Everyday Instructional Coaching - Nathan D. Lang

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principals often ask their coaches to facilitate collaborative common planning to discuss standards, normed assessments, and instructional strategies. Oftentimes, this looks like a rushed gathering focused more on logistics than on strategies. Although it’s appropriate to ensure we stay productive, we should utilize our collaboration time in the most meaningful way. This valuable face-to-face time together provides opportunities to create goals, discuss strategy (for example, personalizing learning), and articulate progress. A culture of collaboration is only possible when all teachers feel affirmed as educators and valued as contributing members of the team. However, this does not mean that coaches should aim to eliminate all dissonance. In fact, some forms of dissonance can actually be beneficial.

      When working with existing faculty, how can coaches champion dissonance when visioning, creating new ideas, and monitoring growth? Grant (2016) suggests identifying the person who commonly acts as a loyal opponent or devil’s advocate, instead of randomly assigning someone a devil’s advocate role, because the assignment becomes just that: a role one plays. If the identified person doesn’t truly have a passionate feeling for or against an idea, he or she won’t have a compelling argument, and the argument won’t truly represent an opposing viewpoint. Dissonance must be authentic so that emotion and experience translate to thoughtful communication of ideas.

      A school building contains plenty of opinions to harness. We should look not to create opinion bash fests but to leverage dissonance in a way that leads to purposeful change in teaching and learning. Coaches can discover where dissonance exists in their school through the use of a survey that contains statements meant to invoke emotion or reaction. Figure 1.2 features sample responses to a list of dissonance-discovering prompts that coaches can pose to teachers and have teachers answer anonymously or in confidence.

       Figure 1.2: Dissonance-discovering prompts.

      Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.

      After teachers respond to these prompts, compelling statements, outlandish ideas, and dissenting opinions can emerge. This process gives teachers an outlet to share their expertise, practices, and purposes transparently and frequently. Coaches, in a sense, take a cultural pulse and invite people who have differing views to the table. After receiving these responses, coaches are able to leverage dissonance by acting on teachers’ specific desires and wishes. We, as coaches and school leaders, oftentimes do a really great job collecting copious amounts of assessment data or listening to the latest education buzz, but we frequently struggle with using the data to change our practice. It takes courage and perseverance to act on the information we discover and allow those who hold different viewpoints to take the microphone.

      While collaboration is important, having team members collaborate excessively and not allowing them time to think and work independently leads to danger. Further, collaboration may cater to certain personality types over others. For these reasons, coaches must carefully ensure balance when working with teachers in a collaborative setting. Coaches can begin to understand how to strike this balance by examining the concepts of groupthink and introversion versus extroversion, considering a variety of balancing methods they can incorporate into their practice, and following three important principles of working as a team.

       Groupthink

      Collaboration is most definitely in your repertoire of educational jargon, but groupthink probably isn’t. Groupthink refers to the conformity that results when a group of people come together. This phenomenon, for example, is present in a study by psychologists Jamil Zaki and Kevin N. Ochsner (2012), in which fMRI scanners measured brain activity and identified that if an individual views a photo of someone with a group of people, and the group expresses that it finds the person in the photo attractive, the individual will consider the person in the photo more attractive than he or she would have without that group. Zaki and Ochsner (2012) find that the reward networks of the human brain respond to the photo of the person after it has gained exposure to the positive judgments of fellow group members, which can lead to the conformity present in groupthink. Coaches, however, have an opportunity to facilitate collaboration in a way that doesn’t lead to groupthink. It’s crucial that coaches actively honor individuality within the group and create opportunities for teacher teams to work together in effective ways through collegial-focused (as opposed to groupthink) tools that I’ll continue to provide throughout this book.

       Introversion Versus Extroversion

      The TED Talk The Power of Introverts (Cain, 2012) and book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Cain, 2013) have received a great deal of attention for challenging and criticizing schools and notable businesses and organizations for overvaluing extroversion and primarily creating work environments that cater to extroverts. Susan Cain (2013) examines personality types in relation to social stimulation instead of to the often-interpreted shy versus not shy comparison. According to Cain (2012), “Extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they’re in quieter, more low-key environments.”

      Cain (2012) tells a story about Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple. Because of his popularity and his work with Steve Jobs, you might initially think Wozniak’s success resulted from a collaborative approach to creativity or his work in highly social workplaces. As it turns out, his success did not result from a big, open-concept space full of huddling brainstormers plotting their course on whiteboard walls. Cain (2012) describes how Wozniak always made progress by himself on his journey to build the first personal computer (PC). Wozniak made much of this progress in his cubicle at Hewlett-Packard. He’d arrive really early in the morning before any of his colleagues to read engineering magazines, pore over technical manuals, and come up with designs in his head. After work, he’d quickly have dinner at home and then drive back to the office to have a late night of work. Cain (2013) notes, “He describes this period of quiet midnights and solitary sunrises as ‘the biggest high ever’” (p. 73). The key, then, to capitalizing on our talents and skills is for us all—introverts and extroverts and those in between—“to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us” (Cain, 2012). This means allowing time for teachers to work independently as well as in collaboration.

      Grant (2014) finds that “introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they’re much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas,” whereas extroverts get so enthusiastic about their team’s ideas, they unconsciously start taking credit and “putting their own stamp on things” (as cited in Cain, 2012). This extroverted leadership keeps other team members’ ideas from gaining traction or even being illuminated. Applying this conclusion to the coach-teacher relationship, coaches can leverage the team’s great ideas by facilitating collaborative work that empowers teachers to be innovative instead of imparting their knowledge onto teachers.

      I’m not proposing we stop collaborating together as teams, nor would Cain (2012, 2013) suggest that. The overwhelming culture of schools and society continues to shift more and more toward teamwork and collaboration. More than ever, learning should be part of a social context, as learners collectively rely on each other’s thinking to solve complex problems.

      What I am proposing is we not allow the pendulum of collaboration to swing to the far extreme of cooperative learning all the time, promoting excessive group work and overly social norms in the classroom. Like in the classroom, I also suggest a balance of healthy collaboration in teacher teams. Cain’s (2012, 2013) and Grant’s 2014 research on introversion and extroversion is compelling, and we must address how coaches can work most effectively and creatively with all personality types by creating balance.

       Methods to Ensure Balance

      Coaches are

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