The Coach Who Forgot How to Coach
On coming back to the basics
đ Hi, itâs Matt. Thanks for being a reader. I write about literacy and leadership, including my free guide, What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading. Last week, I shared how I use AI to support my coaching practice. This week, I talk about how easy it is to forget about the basics of coaching.
Coaching has a strange irony: the people who need support most arenât always looking for it. Unlike a principal, whose door people knock on, a coach has to seek out educators and earn the right to help.
For example, I recently participated in a workshop on AI policy and intention. The room was full. The speakers were well prepared and gave leadership teams time to think, talk with each other, and make plans. During team time, I walked around the room and listened in on their conversations.
As an MTSS coach, I feel I know what teams need: someone to help them build systems of support, such as co-creating an instructional framework that spells out effective vs. ineffective AI use. So I stopped by a few tables, politely interrupted their conversations, and handed out a flyer for an upcoming training. âBring a team to this event, and it will unlock coaching from me. We can build this work out together.â A few nods and a âthank youâ were the response. It was awkward.
With one team, however, I knew the principal well. We had worked together previously on reducing negative behaviors, with noticeable and sustained success. Now they wanted to learn how to use AI to generate ideas for reading intervention.
Resisting the urge to help them address this issue, and because I genuinely wanted to connect with this principal again, I asked how they were feeling about the information shared so far. (We had just heard the AI policy speaker explain the legal ramifications of sharing personally identifiable information.) âLike I donât want to use it!â I laughed. âThat was the feeling I was beginning to have,â I affirmed. I then asked how they were using AI so far. For the most part, it was typing prompts into the chat and hoping for a helpful response.
Sensing a genuine opening, I asked if they were familiar with Gems in Google Gemini. They werenât. âGems are like projects in ChatGPT or Claude. You can guide them to focus on a certain topic or domain, such as reading interventions. Name it, type in some directions on how you want AI to respond, and upload PDFs and other relevant files to its knowledge base, for example, your current MTSS handbook.â I walked them through the process. Their superintendent came over and watched, curious. I closed the conversation with a no-pressure invitation to reach out if they wanted to continue to work on this together.
I donât know whether the principal or their district leadership team will contact me to request more support. But if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on this team over the others.
I connected with them personally. I wasnât trying to sell them anything. I just took time to see how they were doing, out of genuine care and interest.
I acknowledged and validated their current reality. People want to feel seen, as fully human. I recall reading that the number one thing teachers want from their supervisor is recognition for their work.
I earned the right to pose questions. Connecting personally and acknowledging their reality built enough trust that curiosity felt like care and not interrogation.
I gave them a sample of how I can support them. I didnât solve their problem, but I did give them a peek into what I could provide.
Three years into this work, and I can still walk into a room and forget everything I know about coaching. I handed out flyers. I interrupted conversations. I promoted a service. And it fell flat. Of course it did. The things that actually open doors arenât new techniques or better positioning. Theyâre the basics: show up curious, ask how someoneâs doing, and listen like you mean it. Apparently, I occasionally need the reminder.
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What Iâm Reading
Why Do We Keep Saying âStruggling Studentâ? (Substack)
The author, Colleen Cruz, regrets using the term "struggling student" in a previous book she wrote. This term identifies students by their struggle instead of seeing their potential. Calling students "struggling" can also lower teacher expectations and hide learning disabilities. Instead, Colleen recommends teachers stay curious and investigate deeper to better support each student's needs.
From the article:
â Many schools and districts have clear and robust procedures for Child Find. They use screeners to identify students early and offer professional development to general and special education faculty on common signs of disability. They have explicit guidelines for MTSS and ensure that students who are not helped by Tier 3 are moved through to the evaluation process. These are all great systems that help a lot of students get the support they need.
Yet, in spite of those systems there is one area I believe is worth deeper reflection: the effect of casually labeling students as struggling might render them invisible to those systems. (my emphasis)
Quotable
