 the list and just give you a chance to see, to speak or to just type in the chat really, really quickly. Oh, Val, in here. Sorry. We were just waiting for Val to come back. So I'm going to give the mic over to Val-Elex. She is the Executive Director of ERLC. She's going to introduce our speaker for today. Good morning. Welcome to everyone from across the province and our region that has joined us this morning. It's great to be in a school site this morning, and you may be able to hear the announcements in the hallways. So my apologies for that back channel talk. Before I introduce Michael, I'd like to just see a check from all the participants across the province that are engaged with us this morning. If you have ever heard Michael speak or if you have ever read one of his articles, could you indicate to us with a happy face? Thank you very much. Would you also indicate to me that Michael probably needs no introduction at all? We have a short time together, and just before we let him go, we're going to do a little bit of a roll call, which indicates for me whether you want to give him a round of applause for all of his work that he's done, all of the writing he's done, the speaking that he's done, and helped us in our work in school improvement. So thank you. As you can see, I don't think Michael needs an introduction. We're thrilled, Michael, that you're willing to join us today. If it's okay with everyone, we would like to start with a quick roll call from districts, and we'll start alphabetically on the participant list. If you wouldn't mind sharing the name of your district, and if there are more participants with you from wherever you are right now. So Bev, I'll let that, if you wouldn't mind starting with that introduction. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Jan. Hi, Debne LaBarre from L. Capan's public schools. There are four of us here. Hi, Caroline, and our customer. I'm Elaine Lou. I'm just in thanks for the musicians. Chantel, who's at your site Chantel, and you can type it in the chat or you can speak it in the microphone. So we will go down to coaches as change agents. agents. The mysterious coaches is change agents. Can you jump on your mic and say hello and say how many people at your site please? Hi, coaches. Which site are you participating from? You're the only one? Okay. And we've got Jen. I think Jen said she was alone at her site. Jose. Oh, thanks for typing it in. PSE, they have a half a dozen facilitators and a step student. Awesome. Jose, hello. Hello. Hi, this is Jose. We are four. We're from Greater North Central Francophone Board. Welcome to both Jose's. And I think Kate has told us previous. Well, this is Kate Belford III, so I'm not sure if that means there's three people. That's correct. There's three of us from Canadian Rocky Public Schools. Welcome, Canadian Rockies. Hello Paula. How many people at your site? Paula, you can just type that into the chat. I know that Parkland has said they've got a half a dozen people. Welcome all the way from Yellowknife. Coaches is change agents. That's awesome that you could join us today. Sandy, how many people are with you today? We've got seven sitting here. All bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. That's just excellent. Sturgeon, can you talk that? Yeah, we can definitely talk that. We have 12, including our superintendent, associate superintendent, couple principals, special ed coordinators, vice principals, and central office. Thank you. And Therese, how many people over at Merfit Today 8? Bonjour. Merfit 8 members. Great to be there. Awesome. And thank you everyone else for typing in the chat. Vicki, we're going to assume that you're all by yourself. Well, thanks everyone. And Belle, did you ... No, just thanks an awful lot for joining us. And thank you very much, Michael, for willing to do this after your recent travels, and we'll turn it over to you. Okay, thanks very much. Hello to everybody. So I'm just going to make about 12 minutes beginning presentation. Many of you know that, excuse me, I've been working in Alberta for the last, especially the last three years with superintendents. And several of you will have been at the session recently at Rimrock that Ben Levin and Lynn Sherritt and myself did. So we're very happy to have this ongoing connection with the whole province, basically. And secondly, just by way of also background information, I know you've been connecting with Jim Knight, who's a colleague of mine from Toronto from the old days when he was just starting out. And he and I just did an article for educational leadership. I don't know whether it will be accepted, but I'm not actually going to talk about the inner workings of that article except to give you the title that will convey what our message is. The title is Squandering the Efforts of Coaches. So Squandering the Efforts of Coaches. So this is really basically saying it doesn't matter how good a coach is, if they're not in a school that doesn't have an instructional leader as a principal, if they're not in a district that's working on the reform agenda in the way that we know works, if they're not in a province that has a good context, their efforts are going to be blunted. So I'm going to present with you and I just put these slides together last night so they're not a couple of slides you have seen before, but I tried to put together these eight lessons I call them that are the most recent things coming from this that I think will be helpful for you and then we can talk about them. We use as you know this term in the last 16 months motion leadership to connote the idea that motion leadership is about causing positive change to move forward. Whether it's turning around an individual, a school, a school district, or a system, it's all of those. So that's kind of the lead in. I won't get too much background but many of you will know from 2008 to six secrets that kind of captured what we had learned and I tested it with a business literature so again I won't go over that but it is relevant background because these ideas came from practice and