Three beliefs I hold right now about coaching and the role of the school leader
Literacy instruction is too complex and situational for simple approaches.
A couple of weeks ago, I received Elena Aguilar’s newsletter with the subject line:
“Managers can’t be coaches.”
As you may know, this is a topic I have explored since 2013. You can find my most recent understanding here. While I understand to some degree what Aguilar is referring to, such as the importance of having a true instructional coach, I struggle with simple views of what it means to be a leader or to be a coach.
Since 2013, I’ve come to hold 3 beliefs in this area:
Belief #1: A principal is obligated to hold ineffective teachers accountable.
Belief #2: A principal is influential when they help effective teachers hold themselves responsible.
Belief #3: As the world becomes more complex, effective teachers and leaders embrace the complexity.
Next is my rationale for each belief.
Belief #1: A principal is obligated to hold ineffective teachers accountable.
Few will argue with me on this point.
As Aguilar notes, “Your job is to keep an eye on performance, that includes evaluation.”
If I have a teacher in my school who consistently struggles teaching readers, and no amount of coaching has supported their growth to an acceptable level, I am obligated to follow the process designated by my district. That usually includes a plan for improvement and even nonrenewal. The school community should expect this.
That said, two questions surface for me in these circumstances:
1. Has the teacher truly been supported?
For example, what type of professional learning has been provided for all faculty? Were there opportunities to watch and reflect on excellent instruction in action, followed up with instructional coaching? If not, it becomes more difficult to hold someone accountable.
2. Have I tried to understand what obstacles might be in their way?
I’ve learned that I only know a fraction of my teachers’ lives (as it should be).
Personal and professional issues can impact their work. One question I’ve asked, adapted from the work of Viviane Robinson1, is, “What obstacles are in your way of meeting our expectations?” It's an empathetic response to a potentially tenuous situation. The way I phrase it - "our expectations" - positions myself as an ally instead of the enemy. And if we can address their challenge effectively, I have influenced this teacher's life in a positive way, professionally and even personally.
If these two conditions have been met and improvement still hasn’t occurred, then, yes, it’s my responsibility to place them on a plan for improvement with nonrenewal as a potential outcome. Yet even then, I’ve been a coach in some respect, such as discussing the next steps in their life when appropriate and supporting them to find their truer calling. It’s about being authentic and respectful.
Belief #2: A principal is influential when they help effective teachers hold themselves responsible.
Aguilar attempts to define the different responsibilities within a leader’s position.
“Here’s one way to think about these three functions:
The purpose of assessment is to have accountability
The purpose of feedback is to align on practice
The purpose of coaching is to support growth”
I can attest to the helpfulness, at least initially, in clarifying the purpose of our intentions, for example communicating with teachers ahead of time that I will be doing formal observations next week. (This is also why I don’t use a computer during instructional walks; pen and paper seems to convey to the teacher my intent to learn and affirm their work.)
Where I struggle with this differentiation is the limits we mentally place on our functions, our responsibilities, and even on our roles as leaders.
For instance, take a closer look at the “assessment - accountability” and “coaching - support growth” frames. What does it communicate to you? I might read it as two separate functions, with one rarely or never intersecting with the other.
This would be an unfortunate interpretation, primarily because of the power of facilitating self-assessment and helping a teacher become more self-accountable, i.e. responsible.
Said another away, here is my email response to Aguilar’s newsletter:
“When I judge a teacher, I am potentially taking away the opportunity for them to judge themselves, to become more self-directed and independent in their practice.”
What this looks like in practice varies, but I largely accomplish it through coaching skills such as paraphrasing and asking mediative questions.2
Belief #3: As the world becomes more complex, effective teachers and leaders embrace the complexity.
A bias toward learning helps us understand the complexity in this work. The situational nature of teaching, learning, and leading has too many factors and influences to distill it down to simple scores. This is especially true with literacy instruction.
For example, let’s say a teacher has a challenging group of students.
Are they a worse teacher this year than last year because they struggle more frequently?
Or is it their best year as a teacher, because of the impact they’re having on some of the most challenging students?
How might this teacher be embracing their struggle as opportunities for growth, such as spending more time using shared reading and writing?3
In my experience, this is where the wheels fall off the evaluation wagon. Rubrics and ratings doesn't account for these nuances and contexts. Leaders often lean too heavily on the teacher evaluation rubrics to judge a teacher they’ve observed only a couple times during the school year. Similar to the limits of state testing, we need portraits instead of snapshots of practice.
Again, this is where more informal and formative practices like instructional walks can create a richer picture to better understand the complexity of every classroom.4 It's a more integrated approach to improving literacy instruction schoolwide.
No perfect answers here...and more questions. Let me know where you are at on this topic.
These key coaching skills, based on the work of Cognitive Coaching, are covered more in-depth in my new book, Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.: Five Strategies for Supporting Teaching and Learning (Corwin, 2022).
What a great post. Having a small bit of experience as a university supervisor of credential candidates, I’ve got an inkling of what you are feeling. It’s a challenging task. The decision whether to advance a candidate to certification whom you have serious reservations about parallels the decision to terminate an ineffective teacher. It’s critical that serious support work precedes the decision. My bet is that instructional leaders like you in the field have a lot of useful insights for credential program instructors and supervisors in terms of assessment and evaluation. In my book, assessment can and should serve accountability as well as improvement; assessment should always aim to improve the future, though actions the consequence of assessment may seem harsh in the moment. Politically, I support tenure laws because they assure due process, but I struggle philosophically. The devil is in the details of due process. I like what you say about self-accountability and self-assessment. I’d like to see more of it at all levels. These aspects are particularly strong elements of teacher-prep but are improving. In the best case the teacher and the supervisor are able to agree on the validity of the evidence even if they may have disagreements on the interpretation.