Glows and Grows: Celebrating What is Going Well and Thinking About Ways to Improve

Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H. Book Study

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

The life of an instructional coach in education is an interesting one; this position is as unique as the person and the school community. 

What I have found in the past five years is that I am nowhere close to doing the job that I thought I would be doing. Yet it has turned out alright and our community is better for it. As I read Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H: 5 Strategies for Supporting Teaching and Learning, I was able to reflect on what I feel like I am doing well and some things I would like to consider for improvement. 

Glows

As Matt points out in Chapter 3, “Create Confidence Through Trust”, trust is everything when it comes to instructional coaching. 

I am in a small school with only one teacher at each grade level. I knew from the very beginning that trust was going to make or break my ability to help move the school forward in a positive direction. As I read, I realized that without even knowing the research on trust, my instincts led me in the right direction. 

• I followed through with Consistency when I talked to them about the power of common language and how it builds bridges for students and helped combat “teacher islands”. I showed them how powerful consistent routines were for kids; such as everyone striving towards a workshop model that kids could count on from year to year. 

• Compassion came about easily as I had just left the classroom after 18 years. I knew how they felt when different situations would arise; I was able to empathize with how they were feeling. 

• My consistency helped teachers feel like they could trust what I was saying and doing. If I made a promise to be somewhere, I showed up. If I told a teacher I would bring them a resource, I brought it. 

As I read through the chapter, I realized that my Communication needs to be more effective, specifically when it comes to feedback. 

Grows

I find myself reading and rereading Chapter 6, “Communicate Feedback”. 

My Enneagram type is Number Two, The Helper. This comes as no surprise with the job that I do because for me everything is relational. I am hypersensitive to how others feel and what they need. I am a people pleaser and, just maybe, a bit of a fixer. Although all good qualities for working with others, I find the “people pleaser” in me can hold me back from having true growth conversations with others. Also, not everyone is looking to be “fixed.” 

I’m also ruminating on Figure 6.1 (p. 119) that describes how to engage in feedback conversations through observations, wonderings, and next steps. 

Source: M. Renwick, Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H. (Corwin, 2022)

This seems like such a safe way to engage in a growth conversation. Using wonderings can help me get past just telling a teacher what they want to hear, but to start thinking about what they might not have thought about yet. I have written this model into my professional growth plan for next year and have been practicing on my spouse to see how it feels. He is thrilled! I am thinking about how I will document these conversations in a sectioned notebook (one section for each teacher) and record these conversations to use as a springboard for our conversations. 

When it comes to fixing, Matt talks about a conversation he had with a teacher in which he could have just suggested ways to solve the problem but used the format of the feedback conversation to really get to the heart of the matter. He stated:

“In a less effective conversation, the leader as a coach might have right away offered three different classroom management strategies to try. But it would not have alleviated the teacher’s deeper concern over feeling behind in the curriculum” (p. 124).

This statement was a gamechanger for the “fixer” in me when I realized that always offering up solutions is not as effective as feedback conversations to go deeper. This story is going to stay with me as I work towards less fixing and more coaching.

Leading Like a C.O.A. C. H.: 5 Strategies for Supporting Teaching and Learning has validated my work in many ways but also given me a chance to reflect on potential growth opportunities in my professional role. I look forward to next year and honing in on how to give more effective feedback to help both myself and teachers grow in deeper, more profound ways. I will keep you posted!

Jen McDonough has been a Kindergarten, First Grade, Fourth Grade, and Seventh Grade  teacher and more recently Literacy Coach  for the past 24 years. She is the co-author of A Place for Wonder:  Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades with Georgia Heard and the co-author of Conferring with Young Writers:  What to do When you Don’t Know What to Do with Kristin Ackerman, both published by Stenhouse Publishers.  Jen presents to teachers across the country on reading and writing topics and is currently the K-8 Literacy Specialist at The Pine School in Hobe Sound, Florida.  You can find her on Twitter @jenjmcdonough and on her blog www.literacychats.wordpress.com.