they were tested out in the literature. Since in the last four years or three and a half now these products, four of them are the most recent, the motion leadership itself, the skinny on change we call it, the movie that pretentious of a title but it's the filming of eight instances of success, six of my districts and two of them are states or provinces. The all systems goal which is province wide or whole system reform and most recently moral imperative realized which I'll get to in some of the lessons. So let me get to these lessons right away. These are a distillation of what I think of the most important insights about change at the operational level that you as a change agent can use and relate to your own experience or that you can also in helping others develop focus on these things. So I'll just do them one by one. All effective leaders combine resolute moral purpose and impressive empathy. We for several years now have written about moral purpose so that part is being clear for a while but what's become clear at the operational level is what I've come to call impressive empathy. An impressive empathy is when you have empathy for someone else who's in your way. That's why it's impressive because you'd rather not have them in your way. So a lot of our change work of course is about building relationships and so point number one I want to make is you really have to be good at not just being right about the agenda but figuring out where other people are coming from in this notion. I mean Dan Goldman's empathy is certainly central here but I want to push it one step further and call it impressive empathy because you really do understand. You get to understand you have that knack if you're good at this for understanding where others are coming from. The second and related one is kind of a corollary I guess I'd have to say is we've noticed this in situations of let's say toxic cultures which I mean turned around significantly over two or three years. We've written about some of these schools and some of these school systems in every case if you have a negative culture or not a good culture you will find people who are not that happy. So and they've learned in their daily work I'm going to say not to be all that respectful to each other because they're really not having a positive culture. So in order to turn that around again and this is a variation of impressive empathy the way I put it in a kind of rule of thumb way is at the beginning especially you have to give people more respect than they deserve because they won't be knowing you, they won't be acting in a different way. We wrote about Crosby Heights and really toxic culture that Ryan Friedman the principal turned around. He was respectful even at the beginning when the staff wasn't because there was just another leader coming in. But it's not just respect but it's respect plus capacity building plus plus as we've seen in all of these. So very important part of impressive empathy is this ability to show respect to others based on the need to sort of find out more where they're coming from. The third one of the eight is I've come to appreciate what I call realized moral purpose emphasis on realized and I call it the best motivator. And what this means is that and I want to revert on doing this on purpose to turn around the causal relationship. Normally we think of get moral purpose stoked up and then people will implement. Now what we're realizing in many cases especially people that haven't had reason to feel that success is going to happen is that you actually have to help cause success and then as a result of that their moral purpose is activated. Maybe it was buried and had to be resurfaced. Maybe it wasn't there much in the first place but once they see the fantastic ability to impact kids it gets stirred. So this is an important change agent skill because it means don't worry about getting the lack of progress at the very beginning. Keep doing some of the right things. Get it to kick in and then when it kicks in take advantage of the new energy and then the fourth of eight the notion that when you work together and we've seen this time and again in every situation this is teachers working with each other within a school. These are clusters of schools working together in networks or districts for that matter is that two big social forces happen. One I call mutual allegiance. One sense of identity gets enlarged and deepened across bigger scenarios and then the second and very interesting and something to be really appreciated is when people are moving to get things accomplished they never accomplished before. There's kind of a sense of collaborative competition that kicks in which really helps people stretch and it's friendly competition that's called. Sometimes I call it moral Olympics but it's that kind of excitement that you really are accomplishing things you never thought were possible. So those are the first four. The second four, success is a matter of changing the culture of the school. So we all know this but I want to put it's not in implementing innovation only it's realizing that the culture of the school is the way that people work together for better or for worse. The values, the habits, the skills, the issues about the practices and so forth. I put in a little corollary here because one thing that's really clear in the practical evidence is that the principal is obviously clearly important for the culture of the school but more than that the principal has to participate as a learner in helping the school move forward. So for example a principal who sets up a PLC focus who provides resources and time for people to work together but himself or herself does not actually participate in the learning would not be an instructional leader in our books but it is the culture of the school the principal is key. The second and this is easily missed because of the focus on schools and not realizing the district context. We're also talking about success and this is in our sessions we've had with the superintendents that we're talking about changing the culture in