Everyday Instructional Coaching - Nathan D. Lang

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and the school and district culture. Chapter 2 dives into the driver of transparency. Coaches hear a lot about creating buy-in and trust. There is no better way for coaches to genuinely create trusting, positive, and collegial environments than to establish a culture of transparency about their intentions, their goals, and even their own flaws and mistakes in teaching and learning. Once coaches create a culture of transparency, they can begin to implement the driver of inquiry by asking questions with the purpose of changing the cycle of thinking and learning, which is the focus of chapter 3. Chapter 4 concentrates on the driver of discourse—the art of purposefully choosing language norms to convey that coaches value all stakeholders as people and value their ideas and perspectives. Chapter 5 centers on a driver that I call reverberation: a meaningful two-way oscillation of feedback that coaches fuel with trusting relationships and consistent dialogue. Coaches push themselves to become the best versions of themselves and encourage teachers to do the same through the instructional coaching driver of sincerity, the focus of chapter 6. And finally, chapter 7 explores the driver of influence, through which coaches can catalyze change efforts in education.

      Throughout these chapters, I will draw on powerful and groundbreaking conclusions of the latest research on growth mindsets from Dweck (2007), communication from Cain (2012), and sociocultural psychology from Grant (2014), which all lend support to the efficacy of the seven daily drivers. I will share daily behaviors, practices, and tools that help define the role of an instructional coach. Reproducible tools appear throughout the book to guide readers and offer opportunities to reflect on new learning, explore new ideas, and create actions that immediately put new learning into practice. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download the free reproducibles in this book.

      This book is for everyday instructional coaches, ranging from novice to veteran. The seven drivers can transform any instructional coaching or leadership capacity. An important underlying concept of this book is that coaches need to act on the seven daily drivers with humility. They must not get caught up in the official title or status of the instructional coach; they should instead focus on the unprecedented support they will provide to teachers using the drivers. Dacher Keltner, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson (2003) explain that people who boldly claim status inside an organization are not the ones who most readily and reliably attain and hold power; the best leaders lead from behind the scenes, not loudly out in front. Additionally, while people often perceive personality (especially extroversion) to be a crucial factor in leadership efficacy, Corinne Bendersky and Neha Shah (2013) find, “Whereas personality may inform status expectations through perceptions of competence when [teams] first form, as group members work together interdependently over time, actual contributions to the [team] are an important basis for reallocating status” (p. 387).

      The seven drivers connect instructional coaching concepts to quantifiable actions that work to make a difference in how coaches support teachers. Each driver will help provide direction and energy to our daily practice and journey as instructional coaches. Each chapter highlights a driver and contains instructional coaching stories, illustrations, tools, and connections to research in education and psychology. Some suggestions in this book challenge the status quo of instructional coaching, which I’ve observed as including an undefined function of supporting teachers with limited resources, support, and leadership. The drivers in this book build on time-tested research and on the latest psychology research to help inspire actions that transform the coaching role. I encourage you to deeply reflect throughout each chapter, apply the ideas to your own coaching context, and ask yourself what might be holding you back from implementing innovative solutions to improve teaching and learning.

      ONE

       COLLABORATION

      Coaches can establish a diverse, inclusive, purposeful, and collaborative community when they take the temperature of the school climate and invite people who have differing views to the table.

      Dismissive responses to attempts at collaboration arise all too commonly in schools. Take, for instance, the teacher who walks into a team meeting ready to create a vision with her teammates and is met with cynical team members who say, “I don’t have time for that right now.” The teammates also give nonverbal cues that they are too busy; after all, they have papers to grade, copies to make, and preparations to complete for the next day. Consider also the instructional coach who brings her ingenious idea to the principal, who meets her with an impassive attitude because the principal feels overwhelmed with his to-do list of managerial tasks. Additionally, imagine the district leader who has experienced success in trying something new and different and shares the strategy with the district instructional team, which turns down the idea immediately, saying it is not scalable and, therefore, would not work at a systems level.

      Coaches often meet heavy resistance to collaboration because their schools have had an impermeable culture of continuing with practices that “work,” without questioning their validity, even when circumstances have changed. Lack of collaboration quickly leads schools to extinguish ideas or prevent people from ever sharing their ideas in the first place. When this happens, urgency, creativity, and zeal at best occur in small pockets but will not exist at an organizational level. Collaborative malpractice transcends the school building and permeates other aspects of the organizational leadership structure.

      It’s easy to shift the blame for collaborative malpractice to the school building’s culture, mandate overload, or lack of time, but a hard look in the mirror could reveal something surprising. We all contribute to a noncollaborative culture when we continue to only respond to urgent requests and react to the multitude of tasks required of us. Always prioritizing the actions that allow us to simply cross things off the required to-do list takes away more and more collaborative opportunities. Instead of having teachers spend all their energy on trying to cross more off their mandated to-do list each day, schools should empower teachers to take innovative risks and invest in creating connections and relationships.

      Teachers and instructional coaches must venture into new and unexplored territories in order to create highly functioning, creative, and impactful teams. Essentially, I am asking coaches to transform collaboration in a way that breaks traditional molds by promoting diversity, embracing dissonance, and ensuring balance. Coaches who value and act on diversity and inclusion and who encourage divergent ways of thinking while nurturing trust and accountability will begin to produce the outcomes required to positively change the landscape of teaching and learning. Coaches have a unique opportunity to influence the culture and context of their school. Their inherently consultative role affords them the freedom and flexibility to approach their work differently. This chapter will explore strategies instructional coaches can use to promote diversity within collaboration, leverage dissonance to strengthen collaborative outcomes, and balance social interactions within collaboration.

      We often think of diversity as relating to demographics, but experiences based on race, gender, age, and so on may not necessarily be the only kind of diversity that is important for the coach-teacher team dynamic to learn from. Diversity also encompasses a range of educational roles, ideas, perspectives, and instructional approaches. Creating diverse environments is important not only because it helps build stronger communities and organizations but also because diversity impacts the way our brains function. A study comparing diverse groups to more homogeneous groups finds that diverse groups demonstrate higher levels of innovation, creativity, and problem solving than less diverse groups (Phillips, Mannix, Neale, & Gruenfeld, 2004). Diverse groups outperform more homogeneous groups not only because they bring an influx of new ideas but

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