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 scored proficient or advanced than their citywide peers on the state assessment. And the next year, 43 percent more did.
As you think about this distinction between support and coaching, I’ll ask you to think about the following questions our coaches ask themselves after every coaching meeting they have:
Did that teacher just get significantly better at something?
Do they know their next steps?
Have I put systems in place to hold them accountable?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, we know the meeting could have been more impactful.
As you read on, and as you reflect on your own teacher development program, I invite you to consider those questions as well. My hope is that if you currently have a no for any of the three, that you’ll have a yes for each one by the end of this book.
2
Expertise is Everything
I’m so much more gratified by my life now that I have an expertise.
—Angela Duckworth
People who have expertise just love to share it. That’s human nature.
—David Baldacci
If you are committed to driving the instructional vision of your school, it’s immensely important that you are and are seen as an expert. Teaching is the hardest job in the world. It’s like trying to file papers while falling out of an airplane. And while I’m sure being a brain surgeon is hard as well, I’m pretty certain that as the brain surgeon is about to make the first incision in the patient’s head, nobody calls out, “Can I go to the bathroom?!”
Teachers are absurdly busy, managing a dozen things at once, so making sure that your feedback to them is precise and accurate is of the utmost importance. Otherwise, you risk disinvesting the very people charged with educating the students.
I’m fortunate enough to get to observe, speak with, and spend time with teachers all over the country. They’re different in so many ways. Some teach every subject. Some teach one. Some teach students who come up to their knees and others teach students who tower over them. Some are the only teacher of their grade and subject in a small school. Others are one of a half-dozen who teach that grade and subject in a school with north of 1,000 students.
What they often have in common though, is this: many don’t see their bosses—meaning principals, assistant principals, deans of instruction, etc.—as a value-add when it comes to what’s happening in their classrooms. And often, they don’t respect the instructional expertise of the person who’s leading their schools.
Put more simply: teachers don’t think their bosses know what they’re talking about.
This is damning. And it’s happening all over the place.
To be clear, teachers sometimes like their bosses. They often say they’re nice and supportive, but when it comes to seeing their bosses as experts who drive the instructional vision of their schools, they rarely view them as such.
To know why, I’d like to take you on a brief journey into the past, to the first of my two jobs washing dishes and sweeping floors at Italian restaurants on Long Island. My boss was as nice and as friendly as they come. But he’d casually stroll in around dinner time and have the bartender pour him a glass of red wine. He’d sit at the bar, drinking his wine and eating the day’s specialty, even as the evening rush picked up. When customers had issues, he dodged them, often leaving it to less-senior members to handle. On one occasion, when the pizzamaker was out sick,