the district. This is not a school by school change. This is a whole set of schools in the culture of the district that's really key for this and we should realize that in that culture changes so that in a game we've written about this we work with districts to help make this all happen and what you see is that the achievement of the whole district on the average whether it's 15 schools or 200 schools goes up. Graduation rates go up over three to six year period and that's because the leadership of the district and the leadership of the schools both of those are important they need to work in partnership they need to commitment to peers across schools but also a new relationship between schools and the district. And then the second last one I put it this way effective change agents exploit state policy by that I mean province policy and I don't think of province policy as something literally to be implemented as if it's somebody else's agenda but I do think of it as something that you really have to understand take into account be part and parcel of and if you take the notion of exploit in the best sense of that word you will find very good goals and strategies in state province policy and you have to be knowledgeable about that policy and you have to know that priorities you have to be an example of the priorities in action so it's again this is a win-win notion because we've got this every element of the system this is systemic after all which means every element of the system has to be in the purview of the coach as a change agent and then as a final checklist to make sure you're on the right side of the next slide. I just did a paper an article for a group and the article is called on choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform. It's on my website MichaelFollum.ca on the homepage so you can download it right from the homepage. I wrote it for a group in Australia and they asked me to concentrate on examples where the leadership of a whole country was trying to bring about serious change and that they were proactive about it and what was right and what was wrong and how to do that. So I looked at Australia which was the group that commissioned the article and I also looked at the U.S. where we're working quite a lot and if you look at this and I have to be brief on this because the article gets into the depth of certainly our discussions again but those countries U.S. and Australia in particular and I'll give the examples in the paper. The ones that are in a hurry I guess I'll say or don't appreciate the right drivers in quotation tend to over emphasize accountability instead of capacity building. Capacity building is learning. It's building up the competencies and skills so they err on the side of accountability which means testing, merit and other things that really focus on checking up on things and getting data. The second thing that's related to that which is the second wrong driver is especially in the U.S. they tend to focus on what I'm going to call the individual solution. So if we could only get more top notch principles if we could only get more high quality teachers which is relevant of course but when you look closely at all the powerful strategies it's really teamwork that's the winner. That is groups of people the whole PLC foundation is built on this premise and the evidence is actually overwhelming if you look closely even at the last 40 years time and again it's those collaborative cultures that win every time. A collaborative culture is group work it's not individual work and then the third one is the importance of having instruction drive technology rather than the other way around and technology is seductive as we know it's sexy it's got all kinds of bells and whistles it's fabulous in many ways but it also it can look like progress if you have the latest equipment but it's not a progress if you don't have instructional improvement. And then the final one is the need to make it systemic and not to keep going for pieces, accountability individual quality of teachers there and so you need to get it connected I guess I'll say and we have positive examples about the work the hot performance of Alberta is an example of probably the right drivers that work more explicitly on Ontario Ben Levin and I have written about this him in his book on changing 5,000 schools and me and all systems go for example showing how we use the right drivers although we didn't use that language at the time so that it's a good checklist because it really is the eight lessons that you go back to those in action on the right side of the drivers. And then just a final slide here the culture of learning is everything so that the single greatest difference I'm going to say between effective and ineffective organizations whether they're schools or businesses or multi-unit organizations systems is the shared depth of understanding among people about what they're doing shared depth of understanding and you can't get shared depth of understanding from a workshop you can't get it even from sending a team to a workshop you have to get it by what we call learning is the work which is actually secret number four so learning is the work is the centerpiece of this you say learning is the work I mean two when I say it I mean two things one it is the day to day experience of people and secondly it's collective it's team-based it's the group learning game so those that's a quick I know many of you have heard me or read the book so I didn't want to get into a long winded review of that you can read more about it but this is my my short Levin slide reminder of I think what is the latest what's coming out of this work I'm very glad to get your reactions about whether this rings true what questions you might have what things I've omitted that you want to talk about anything goes in the next half hour so over to you. Thank you Michael for that overview and you're right lots of opportunities to read your good work to listen to your messages and Jan's added your website address to the chat room I am struck by as we provide districts time