MOVING COACHING FROM LIGHT TO HEAVY

A recent blog by Kim Cofino, a 21st Century Literacy Specialist at the International School in Bangkok, whom I’ve met through Twitter and online, triggered this week’s post.

Kim, learning with a coaching team was studying Coaching: Approaches and Perspectives edited by Jim Knight, focusing on a chapter written by Joellen Killion, Coaching Heavy and Coaching Light. (I am personally looking forward to working with Jim and Joellen in Oct at the Instructional Coaches’ Conference in Kansas.)
Joellen writes...

...that there are two kinds of coaching – coaching light and coaching heavy. The difference essentially is the coaches’ perspective, beliefs, role decisions, and goals, rather than what coaches do. Coaching light occurs when coaches want to build and maintain relationships more than they want to improve teaching and learning. From this perspective, coaches act to increase their perceived value to teachers by providing resources and avoiding challenging conversations. (p.22)

Coaching heavy, on the other hand, includes high-stakes interactions between coaches and teachers, such as curriculum analysis, data analysis, instruction, assessment, and personal and professional beliefs and how they influence practice. Coaching heavy requires coaches to say “no” to trivial requests for support and to turn their attention to those high-leverage services that have the greatest potential for teaching and learning. Coaching heavy requires coaches to work with all teachers in a school, not just those who volunteer for coaching services. Coaching heavy requires coaches to seek and use data about their work and regularly analyze their decisions about time allocation, services and impact. (p.23 -24)

Coaches will want to read Kim’s blog as she reflects on how she consciously or unconsciously decides to work light or heavy.

In my training with coaches, I suggest that the role of coach is to see that teachers continually have some degree of discomfort. It is that discomfort (consciousness) that motivates growth. The reason to study data is to find discomfort…something they’d like to change. If a teacher is overwhelmed with discomfort, a coach offers support, empathy, and ideas (options) to reduce the stress to a manageable level. If the teacher is comfortable, the coach helps identify data or an observation that raises discomfort and suggest the need for change (growth).

Questioning is often the skill that coaches use to enter the heavy coaching arena…
Where during the lesson did you find yourself feeling discomfort with the student performance? Why?
What student responses surprised you?
Sometimes I ask teachers to predict individual student scores, prior to an assessment. Then, compare their predictions to the results.
Which students’ achievement falls under your expectations for that learner?
To a grade level team, department, or for whole faculty-Which students are we serving well? Which students are we “hit and miss”? Which students must we honestly say we are not serving?

Coaches, supervisors, leaders, and teaching colleagues in professional learning communities need to become comfortable bringing discomfort to colleagues. In other words, we need to create environments, communities, and relationships where we are comfortable with discomfort.

That environment requires trust and respect. I suggest that the trust and respect is built from a shared commitment to students. “I know the reason you are asking me a heavy question is that you care about my students' learning and you know that I care about their learning.”

I just finished spending three days with teacher leadership teams in 5 schools within a district-3 elementary, a junior high, and a high school. These teams are tasked with deciding the professional development program for their building. I pushed the teacher leaders to agree to do observations in colleague’s classrooms focusing on observing students’ behaviors. Our goal was to see if students are doing what they need to be doing to reach the schools desired student achievement goals. If not, what changes would teachers need to make to get the desired student behaviors and what PD would support teachers in making those changes.

These teacher leaders were VERY uncomfortable doing the observations. Many teachers were uncomfortable having the observations occur.
Discovery…five out of the five teacher leadership teams decide to create a plan for their colleagues to do observations and discussions similar to the ones they had done. They are planning to spread more discomfort. Why? They found it generates learning for teachers and they agreed that their students’ learning outcomes are too important for them to stay light…..they are going HEAVY! Congratulations to these brave, proud, committed leaders!

DANIEL PINK ON THE SURPRISING SCIENCE OF MOTIVATION

I recently met with a PLC consisting of 3rd 4th and 5th grade teachers early in their school year. The group was struggling with two new district/building policies put in place.

