In the land of teachers, what is a professional coach for teacher effectiveness?
When a new position is created in an established game, no one knows the rules for the player in that position. It would be like introducing a twelfth player onto the football field, one who is an expert in offensive and defensive and special team play, but does not wear a football uniform. Instead of playing the game, this expert-player is a coach on the field who can “stop the action” in order to critique the last play and then tell and show actual players how to improve performances on the next play. Most players, as well as football fans, would say, “This is new! How does this work?” This is the environment of professional coaches for educators who are employed to advance educator effectiveness. It is a new day and professional coaches in education are the new player.
Educators have a history of working with evaluators, coordinators, consultants and vendors. A veteran classroom teacher has a ready understanding of the roles these persons play in public education. Evaluators typically are building principals or district supervisors. Coordinators, as in curriculum coordinators and subject area specialists, assist the teacher in understanding the district’s approved curriculum and interpreting curricular outcomes into instructional designs. Consultants and vendors most usually work for producers of educational materials and are invested in helping teachers implement materials the district has purchased. But, a professional coach is none of these. So, what are the role parameters for a teacher’s coach?
“What does an instructional coach do? Look at ‘instruction’—the act, process, or art of imparting knowledge and skill. Look at ‘coach’—to teach. Instructional coaches teach teachers how to be effective instructors. This is the focus of instructional coaching because good instruction is 15 to 20 times more powerful in producing student achievement than family background and income, race, gender, and other explanatory variables. Student learning must be at the heart of all decisions made in the school.”
http://www.teachers.net/wong/SEP11/
In order to coach, coaches will need to persevere. If educational leadership follows past practice, professional coaches will be lost in the soft work of staff development and educational community building. Why do I believe this? Let’s start with the mission of a teacher coach: to improve a teacher’s active demonstration of the district’s adopted teacher effectiveness practices, and, improve the teacher’s skills in causing all children to achieve the district’s standardized testing and student learning objectives. Just as a hitting coach is responsible for improving each player’s hitting skills, as in on-base percentage and hits with runners in scoring position, a teaching coach is responsible for improving the educational effectiveness of teachers. Aligning and keeping the teaching coach aligned with this mission is the difficulty.
Too many coaching positions are filled by teacher/coaches. A current teacher, usually a very competent teacher, is assigned to a split assignment: half-time teacher and half-time coach. This “half way” attempt to create a coach fails to align the coach with the mission because teaching is a full-time assignment. A competent teacher will commit as much time to planning, assessing and teaching a half-day assignment as she will to a whole day assignment. The belief that she can be an effective coach on released time is both naïve and condescending to the possibility of coaching.
Second, when a teacher is a half-time coach, her fellow teachers cannot have adequate availability to her coaching. Half of the faculty will be available when she is a coach and half will not be when she is teaching. Principals may try to assuage this by using the teacher/coach’s prep time for coaching, but this will only irritate the coach’s teaching assignment. Using prep time in the day or before or after the teaching day only short-changes both assignments.
Third, teachers view teachers as teachers. There always will be a shadow over her coaching as the teachers she coaches will look at the half day she is teaching to examine “And, how effective is she in her own classroom?” Disregarding the variables of student demographics and the pull of her dual assignments, a teacher/coach’s classroom work will be used as a judge of her coaching expertise.
Fourth, district leadership with a political or budgetary mind-set will include the instructional coach within departments of coordinators and staff developers. The coach’s role of critical assessment and refinement of teaching skills requires an intimate relationship with a small set of teachers while coordinators and staff developers work across the district. Combining the coach with these generalists dissolves the ability of the coach to do the critical and clinical work of coaching into another district-wide responsibility.
Finally, districts with multiple initiatives, such as building professional learning communities for teachers, mentoring of initial educators, and teacher retention programs, have a propensity for adding a component of each of these to coordinators and specialists. Existing descriptions of instructional coaches in some districts displays this misalignment of mission.
A report by the Annenberg Institute verifies the potential for structural problems in aligning teacher coaches with their mission. “Since coaching is a relatively new practice, much attention has been given to creating the conditions necessary to implement coaching at the district and school levels. As coaching becomes more widespread, attention needs to shift to making sure coaching has a significant impact on teaching practice, and, ultimately, on student learning. For coaching to make an impact, it must be wedded to specific, articulated gaps in content outcomes. Effective coaching structures use indicators to measure the changes in their practice and assess the effectiveness of their work.
Central office supports for instruction and school-level efforts to improve instruction are often not consistently aligned and coordinated. While coaches can serve as liaisons between school and administration, clear routes of access to supports and communication of needs between central offices and schools remain ongoing challenges, particularly in large or decentralized districts.”
http://annenberginstitute.org/pdf/InstructionalCoaching.pdf
In the land of teachers, district and building level leadership must let teacher’s coaches have direct access to teachers in their classrooms. This new player is a wild card that cannot be clouded by non-mission assignments. Coaching for educator effectiveness is predicated upon a coach’s
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direct observation of the teacher,
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clinical lesson studies with the teacher,
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critical analysis of the teacher’s effective educator practices,
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instructive modeling of effective practices by the coach,
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objective analysis of student achievement data
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instructive modeling of instruction aimed at student achievement gaps, and
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constant interaction between the coach and teacher.
If the new player on the education field is to be given a chance to make a difference in teacher effectiveness, the coach must be allowed to coach.