Let Me Tell You What to Do: An Instructional Coach Reflects on Facilitating Teacher Growth
“By learning to pose the right questions at the right time, you will open up cognitive windows to new learning.”
Shane Safir
One of my goals as a literacy leader in my school is to learn how to have conversations with colleagues that don’t just solve problems at the moment, but dialogue that leads to deeper understandings. The kind of conversations that can have a palpable effect on the work to come. Over the past few years, this has been a typical conversation for me:
Teacher: I feel like independent reading time is too noisy.
Me: What have you tried?
Teacher: I pulled the kids back to the rug and we practiced/discussed what it should look and sound like and we went back and revised the original anchor chart we had made. I also added pictures of kids reading to the chart so they could see what it should look like during that time.
Me: Those are great ideas, but it sounds like it still isn’t working for you. Here are a few things that worked for me that you could try…
Then, I would get right into giving suggestions to try and help the teacher “solve the problem.” It feels successful at the moment but doesn’t bring forth a deeper understanding of why the teacher wants her room to be quiet during independent reading time. What the purpose would be? At this point, we are focusing on behavioral issues and not the ways in which we want readers to engage in reading to become lifelong readers. I’m not helping the teacher get a better understanding of her philosophies as an educator. I haven’t learned how to ask the right questions...yet.
Chapter six, of Shane Safir’s book, The Listening Leader, helped give me insight into how I might have deeper learning conversations, to go beyond the shared conversation above. Practicing Strategic Listening helped me begin to understand the kinds of questions I can ask the teachers with whom I work to help them think deeper about their practices. In this chapter, she talks about the three stances of strategic listening: creating an orientation to vision, reflective inquiry, and a bias toward action.
Creating an orientation to vision is about having the teachers create “tight visions” in which they can see an end to where the goal will be accomplished and not get overwhelmed by too many initiatives. This type of conversation helps teachers create plans for success. Questions I could have asked the teacher above to help her create a vision statement might have been:
“What are your hopes for your readers?”
“What is your philosophy of teaching young readers?”
“What would be true a month from now if you achieved your vision?”
“To make progress on this vision, what do you need to do differently? What do you need to learn?”
Reflective inquiry is a stance that can help me to move past the “quick fix". Safir states that artful questions create cognitive dissonance. This is the moment when a teacher realizes that there is a gap between what they believe and what they are actually doing. The moment when they sit back and say, Ohhhhh...right. Why am I doing that?
We can get teachers to this place safely when we use data from their classrooms, data they ask you to mine for them such as looking at student work, posing questions to their students, or observing their classroom through a non-evaluative lens. The teacher and I could have come up with a plan for how to gather data to help us understand why it was noisy during independent reading. I could ask her what she would want me to observe, come up with questions together that I could ask the students, or make observations on what the students are doing during that time. We could then look at the data together to see if we could get a picture of what is really going on. Some questions for deeper thinking Safir shares are:
“Tell me how you understand the problem now. What evidence supports your thinking?”
“What makes this problem confusing or challenging?”
“What if you tried...What might you learn?”
A bias toward action would be that next step forward. Not just action but a shift, from experiencing fear, to taking risks and making mistakes. It is a new stance, that innovation and reflection will create professional growth. As her literacy leader, I will be there to support her on the journey. Instead of just telling the teacher things she could do, I might ask these questions:
“As a result of this conversation, what new instructional move will you try tomorrow?
“What specific action steps do you want to take, and when can we debrief?”
“What are you going to prioritize next, and how can help both support you and hold you accountable to your goal?”
Shane Safir reminds us that by helping teachers articulate their own picture of success, they become active in pursuing it. As I reflect back to the original conversation, there was no deep thinking or learning. The teacher was not necessarily a part of the plan. It was a quick fix that addressed something surface level. As I move into next year, I will be using what I have learned in The Listening Leader to create conversations that have a more lasting effect on teacher growth and understanding.
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