First, a district policy that homework scores not count in student grades. This decision was made after the recognition that there were substantial numbers of students who failed courses but had more than passing standardized test scores.
The decision was made that grades needed to better reflect learning gains.

The second was a building recommendation from the principal that scheduled recess might not be the best use of time.
This was based on physical education being scheduled daily. The principal’s suggestion was to take recess when the teacher saw it was needed rather than a schedule that had to be met.

The teachers reported that they were stuck with the question, “How do we motivate students to do homework?”. In previous years teachers shared with students that doing their homework impacted their grades. For students not motivated by grades, staying in at recess time to do homework served as a penalty most wanted to avoid. New policies seemed to remove the carrot and stick of past practice.




My first response was to suggest that they would have to teach students the value of homework…How is homework an example of effort invested in learning and what is the payoff for that effort investment? As I began to explore the purposes of homework, the first problem emerged. Common practice among the group was that the whole class had the same homework assignment. It would be hard to imagine that there weren’t some students who didn’t need the extra practice that the assignment provided and that some probably couldn’t do the assignment without parental help (which some would get and some wouldn’t). Lots of questions then emerged for further teacher reflection and learning.

A good start may be to view the Daniel Pink TED video (below) where Pink illustrates for business leaders what the research tells us about motivation and why the carrot and stick approach is becoming increasingly less effective.

Pink provides some great experiments that illustrate that rewards were effective with simplistic, straight forward tasks that involve little creative thinking or problem solving. Rewards tend to narrow the focus and can “get in the way” of original solution generation. While “straight forward” describes some homework assignments, its not a common theme that we’d want students to internalize.

Pink presents three elements of motivation that struck me as the “payoffs” for effort I’d examine with students:

Autonomy- the ability to direct your own life- Students should find that as they work hard (effort) they get increasing autonomy….more choice. A problem in many elementary schools is that students’ choices decrease as the grade level increases so kindergarten students often have more autonomy than 5th graders.

Mastery- the desire to get better and better at something- Students need the opportunity to see that the “payoff” of effort spent on homework is increased mastery. For some students, focusing on a grade on the homework may actually get in the way of recognizing the mastery. I may get a passing grade before I’ve worked hard enough to increase mastery. Or, I may be doing the wrong homework…practicing a skill I’ve mastered and not seeing payoff.

Purpose- providing service to something larger than ourselves- Many teachers have experienced the effort that students invest when they have the opportunity to work at real life assignments that make a contribution. See the story from an earlier blog where a student’s senior project had her provide school supplies to students impacted by Katrina. She states that what started as an assignment turned into a real investment of effort.

Marv Marshall”s newsletter Promoting Responsibility & Learning #97, September 2009 has this statement from his new book, PARENTING WITHOUT STRESS: How to Raise Responsible Kids While Keeping a Life of Your Own

Carrots are no more effective than sticks for helping young people make responsible choices and become moral and ethical adults.

Marv suggested viewing Pink’s video.
I’d encourage you to watch Daniel Pink’s video and see what ideas it generates for your work with teachers and students.



Here’s one that caught my attention:

Google provides employees with the autonomy to spend 20% of their work time on any project of their choice. A great start for our classrooms?What learning might my students produce with 20% of their time studying something of their choice?

HOARDING INDIVIDUALS...SHARING FRANCHISES...TEAMS

In a blog post titled Hoarding Culture or Sharing Culture, Rob Jacobs provides the following descriptions:

Hoarding Culture--- teachers and schools keep their expertise, their knowledge, their ideas, and their innovations to themselves.

Sharing Culture---- these teachers know that their fellow teachers, their fellow principals, and their fellow schools can benefit and should benefit from their knowledge, ideas, creativity, and information. Sharers get a “reward” out of helping others benefit from what they know.

