Coaching Letter #194

On several topics, including a humble tribute to Mark

Hello, I hope you are well. Thank you for reading the Coaching Letter, you rock. I try to write a Coaching Letter twice a month, but frequently there is so much going on that I find it difficult to focus on just one thing, so this one is just what’s on my mind lately.

My friend Mark Rabinowitz died last week, so he has been occupying my thoughts. We have known him for a long time, since my sons were in their early teens and maybe before. When I told them that he had passed away, they were very sad, and what they said about him is what I want to write about here. They really liked Mark because he took them seriously. He was always so pleased to see them. He was genuinely interested in them as people, and treated them as he would treat any adult. He listened to them as though they were the most important people in his universe at that moment, which they may have been. He was endlessly encouraging and supportive. They came away from conversations with Mark believing that they could do anything, which I’m sure is exactly what he intended. And I guess I felt the same thing, but it was particularly striking to me that that’s what my sons recognized and could articulate. He was a role model for how to talk to students, which of course is also how we should talk to adults, and I wonder how often we do. He was a lovely, lovely man and will be much missed. May his memory be a blessing.

And because this is a Coaching Letter, I want to point out that what my sons experienced from their interactions with Mark is what should be the norm in education. He personified the Developmental Relationships Framework, which I wrote about in the most popular Coaching Letter ever, judging by the number of people who mention it to me all the time: CL #179 on what we can learn from Ted Lasso. 

Which brings me to another point. I have been playing around with the concept of a stance—see the diagram at the top of this Coaching Letter. We pay attention to observable, measurable behaviors, because they are observable and measurable. But they rely on having the knowledge and skills to enact them well. For example, I could give you a very detailed, minute-by-minute set of instructions on, say, how to perform knee replacement surgery, but those instructions would be meaningless without the knowledge and skills developed in you through an intensive medical education. And even if we have the knowledge and skills, if we don’t believe that enacting them will make a difference, then we don’t. One of the major themes of the research on teacher expectations is that even if teachers have the knowledge and skills, if they don’t believe that students have the capacity to engage in challenging tasks, then they won’t ask them to. Mark is my symbol of what it means to have a stance towards powerful relationships as defined by the DRF: his behavior was supported by his deep knowledge and skill as an educator, which in turn were built on his beliefs about people and their capabilities. It was awesome to watch and to experience, and I am grateful.

OK, I’m going to stop crying and pivot to other stuff.

If you want to dig deeper on teacher expectations, which you should, then here is the link to the articles we have compiled as part of our research for the next book.

I continue to find the book Systems for Instructional Improvement extremely helpful, and find myself pulling quotations from it all the time. As many of you know, I keep a set of slides connected to ideas in the Coaching Letter, so I added the quotation slides to that bank, in case you can use them—they currently start at slide 24, or you can search for Cobb. (The stance slide is in that deck too, currently slide 22.) We are, as I have mentioned before, organizing a book study on the book, featuring presentations from members of the research team. I am super excited about this. The link to register is now live: please sign up! The first session is April 30, 2024, 3:15 pm-4:30 pm Eastern, and we will continue to offer sessions over the course of several weeks and months. It’s free, anyone can join, so please publicize to your colleagues and networks. Many of the people who have already signed up are in different states and different countries, so we’d really like to encourage that; the idea of being in a book study with educators in South Africa and Korea seems super cool to me. And even if you don’t join the book group, read the book! But seriously, sign up for the book study, it will be awesome.

I have become a little obsessed (or perhaps more accurately, re-obsessed) with strategic plans and school improvement plans, and have been looking at them in the light of what I have learned, or understood better, over the last few years, since The Strategy Playbook was published. And several things stand out, perhaps variations on the same thing: plans are much too vague. I read things like: “Develop, monitor, and continuously improve data-driven practices to foster excellence in student learning experiences” and I think yeah? How are you going to do that? And what is that, exactly? And if you read on, it goes straight to assessment: “To assess progress toward a shared understanding and high-quality implementation of Focused Collaboration, we will use data from monitoring the established observation tool and use the results to strengthen a culture of collaboration. By providing targeted feedback, resources, tools and information to support Focused Collaboration, we will help teachers effectively use student learning results to inform instructional decisions.” That could mean very many things.

As I wrote in Coaching Letter #175, which I think of as one of the more important Coaching Letters, vagueness is the enemy. When people read something vague, they don’t think “oh, I need to operationalize this and make it more concrete.” No, they think, “oh, this doesn’t apply to me” and they cheerfully go on their way. I have worked with many administrators over the years who get annoyed at teachers for saying things like “just tell me what to do.” They seem to think it is an indicator of churlishness or resistance. But I think of it as straightforward feedback: “what you are telling us is under-specified and if you expect us to change our practice you have to do better than this”. But you know, don’t take my word for it. Read Switch, by the Heath brothers. They have great language, including the idea of scripting the moves. Clarity is your friend, don’t make people figure it out for themselves, don’t make it harder than it needs to be. At the same time, don’t issue edicts; give people your best guess on best practices and ask them to test it and collect feedback—in other words, ask them to do research on their own practice, in collaboration with colleagues. The places where this is happening are providing lots of encouraging data.

So I am leaning heavily into the work of standard work, for teachers, coaches, and leaders. Even though I wrote about this in Coaching Letter #190, I’m having trouble refraining from just repeating myself. Get narrow and specific: script the moves. It’s not about what’s going to happen in the next year, it’s about what you’re going to try next week. It’s not about outcome data that is weeks or months away, it’s about what’s going on in your classroom or building right now. Don’t give people feedback on what they are doing, ask for feedback on what is getting in their way. I think I might sound like I’m ranting, so I’m just going to stop. But just so you know, almost every conversation I’m having at the moment is about standard work.

And just some housekeeping. Almost all of our upcoming Building Thinking Classrooms events are full. For more information, join this distribution list. We have merged our upcoming facilitation workshop with our Coaching In-Depth on May 8, since we realized that we were really going to be talking about the same thing in both, so I hope to see you there. And we are currently registering for Coaching for Leaders July 23-25, and The Coaching Institute in September. And I hope to see many of you at the Carnegie Summit later this month—I am super excited about that, because we are doing a lot there, and because it will be the first time I see Rydell’s and my new book in print! Woo hoo!

Again, thank you so much for reading what I write, and please let me know if there is anything I can do for you. Best, Isobel