Revisiting the Basics Before Running the Race: Questions I'm Forcing Myself to Ask Those I Coach

Learning anything new is oftentimes exciting. An adventure awaits, and the possibilities seem endless. I find that as I begin a new learning experience, my mind often jumps to envisioning myself applying advanced complexities of a new concept or practice to mastery. I find myself thinking like this now with my new coaching endeavor. To use a running metaphor, I picture myself crossing the finish line, with little regard for the time and energy that naturally goes into preparing for, and then actually running the race.

I imagine that this type of mental fast-forwarding happens to others, not just me. And I believe that it serves the purpose of motivating us to learn. However, from experience, I also believe that neglecting the need to discipline our thinking to respect the process of learning can lead to becoming overwhelmed and eventually giving up before reaching the precipice of our learning curve.

To use my current situation as an example, I get excited when I think about working with colleagues in a coaching relationship where I support them in using technology in a highly student-centered, project-based context. If I had it my way, we would all travel there over night, or at least over summer break. Because of this, I find myself tempted to start talking about Gold Standard PBL right away.

While discussing what highly-effective PBL looks like in a classroom helps to visualize a desirable state, to get there, I'm forcing myself to consciously ask a series of different questions:

• What will your classroom management look like with devices in students' hands?
• How will you leverage new technology to engage your students in mastering the standards?
• What might you do to increase communication between your students and you to promote student-reflection for learning?
• What are your thoughts about how you might use these devices to enhance formative assessment and authentic, timely feedback?

In other words, to get to the finish line, we're spending time reiterating the basics. Drawing on our running metaphor, we are preparing to run our marathon by developing a good stride and increasing our endurance over time.

While that might not be sexy, neither is collapsing at mile seven. If that were me, I doubt if I would ever attempt to run a marathon again, at least not until I got a coach who would help me gain the right perspective.

Coaching Is . . . Coaching Isn't . . .

While I haven't been an instructional coach before, I have worked in a district with instructional coaches at the elementary school level. Admittedly, I didn't know what their role exactly was. Often times, I don't believe they did either. Or, at least, they were tasked with so much "other stuff" that their time was taken away from their primary responsibilities as an instructional coach.

In Get Some Guts, Coach!, Jackson writes:

"It is essential to recommit to what coaching is and what it isn't, and align our work to what's happening smack-dab in the classrooms every day . . . I know this to be true: there is no coaching activity or task completed that will trump the return on investment of getting into a classroom and supporting a teacher before, during, and after instruction."

Jackson created a table to support her characterization of coaching, describing what coaching is as well as what coaching is not. See below.

Coaching is . . .

• Individualized to each teacher
• Improving the quality of instruction
• Improving the effect of the instruction on student performance
• Professional development
• Diagnosing teacher needs, based upon student data
• Focusing on specific teaching skills
• Face-to-face
• Communicating care and serving as an example to teachers
• Providing positive feedback
• Providing corrective feedback
• Modeling
• In the classroom

Coaching isn't . . .

• Optional
• Punitive
• Personal
• Tattling to the administrator
• Unlimited patience
• Always comfortable
• Paperwork based
• Fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants
• Subbing in the classrooms
• By teacher invitation only
• Working with kids directly
• Doing work for teachers
• Acting as the go-between the leader and teacher

Jackson emphasizes the importance of action over talking, when she says, additionally:

"Many coaches spend way too much planning time, collaboration time, professional development time, and leadership and coaching time merely talking about things teachers should do. Very little, if any, actual in-classroom coaching is taking place -- and that is why the return on investment of professional development is so low. We have ignored the data that tells us that coaching is the number one tool for getting training information into practice. And without getting that training information into practice in the classrooms, there is literally no way that the training we provide teachers will impact student achievement."

Falling Into Instructional Coaching

I recently fell into instructional coaching. I say fell because coaching was not on my radar. Eight months ago, I accepted a position as a project manager in a central office for a public K-12 school district. It was my dream job, or so I thought. As my first year in this position drew to a close, it became evident that the dream job I was hired for wasn't what it seemed. On paper, I was qualified. Still, I came to see that it just wasn't the right fit for me, nor was I the right fit for the position.

Thankfully, I was approached about the opportunity to transfer into a newly created position as an Instructional Technology Coach at one of the district's high schools, a school preparing to "go one-to-one" with Windows-based devices this coming school year.

To make a long story short, here I am. And with me, I have classroom experience as an elementary school teacher, a Master's degree in Educational Technology, an extensive bibliography of books, blogs, articles, and white papers about technology in education, which I have read. And I even spent a year as another district's Technology Integration Specialist, which, without a clearly articulated job description, turned out to have less to do with actual integration than with show-and-tell.

My point here is that I have a good grasp on the technology aspect of being an Instructional Technology Coach. But to be completely honest, the Instructional Coaching part of my new gig is a very steep learning curve, which I'm excited to climb, one step at a time. Fortunately, I'm not forging a new path. While the formal position of an Instructional Coach, generally, seems to be relatively new (I could be totally wrong about that.), there are numerous educators who have left the classroom to chart the path of instructional coaching for me (and perhaps you, too!).

One of these coaches, Jill Jackson, wrote a very good book, which is serving as a great jumping-off point for me. In Get Some Guts, Coach! 6 Steps that Every Instructional Coach, Team Leader, Mentor or Facilitator Must Take to Unleash True Coaching Power, Jackson introduces readers to instructional coaching as a concept as well as a very manageable practice. On page 1, Jackson writes,

"Coaching is the number one, most readily-available tool that has the real-life power to transform the quality of teaching and the impact of teaching on student performance."

Can you ask for a better why to get started with than that?!

I can't. And that's why I am here. I'm committed to learning about being a highly effective Instructional Technology Coach for two reasons: 1) the teachers, and 2) the kids. If I can do this, I know that I can make a difference, even if it is by doing something that I seemingly fell into.