to think of the questions they'd like to pose with you so I think it's a beautiful opportunity to have access to one-on-one so to speak I appreciated the wrong versus rate drivers analogy and just to try and make us an alignment with our work in the province the accountability versus capacity building reminded me of what someone mentioned about the essential conditions to support implementation that's available general type in the website address that that whole guide is based on a shared accountability and someone mentioned it's almost like a collaborative accountability framework that we want to address all the conditions to really support the capacity building we want for the system how do we really focus on implementation the individual versus group work there's some great work being done by the province right now around collaborative practices and we'll add that website into the archive material there's a little bookmark that has been developed and she is useful for districts and groups to look at how are we modeling that collaboration so teaching us about how to be collaborative the technology versus pedagogy reminds me of the work that the region and the province is doing around the TPAC model and some of that information by chance just happens to be on the front page of our website how the pedagogy needs to drive the strategies that we use in classrooms to support systems or to support student success and that's when it reminds me of piecemeal versus systemic change there feels like and what we talked about at the leading our way forward session with the superintendent's panel is there's multiple priorities initiatives coming together and our districts in our region we've asked us to how do we connect all these dots how do we make it a system change versus all of these initiatives that come forward so I appreciated the wrong versus right drivers that you suggested there I'm not. So I just wanted to that was a very good summary and overview I wanted to make two comments on it one is that we do find that people have too many priorities this is part of the piecemeal problem but that the sheer number of poor priorities so we've when I say we I'm thinking of Ben Levin myself who have really been the most influential at least in Ontario and shaping the agenda but a small number of core priorities that are elevated above others so that the sheer number is not the problem that's one thing the second thing is that quite often and I say this in the wrong drivers paper it will look systemic on paper so I know the essential conditions for example we've been over the copy a couple of weeks ago the essential conditions paper for example it looks systemic and I don't know that it's intended to be but my question always is does it feel systemic to people that are implementing it not just can you make the case that it's cognitively systemic by reading it but can you as a way it plays itself out does it really operate in a connected way on the ground and I think that's a much tougher criteria to meet. So Sandy has brought forward a question from Graham Prairie on behalf of his team and it is what would be the top three qualities or experiences that you would look for so what past practice represents their future performance Michael? Yeah I would first I would look for what they can describe as their actual work that a lot can be found out just by whether people are vague or specific so in one sense it's what is their track record of instructional practice so that would be one overall criterion. The second one is I would want to know how steep they are in instructional pedagogy that is do they really know their stuff when it comes to for example the embedded formative assessment instructional practices that are working and the third very important I think is are they aware of the school improvement and district improvement side of the knowledge base so we might find instructional coaches that are steeped in pedagogy but not very cognizant of the wider knowledge base on school improvement and professional learning communities so I would want to know whether they are plugged into that whether they are conversing in it whether they read that stuff and agree with it and engage with it so all of those things and I guess a fourth you didn't ask for a fourth but I'm going to throw a fourth one in is how respected these people are with their colleagues I don't mean a popularity contest but are they respected by for their moral commitment for their expertise for their interpersonal qualities and the more that they're respected by a diverse range of other people I think that the more telling that that is. Thank you Michael for sharing this this is Val again. Albert education has provided a summary based on Joelle and Killian's work of some of the roles that learning coaches may undertake and we appreciate your summary as well as that the leading our way forward where districts are making decisions about what are those aspects that we want these folks to take on. The list that currently is on the website and from some of the literature is much longer than three or four items but I appreciate the conversation around what are the KSA's or the knowledge skills and attributes that these folks need to have in their back pocket. I'm also intrigued around the conversation around are there some of those knowledge and skills that we can teach that we can help and build learning coaches capacity and how would you respond to that are there some things that are teachable. Well yeah to me they're all teachable I just did a new book called change leader it's only in page proof sense but I went over this change leader are good leaders born or do you develop them so I mean virtually all the things we're talking about are all teachable I'm sure there's on the margins you know five percent who get it fantastically well without much effort in five percent you'll never get it but for the other ninety percent we can all learn it but we also know that the learning must be experiential and cumulative so that the famous rule which has a lot of truth to it that it takes