Jacobs introduced me to an approach to knowledge management called “Yokoten.”

The Japanese word means “taking from one place to another.” Toyota’s culture is a sharing culture. They correctly understand that knowledge, ideas, and data are organizational resources. A good idea should not be wasted but should be implemented. In addition, and this is key, a good idea should not just be used in a single location, but should be exported to all parts of the organization. Their sharing culture obligates that an individual share with their peers and leaders are expected to circulate good ideas throughout the organization.1

Jacobs’ descriptions fit with the progression flow that I have been identifying for Professional Learning Communities.

(Click on slide to enlarge)

…from individuals meeting to franchises to teams.

At the initial stage, individuals meeting, you often hear people complaining that they have to go to the meeting: “ this is my time I should be doing my work” With the emphasis on MY, it’s a hoarding culture.

The first step forward is when teachers begin helping each other. ”When I had a student like that, I found this worked”... When a teacher’s shared idea or strategy is accepted with appreciation, a sharing culture begins to grow. When teachers find that ideas from colleagues improve student learning, commitment to time in PLCs increases.

Franchises are formed when teacher share their creativity with each other and work together to design instructional or assessment strategies together, such as 9 week common assessments or a unit of instruction. In the early stages of franchising, strategies designed together are implemented individually. A team designs a common assessment but doesn’t look at each other’s lesson plans.

As PLCs progress from franchises toward teams, teachers begin to modify their individual practices to align with others creating a consistent practice that benefits students. A PLC of freshman teachers decides on common notebook criteria for their courses that encourages organizational skills. A 6-7-8 middle school PLC implements common expectations for students over the three years.

At full implementation, PLCs become teams. Members take shared responsibility for student success. On a K-1 -2 vertical PLC where the team has the same students over three years, members share responsibility for all the students across the three years. On a high school science PLC a biology teacher assumes responsibility for students’ success in chemistry.

Student achievement is important-too important- for a hoarding culture or working as individuals. Our students deserve the best that sharing and teaming can offer.


1Hoarding Culture or Sharing Culture blog by Rob Jacobs

TIGER WOODS AND TWO COACHING BELIEFS

In Quality Teaching in a Culture of Coaching, I describe the need for everyone to be coached and suggest that the stronger a person’s skill set becomes, the more coaching they should receive. Debbie Watts a new instructional coach in Sumner County TN produced the following visual to introduce the coaching concept to her school. Read below…

Two beliefs can build a successful coaching culture:

Belief No. 1: Everyone working in a school should be observed once a week and receive feedback.

Belief No. 2: The most skilled and professional educators should receive the most coaching.

Why would we have a belief like number two? Simple. It generates more options for teachers that are already good or great.

The farther up the ladder of success one goes, the more coaching is needed. It’s what I call the Tiger Woods syndrome. Tiger had only his dad as a coach when he first started playing golf. Now he needs multiple coaches. As he gets better, he needs to improve even more until he becomes the best. As he achieves success, he needs to achieve more. He needs coaches to improve his swing, and he probably also needs coaches to help him deal with fame and success. He most assuredly needs a financial coach!

The most skilled and professional educator in a school can serve as a role model for others. This person models for others the ideas that

• constant improvement is part of the profession;
• it’s okay to be coached as a successful professional;
• coaching is an opportunity to learn new strategies, to come up with creative lesson plans, to increase one’s bag of tricks, so to speak, in order to avoid falling into the rut of doing the same things year after year;
• coaching doesn’t mean you need fixing. You’re not broken. You just want to improve and get better at what you do;
• you gain a solid return on the investment of teacher education by learning every day better ways to teach.

Providing coaching to even the most skilled professionals not only allows those professionals to improve but gives them recognition— someone cares. Skilled professionals—great teachers—need acknowledgment and recognition. In many vocations, the more you do, the more you’re ignored. You are taken for granted. Good people—great people—need recognition too.

Now see Debbie’s visual: