“Do you want to know why you lost today?” Sam Mussabini asked of Harold Abrahams regarding Abrahams’ loss in the 100 meter dash. “You’re over striding. Now these coins represent the steps in your sprint.” Mussabini pushed the coins together. “Can you find me another two coins, Mr. Abrahams? Remember, over striding. Death for the sprinter. Knocks you back.” Mussabini slapped Abrahams across the cheek. “Like that!” He slapped him again. “And that!” Harold Abrahams diligently worked on shortening his stride and improving his sprint technique and he won 100 meter dash in the 1924 Olympics. More importantly, Sam Mussabini demonstrated the power of coaching for improving personal performance. Mussabini broke the barrier for professional coaching in an era when everyone was expected to perform using only their own God-given talents. Being coached breached the dignity of the sportsman. Thus it was portrayed in the movie “Chariots of Fire” (1981).
Coaching for improved performance today is accepted practice. The 2014 roster for the Green Bay Packers lists 20 assistant coaches each assigned to a specific skill set for professional football players. Watch the pre-game warmups at any major league baseball game and you will see a dozen coaches and assistant coaches around the batting cages, in the bullpen and along the infield and outfield critiquing and coaching professional baseball players. Look around the practice tees and greens of any PGA event and you will see Butch Harmon, Hank Haney, Sean Foley and Dave Pelz and a score of other golf coaches constantly watching and critiquing the swing techniques of the world’s best golfers. Watch center court at Wimbledon and you will see championship tennis players looking into the stands for smiles or frowns from their personal coaches. Why are these professional coaches present today? Because even the best want to be better – again, even the best want to be better. If they don’t stay sharp or get sharper, they will lose. Professional coaching is all about improving professional performance.
It is time for educators to embrace professional coaching. The name of the game in education is causing learning. Learning is a measured effect of instruction. Children start at point A on a learning continuum with a planned expectation to reach point B and beyond using strategized curricula and pedagogies. New state statutes and mandates demand improved student achievement. Layered in these statutes and mandates are requirements for improving teacher effectiveness, typically measured by student academic achievement gains and a demonstration of “best” teaching practices. Professional teachers are in the perfect environment for professional coaching.
In times gone by, topics were covered, books were read, and subjects were studied. Children attended classes and teachers taught. At the end of the term, grades and credits were assigned and learners went on to whatever came next. Today, coverage, reading for reading’s sake and studying are minor strategies to a more significant end game. Learning now is a measured product and the metrics for evaluating student learning gains create the box score of interest. A school may only be as good in the educational world as its annual student achievement data.
The era of measured learning is doubly important because of politicized school choice options. All parents can read the box scores of their various local public, private and charter school options and enroll their children in the school that demonstrates the best learning gains. Education is a consumer-based industry with money and jobs dictated by school choice options. The advantage gained by open enrollment to a high achieving school or teacher is now a greater factor in student enrollment than neighborhood school affiliation.
Given this new reality, every professional teacher, like every performance-based professional, should have access to professional coaching. This is a “duh!” statement. This also is a survival necessity. The dilemma that teachers face is that they, like athletes in the era of Harold Abrahams, shun professional coaching as the arrival of an anti-Christ. Professional coaching of teachers; how dreadful! The black box, closed door classroom world of teachers decried the intrusion of critical coaching as anathema to the purity of their work and the sanctity of place where they do their work. Those days, however, are as antiquated as the horse and buggy. Interestingly, most students and many young teachers today don’t know what a horse and buggy reference means.
Here are five truths regarding professional coaching that must be embraced in order for professional teachers to survive in a consumer-based educational world.
• Teaching for learning is an art and a science that can be critiqued and coached for improved effect.
For too long a time teachers have believed that teaching is an art and only the teacher-artist can understand and interpret her own work. Or, that if teaching is a science, it is an inexact science that defies critical evaluation. I have known too many of these teacher-artists and thankfully they have proved to be a dying but not completely extinct species.
Teaching practices have been studied and associated with student learning for decades. Best teaching practices are those that reliably and consistently cause positive student gains in demonstrated learning. There are no teaching practices that guarantee positive learning for every child in every circumstance every day. Wonderfully, there are a wide variety of best practices that consistently correlate with positive learning gains with certain student groups and characteristics. When taken in the aggregate of practices, a teacher who is expert in using this variety of best practices creates the best record of causing positive learning gains for all children regardless of their characteristics. Although the use of the terms “science-based” teaching practices have become over used and abused politically, there are best practices that any and every teacher can be coached to learn and coached to perform with positive effect.
• Teaching is a public enterprise and no longer the sole purview of a teacher in a teacher’s classroom.