ten years of purposeful learning to become good at something so this is why if I'm going to interview somebody for a position of this nature I want to know what they've done the last ten years or what they're only in the system for five years what they've done the last five years so that another way of answering your question if they haven't already just demonstrated that they're a learner by what they've done then I would worry but I wouldn't say it's because they're hopeless I would just say they haven't been doing the right learning things to get to get that development so it's just keep saying this is not impossible work but it's hard work you have to apply yourself and you have to go through the learning curve and get better and better at it and it's going to take a few years of staying at it. So Sturgeon's question is how would you advise learning coaches to be working more elbow to elbow with their colleagues I think any depends what the particular sort of arrangements are if you think of coaches working with schools you want to build in opportunities for coaches to learn from each other so those are you know some models have been coaches spend four days a week applying you know working in schools in the fifth day learning either individually or in combination in our literacy and numeracy secretariat which has over a hundred people in it who are in effect coaches we call them student achievement officers that we think of it in two ways one their main work is definitely to work in partnerships with schools and districts but their other work is to learn from each other so we do I do maybe four workshops a year with them as capacity building and in it it's not just me talking I'm pulling out what they're learning from each other they also build in other ways to do that another way of adding it because once you brainstorm in this you come up with your own ideas is to have coaches some people shadow other people for a day you know just or a team to do something as a two-some rather than a one-some so the anything those micro examples as well as the larger collective get-togethers you don't have to overdo it but you have to in the course of the year say do we have a few opportunities some of which need to be collective and others need to be one on one to learn from each other and do we value the learning from each other have we committed as our own norm that we're going to learn from each other because if you're not learning from each other you're unlikely to be very effective in helping other people learn other people learn. Thanks for that Michael now going back to Grand Prairie they've commented that the process and timeline for parenting learning coaches in the schools is a challenge so what would you recommend to districts who are contemplating a learning coach model regarding a start from central team or would it be a start from a school embedded model? This is a tricky one because the answer is neither in sense it's neither top down or bottom up so there's really two questions in it as I'm looking out of the chat but one is if I'm thinking of starting I guess I'll say my first thought would be not to air on either end of that problem so the one end to air on is to say we better get the central office staff up to speed before we extend to the schools I wouldn't do that I also wouldn't say that this is site based management therefore we should have the individual schools work at this and we've done this with school districts many times so I'm speaking for my experience. We steadfastly avoid either of those two extremes instead what we might say is we would say that this is a partnership between schools and this district office that if it's a very large system we can only we don't want to start all at once when we started York Region with its 140 elementary schools we started with 40 schools not 140 but everybody knew that it was coming for everyone so to speak so we phased it in according to our capacity so I think it's important to establish the spirit of partnership in two senses one is between the district and the schools and the other is among schools that that spirit and that norm be established that value be established right at the beginning and then you start to go about maybe a partial implementation or full implementation depending on what's involved and then the other part of the question I think I'm just going to interpret it this way is that I think it's important and it seems a bit strange to put it this way is to realize you're not implementing a coaching model that's not the main point that's a means to an end so for example we saw this in the early stages of PLCs especially in the schools where a district would say we're a PLC district and their whole raison d'etre about that was to implement PLCs per say as an engine itself so PLCs are only a means to changing the culture of the school a learning coach model is only a means to changing the culture of instruction so in this sense it goes on forever because if you're using a learning coach model you're establishing and it takes a bit to establish it but the way of working which includes coaching is meant to be permanent it's meant to be a permanent change in the culture and I've expressed it one way in some of the writings that we've done which is to say that the coach in a sense is a second change agent at the school level the first change agent I'm thinking of elementary schools the first change agent should be the principal as an instructional leader but the additional leaders coaches are very much part and this is why when we say squandering the efforts of coaches means that you have a coaching model which is not integrated with the overall leadership of the system so to see them as part and parcel of that as second change agents as representing a new way of working in the district is going to become permanent in terms of a culture of learning I think is an important way of establishing that right at the beginning that that's the nature of the change thanks for that Michael I'm looking in the chat and Jose from one of our francophone boards asks how do