.
But the first time I saw Sonbert in action, in a Milwaukee elementary school, I thought he was onto something important. I’ve participated in or observed too many post-observation debriefs to count. Whether genial or firm, they’re usually a mix of pointers, reflections, and encouragement. Even the good ones tend to feel a little slapdash.
Watching Sonbert conduct a debrief was the opposite of that. There was no one-on-one chatter—the debrief played out in a small, intense but collegial team. Every word was measured. The questions were finely honed. The suggestions precise. The experience, I suspected, was a glimpse into what it would be like to watch Leonard Bernstein mentor a violinist or Bill Belichick explain a defensive technique.
Now, Bernstein or Belichick could coach me all day and I still wouldn’t be able to play a lick. So, I’m not promising this book will work miracles. As with anything else of value, it’ll depend on whether you’re willing, able, and inclined to use it. But if you’re sick of the feeling that you’ve seen plenty of change but little real improvement, this may be the book for you.
A number of years ago, I penned the book Cage-Busting Leadership. In it, I encouraged school and system leaders to stop accepting frustrating rules, routines, rhythms, and cultures, and to start changing them.
What Sonbert offers here is one powerful way to help make that change happen. Now, let’s be clear: I’m not saying that his Skyrocket approach is the only way—or even necessarily the best way—to do so. But it’s a promising one.
Sonbert’s emphasis on execution and doing things right should be a beacon in a field where passion, good intentions, and formulaic processes have too often been allowed to excuse ineptitude or sloppiness.
So, if I haven’t yet scared you into seeking out a cozier, cuddlier, more familiar alternative text, I’d urge you to read this book. Read it tonight, and take its advice to heart. After all, Michael Sonbert is the best kind of hard-ass, the kind who approaches his work with the passion, precision, and unrelenting discipline that is the hallmark of excellence in any endeavor.
And I think our schools need more of that. A lot more.
Good reading. And good luck.
Introduction
When I was a new teacher, I had a coach. She was great. Friendly and supportive and knowledgeable. We talked about my lessons and she gave me a lot of ideas to incorporate into my teaching. One piece of coaching she gave me was about the volume of my voice: it was too loud as I was instructing, and it was likely off-putting for the students sitting in front of me. At the time, and in hindsight, she was right. So, I lowered my voice. But it wasn’t an earth-shattering shift. It didn’t change me as a teacher. It didn’t change what my students did or what they produced, even though it was helpful.
When I was a more advanced teacher, I had a coach as well. He, too, was equally friendly, supportive, and smart. He shared ideas and materials, and I really enjoyed working with him. He provided me with sentence starters, and as a result, my students started using academic language in response to my questions and their classmates’ answers. Again, that was very helpful, but again, this coaching didn’t radically change my practice or what my students produced.
I eventually became an instructional coach myself. I wasn’t half bad: a solid relationship builder with a strong ELA background and the ability to motivate teachers. Still, if I’m being totally honest, most of what I coached teachers on early in my tenure didn’t drastically change their practice. It was what I call “suggestion-based coaching.” I thought of something, and I shared it. I shared it in a “Hey, it would be cool if you tried this” type of way. And I have no doubt I made some helpful suggestions at the time. Likely my material-share and my support around lesson planning were appreciated. And, I believe my teachers enjoyed working with me. Still, something was missing.
If you’re reading this, you likely agree that teachers need to be amazing for students. And we know that, in many places, principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, lead and master teachers, site-based teacher leaders, and so on, all coach teachers. But, too often, like me or the teachers I coached early on, the teachers aren’t improving quickly enough.
The question is, why not?
I eventually became the director of strategic partnerships at Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia, and after that, the founder of Skyrocket Educator Training, through which I have trained school leaders and teachers from district, charter, and faith-based schools from over eighty cities around the world, and have provided significant onsite support to leaders and teachers in places like Detroit, New York, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indiana, Delaware, Dallas, and Connecticut, to name a few. Through this work, I have witnessed things like what I described earlier happening in schools and classrooms nearly everywhere: well-meaning and passionate school leaders simply weren’t moving their equally well-meaning and passionate teachers nearly as quickly as they needed to. And while, when it comes to instructional coaching gaps, it can seem like every school is different and every challenge is unique to that building and those leaders, teachers, and students, there are really only three key trends that are appearing nationally.
The first