Here’s the thing: it’s just not possible to become proficient at “Chopsticks” and Tchaikovsky at the same time, the same way it’s not possible to become proficient at giving clear directions and checking for understanding at the same time. It’s too much, and these tasks are too different.
This is why the core belief behind the Skyrocket approach is that teachers should be coached where they are and not where you want them to be. That can be a challenge for school leaders who feel the urgency to “fix” everything at once, and it’s going to be a theme throughout this book.
Our approach is a long-game approach. It’s about building foundational skills, and layering on top of them more and more advanced skills. This means no more training a teacher on writing objectives when they can’t get their students to stop talking, because even the most effective lesson, in the hands of a teacher who can’t get students’ attention, will fall flat. Also, the teacher will likely feel disheartened and may lose faith in their coach and, potentially, the students. A coach in this situation might even start to doubt themselves. And lower coach confidence often results in less directive and more general coaching—the same type of suggestion-based coaching I provided to teachers early in my career.
Coaching teachers where they are does not mean we lower the bar. Certainly not. In fact, I’d argue Skyrocket is one of the most—if not the most—intense coaching models in education today, and the intensity and precision of our model will become evident as you read on. We train school leaders to land on a teacher’s highest-lever teacher action to increase student outcomes. After that, the leader designs and executes a practice session that will move the teacher forward immediately. Then the leader provides real-time coaching and follow-up support to ensure the teacher action sticks. (This three-step process—Ignition, Launch, and Orbit—has ample time dedicated to it in this book.)
If you have designs on running a marathon, I wouldn’t train you by having you run an entire marathon on your first day. We’d have to build to that. That might be your end goal, but trying to do that on day one or in week one would be a formula for failure, just like asking the first-week piano student to play “Chopsticks” and Tchaikovsky in the same lesson. Without adequate support, success is even more difficult. That’s why leaders often find themselves having the same conversations with teachers in March that they were having in September. It’s too hard to provide feedback on, collect data on, or design practice for too many skills at once.
I was in a school recently that had a schoolwide initiative around higher-order questioning. This seems like a reasonable thing for a school to be working on. We want students to engage with harder and harder material, and higher-order questioning is a great way to help get there. But as I began sitting in on coaching meetings and talking to teachers, many were so far away from being able to create the space for a higher-order question to even land with their students that it was largely a waste of time to provide them training on it. I shared this data and the school leaders agreed. They then decided to coach only a few teachers on higher-order questioning (as it was a logical next step for them), while coaching everyone else exactly where they were.
What I’m suggesting is that, even if a schoolwide instructional focus is present, individual teachers are still coached—in the finite amount of time a coach has with a teacher—on the skill they personally need to work on to most increase student outcomes in their room.
Right now, you may be thinking, how do we land on that thing? And how do we train on it? How do we ensure the teacher gets good and stays good at it? Our three-step process provides the answers for these three questions. But before we get there, I want to reiterate that core belief: Teachers should be coached where they are and not where you want them to be. Because to get them to where you want them to be, you need them to get really good where they are now.
Now that we’ve discussed this core distinction in our approach, I think it’s important to make another distinction, between what we at Skyrocket consider coaching and what many schools, networks, districts, and consultants consider coaching. What most people in education consider coaching is what we consider support. It’s important to name this, because you’re likely reading this and reflecting on your own teacher development program, which is great. But I’d like to ask you to think about coaching and support in the following ways throughout this book: for the sake of uniformity, for the sake of clarity, and for the sake of simplicity.
Support, as we see it, is discussing a lesson, maybe sharing some materials, or talking about a student discipline issue. It’s a conversation about the teacher’s class. It’s not terribly structured, no skill is modeled, no practice occurs, and there aren’t any deadlines or deliverables set at the end of it. It’s talking about how to get James to stop sleeping in class. It’s helping a teacher organize a lunch meeting with some students he’s struggling to build relationships with. It’s telling a teacher to use popsicle sticks to ensure more students are called on (this one happens a lot). It’s showing the teacher the worksheet you used when you taught main idea and telling them that they can use it too. And meetings like that are fine sometimes. But those meetings likely don’t build skill. And what was discussed likely isn’t transferrable (like a deep dive into writing objectives would be, for example). When a meeting like that ends, even if the teacher feels great, he probably didn’t get better at anything. He might have a few more tools in his toolbox, and he likely feels supported (hence the name), but he’s not more well-equipped to design tomorrow’s lesson or to deliver clear directions. That’s because those things that were worked on are prescriptions and not habits.
This distinction between prescriptions and habits is important. A prescription is a basketball coach telling her star player, after the player suffered an Achilles injury, to switch to a new brand of sneakers because that brand offers more support in the Achilles area. This is helpful and important, but it’s not a habit. It happens once and it’s over. Like an instructional leader suggesting a teacher switch the seats of two students who are talking to each other throughout instruction.
Coaching, as we see it, is very different. It’s structured and focused. It’s heavy on modeling, practice, design, and feedback. It’s directive and grounded in data. All in service of building habits that teachers will continue long after the coaching cycle is complete.
I opened the introduction of this book writing about my first and second coaches. I didn’t, however, mention my third coach. My relationship with her was very different. In her first observation of me, I closed the lesson by telling twenty-eight middle-school students that they’d mastered the objective (I knew to do this much). But when pushed by her, after the students left, to name how I knew that they’d mastered it, I couldn’t provide anything beyond, “I just know my students.”
This wasn’t good enough for her (thank goodness). Because while I was doing a lot of student-to-student responses, group work, and peer editing, I wasn’t always planning effectively. Which made modeling and then providing feedback to students that much harder, as I didn’t totally know what I was looking for. And if success was somewhat of a mystery to me, it was definitely a mystery to my students.
My coach trained me to provide a model and a clear set of steps for every lesson, as well as an evaluation rubric I could use (which became a self-evaluation rubric that students could use), to determine if they’d actually mastered the day’s content.
I never taught another lesson without providing and then modeling a transferable set of steps for students (my class didn’t become less interactive, however, but more, as students were now engaging more deeply and providing more robust and precise feedback to each other when asked, because they more clearly knew what success looked like). Using these steps, I was able to more effectively check for understanding, as I knew exactly what I was looking for. Her coaching led to radical change in my practice and what my students produced. And while there are many measures of success (and, yes, students are much, much more than test scores), that year, 35 percent more of my students