Skyrocket Your Teacher Coaching. Michael Cary Sonbert

      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

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