Coaching Letter #239

On coaching and systems

Stavanger Harbor, which has nothing to do with this post

Hi there! Thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You rock! I’m writing this in Stavanger, Norway, where it’s 57 degrees and rainy. Bliss. For those of you who have received emails from me at weird hours, this should explain a lot. Wherever you are, I hope you are well and happy.

This Coaching Letter has two purposes: to convince you to come to our Coaching Institute (or hire us to come to you—we do that) and to talk about individual v. systems approaches to improvement, using coaching as a really excellent example of that. Here is the TL:DR version:

Sign up for the Coaching Institute! We have redesigned it around a different way of thinking about coaching and instructional improvement. The dominant coaching literature often presents two options: either teachers choose whether to be coached and what to work on, or coaches and supervisors impose improvement from above. We reject the assumption that these are the only two possibilities. A district can and should establish a shared, equity-focused model of high-quality instruction and identify promising high-leverage practices, while teams of teachers and coaches test, study, adapt, and refine those practices across classrooms. That is neither evaluation disguised as coaching, nor is it coaching based solely on individual preference; it is a system intent on improving itself through disciplined collective inquiry into how to make good instruction more reliable for every student.

Coaching is, by and large, associated with improving the individual. Certainly, the most popular books on coaching are all about that approach. And, in my opinion, their argument rests on assumptions that I think are shaky. Specifically, there are very well known proponents of coaching—the gurus in the field—who suggest that the client gets to decide all kinds of things, like what to work on, and whether or not to engage in coaching. I find this position absurd, because it puts the organization in the position of being entirely beholden to the choices of its employees. Is there another profession that would give this argument the time of day? And its rationale seems to be based on a rejection of an alternative that they assume is the only alternative, but, in fact, is not.

OK, to be clear, I understand the argument (let’s call it the “choice” argument), which goes something like: teachers are professionals who exercise judgment in highly complex situations—true; coaching is a partnership between professionals, not a mechanism for correcting deficient teachers. I agree with this. The argument continues that if the coach or administrator decides what a teacher must work on, the relationship ceases to be genuinely equal; the coach becomes the expert diagnosing the teacher, and the teacher becomes the object of improvement. I agree with that, too. The part that I strongly object to is that those are the only two options.

The choice scenario minimizes (eliminates?) the role of the organization. It suggests that the District may have curriculum requirements, professional standards, and other legitimate non-negotiables, but these are simply the backdrop to teacher choice over the particular student goal, the teaching technique attempted to address the goal, the evidence collected, and the adaptation along the way.

There are lots of problems with this. Here are the ones that I think are most important, but I couldn’t figure out an order:

1. A collection of individually coherent choices does not add up to a coherent system, in the same way that a random collection of bricks makes a pile, not a house. I find it interesting that there should be so much written about the power of coherence in theory, and yet we are remarkably tolerant of incoherence in practice.

2. When teachers, coaches, and principals operate from different mental models of good instruction, students’ access to grade-level content, cognitive demand, participation, responsive support, and intellectual authority varies according to whose classroom they happen to enter. We seem to accept this as professional autonomy, but it is at the root of our equity problem. The idea that the coach is a neutral partner in the coaching relationship is, in practice, bogus. But in the absence of a shared understanding of what good instruction looks like, districts hire coaches who all have a different mental model of high-quality instruction, and teachers therefore receive different coaching depending on which coach is assigned to them. The system has spent money to institutionalize variation. And if coach and teacher have two different pictures of good instruction, coaching will fail in any case.

3. The organization has a moral obligation to ensure that all students receive instruction focused on grade level standards, where the students believe they belong, and highly competent teachers adapt instruction while also maintaining cognitive demand. You can’t satisfy this obligation by pairing a coach and a teacher and telling them to have at it—or, my most despised phrase in education: “just try something.” In the choice formulation of coaching, a teacher’s choice on what to work on has implications for the students—what if a teacher decides to work on something that is low yield, like focusing on classroom management while not also increasing opportunity to learn?—and I don’t understand why the organization would be OK with that.

4. Coaching clients—whether or not they are teachers—are not always well positioned to diagnose what they most need to learn. We do what we do for good reasons, and we may not know that there is some other way to do it, because our mental models determine what we notice, what we think is a problem, and what we should do about it, but our mental models are bounded by our knowledge and experience. One of my closest friends is a personal trainer, and I could not count the number of times he has told me I should do something that I perceive as totally counterintuitive. A related issue is that we will rationalize working on what we want to work on—again, my own strength training is a prime example, and I am lucky that my coach is as bull-headed as I am.

5. Individual coaching does not improve the system. The person who benefits is the teacher, not the team, or the grade level, or the school. This is not an efficient use of resources, and it is a strategic mistake. It’s also really slow to try to improve an entire system one person at a time, and any effort to speed it up would require more coaches, which would bring on a whole host of other problems if you tried to go down that route—see CL #232 for more on what those problems look like.

OK, I have other issues, like the conflation of choice with autonomy and agency, but those will have to wait.

The choice model of coaching is an explicit rejection of the top-down model—but we reject that model, too. What we think should happen is that there is a shared model for good instruction, that the organization—which can be operationalized however you want, with teachers, coaches, and content experts all involved—specifies the instructional vision, the current problem of practice, and the high leverage techniques that move practice in the direction of that model, and that teams of teachers work together to test, study, and refine those techniques in their own classrooms. The organization does not claim to be able to say with precision which practice will work in every classroom setting—but we have enough research on good teaching that it can make a pretty good prediction, and then the organization needs to learn its way into ensuring that the best practice is enacted across classrooms.

The false choice, then, is between top-down, evaluative coaching and coaching organized entirely around individual preference. We do not need to choose between control and incoherence. The idea that there may be an alternative that sits separate from these polar opposites, and it is not a compromise between them, is surprisingly hard for some educators to get their heads around, so if you have any feedback on my explanation that would make it clearer, I would be grateful. At the same time, I can hear myself saying that you can’t talk someone into a new mental model and that people often have to experience something different in order to grok it.

OK, so this brings me to the Coaching Institute, and the latest improvements that we are implementing. Come experience a different way of doing things. To be clear, we have always taken the position that there should be a district model for good instruction that coaches are working towards, and in recent years we have been explicit that this should be an equity-focused, adaptive model (we call ours The HEAT, and it is broken down in more detail in our book, Maximizing Opportunity to Learn). And in our work with networks, we have been really explicit about the team-based model of instructional improvement and the concept of recipe testing (see Coaching Letter #190 if you are not yet familiar with our recipe metaphor). And last spring, we ran a Coaching In-Depth on coaching teams. This Coaching Institute is our synthesis of all this work, so while it still incorporates the skills of coaching that we think all coaches should have, it is much more deliberate in its positioning of coaching as being in service of team-based improvement and organizational focus on equitable and adaptive teaching.

And you know, you should come to the Coaching Institute because it’s really great professional learning. Don’t take my word for it:

“I really felt valued as a professional. The opportunities to work alongside like-minded people and actively participate in professional learning made the day a wonderful experience.”

“The content was excellent and brought team coaching to the forefront, which is exactly what I was hoping for.”

“Now I have some ideas about how I can make a greater impact and work with all teachers sooner in the school year, with a shared vision of what we want learning to look like.”

“Your facilitation is so seamless that I focus on the learning and forget to think about how you facilitate.” [my favorite]

Thanks so much for being part of what we’re trying to do here—we couldn’t do it without you. Best, Isobel