Open records and public data bases changed the classroom from the closed and private domain of the classroom teacher and her students and their parents into a public showroom. School report card data can be drilled down to the classroom level and associated with specific teachers. This data describes and analyzes the student learning of one teacher’s student group as compared and contrasted with the student groups of other teachers in the same school and in all other schools. We have reached a time when student data defines the effectiveness of a teacher’s teaching and that data is available for the world to see. It is unlikely that this reality will be reversed; it is more likely that it will be more critically and broadly utilized.
The elementary and junior high teachers who taught me in the 1950s must be rolling over in their graves with the worry that the statistical evidence of their teaching may become public record. It is not that they were ineffective teachers, but that their work would be so brazenly held up for public scrutiny. Public scrutiny! Get over it! Almost everything at school is public data today.
• Criticism for coaching purposes is not personal. Get over the defensiveness.
School is highly affective and no one wants to hurt another’s feelings. Children are schooled in being sensitive to other children. Teachers are just adult children in this case. No teacher wants to hurt another teacher’s feelings or will tolerate being offended by a peer. Sadly, this hypersensitivity has created an aversion to professional criticism.
Even in department and staff meetings designed for and supportive of professional growth, a teacher is hesitant if not loath to be critical of a peer. The concepts of critical and criticism have forever connoted negativity. “I liked the way you spoke to the children in the beginning of the lesson” or “The children seemed to appreciate the way you helped them when they had difficulty dividing fractions today” are typical of the nature of non-specific, fluffy commentary from one teacher observer to another. “I won’t hurt your feelings and you won’t hurt mine.”
Criticism is the language and highway of professional improvement. Being critical is not being mean-spirited; it is using a critical and clinical eye to discern teaching that causes students to learn from that which does not. Teachers need to be told which of their teaching practices are effective and why and which of their teaching practices are not effective and why. Whenever possible, observational data or student performance data correlated with the specific practice needs to be shared and used as a driver for understanding how a better or alternative practice may have caused a better result.
On the softer side of professional criticism may be lesson studies. These are non-supervisory observations based upon understandings of best practice and learning effects and shared by peers related to their observations of each other. The goal of lesson study is to strengthen the capacity of a particular lesson to cause student learning and of variety of lessons to cause all children regardless of their characteristics to achieve proficiency of a common educational objective or standard.
On the more aggressive side of criticism may be a professional coach sitting with a teacher or group of teachers to critique a teacher’s instructional effectiveness. This session will be more clinical and use more exacting language to assess the cause-effect relationship between teacher and student.
Regardless of the softness or aggressiveness of the coaching, the purpose is to cause the teacher to be a more effective teacher in causing all children to learn. Just as the purpose of Butch Harmon’s coaching is not to abuse Phil Mickelson but to cause Mickelson to make better shots in order to lower his golf score.
• Professional coaching supports not threatens employment.
For too long a time teachers have associated the need for professional coaching with “professional remediation.” Teachers were placed on professional remediation plans when their supervisors claimed that their work was unacceptable and improvement was necessary to prevent demotion, loss of compensation or termination. A teacher who needed coaching was one step from being fired.
Not true today. Every teacher and principal, superintendent and district instructional support person should receive professional coaching as the district’s standard operating procedure for assisting each employee to be sharp and become sharper in causing student learning. The lack of professional coaching in a district may reflect an inadequate understanding of professional development.
• The leadership responsibilities of superintendents and principals are supervisory and supporting of professional improvement. Their specific skills sets may not include the breadth and depth of pedagogy required for professional coaching.
There was a time when building principals were expected to be the school’s instructional expert and singularly responsible for assuring the instructional effectiveness of the faculty. Many principals relished and flourished in that expectation and role while even more principals floundered. Today the principal remains the instructional leader of the school but not alone as a professional coach. The mandates for principal effectiveness have exploded as broadly as the mandates for teacher effectiveness and the realities of time and task make it impossible for a principal to be school’s sole instructional coach.
It is usual for a principal in a supervisory role to be trained in the clinical evaluation of a teacher parallel to the training of a professional coach but not to share the larger and more detailed body of work required of coaching. It is usual for a supervisor to share critical observations of a teacher’s work with a coach for the purposes of specifying required improvement but unusual for a coach to share critical observations of a teacher’s work with a supervisor for the purposes of employment validation.
School districts everywhere are exploring the use professional coaches. They understand the relationship between teacher instructional effectiveness, student learning achievement and public opinion of their school district and individual schools. Coaches for teachers will soon be as common as coaches for sports and I hope that soon comes quickly for the good of public education.