you get really a lot of your coaches and Tricia right underneath is do all teachers need to be coached excuse me okay it's good to take these two together you can't cause you can't make people change especially if they have tenure we've tried that so it doesn't work so you really do you need to be patient with those that are reluctant there may be some extreme cases where the person shouldn't be a teacher or they're so bad that they should lead the profession so I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the 80 to 90% in the middle so that you can't force it too readily and I'll tie it into the second question in a moment but the way to get it is to I think get people in a situation of trying something in relatively non-threatening circumstances and build on it to get them linked to other peers there's a very important overlay here which we call non-judgmentalism and that's a very big skill to develop non-judgmentalism is when you're trying to improve something and your attitude towards what you're seeing is not pejorative it's not negative even though it might be ineffective you and we ourselves I think have trained ourselves to say if somebody doesn't have the capacity it's not because they're deliberately trying to do something wrong or whatever or we don't roll our eyes at it we just say this is a matter of figuring it out and getting some skills developed so the attitude is key here about how you approach the reluctant teacher. On the second related one do all teachers need to be coached? The answer to this is a definite yes and by that I mean the definition of a teacher that is a new professional and this applies to all professions actually that I want to use and not be indirect about this. It's no longer acceptable for a teacher to say I'm a great teacher leave me alone to teach behind my classroom door that instead of that the definition of a teacher is this include this that every teacher has a responsibility of helping other teachers learn and has also an equal responsibility of learning from others and coaches are part of that combination so teachers are particularly good if they don't need coaching in the narrow sense they can be fabulous resources for other teachers but the teacher who is a loner even if he or she is very good at the teaching. I mean we can all appreciate the odd person who's a fabulous teacher and everybody thinks they're eccentric but fabulous and I don't want to have a cookie cutter mold here but I also want to say that if those teachers are to be coached they better have an attitude that they can be helpful for other teachers when they're helpful for other teachers they learn more themselves so I think all of this is part of that fabric of changing the definition of a professional to that the professional is an interactive, we're talking about interactive professionalism not independent autonomy. Thank you Kate Belford's group is asking what recommendations do you have for a school district with limited funding to support time and people for this initiative? Yeah it's a good question of perennial one that first I don't want to think of this as the front end question is a matter of time. It's not a matter of time, it's a matter of norms and priority and when you get to practical time questions as you know on learning forward with the NSDC site they have a whole section on how to find time in Rick Dufour's in his group, their book which is called raising the bar and closing the gap. They have a section called frequently asked questions which is how do I find time. So I think it's the attitude towards time as I'm doing this that is one of the issues and I guess I would look for ways of finding time that don't necessarily cost new money. I don't necessarily cost new money and that there's some of the districts that I know because I sat with them a couple of weeks ago in Alberta they worked out various things with the community of early dismissal now and then or built in where there's some small blocks of time none of which cost money. Secondly when you get AC type money as you have and I know it's been cut in half recently but that enables you to get pockets of time. Thirdly there are different ways of staffing of getting students together for some group work and other kinds of issues. Sometimes principals teach because they want to teach once a week to free up two teachers. So I think it's important to talk to the profession inside the school with help from the district and help from the province to address this problem and we know that school leaders and school teachers who want to get time to work together figure out in multiple ways how to get small pockets of time to be able to do this and so I don't want to externalize that as if we don't get time we can't become collegial we can't become collaborative and that's going to be self-defeating. Thanks again. I think that you've probably answered their first question about the role of administrator and coach matching and conflicting. If you think your questions answered in that respect you put up a happy face but further they are asking do you feel that coaching is best done by an individual or by a team at a school level? I'm going to address the first of those two questions because in my comment about non-judgmentalism I'm unequivocally saying we don't want to split the development role and the evaluation role. You absolutely do not want to split. You want to redefine it so that non-judgmentalism and school improvement and therefore administrators and coaches always match in that definition are always congruent. Once you separate them you get a complication that you can't overcome for continuous improvement. The question of the coaching is best done by an individual or by a team. I think it's done best by an individual if I gave a literal answer but then the team part of it has to be part of this, the culture of what the school is doing. I'm thinking of a very interesting parallel finding here and I think that will illustrate this. Susan Johnson from Harvard has done some great work on the teaching profession and she was looking at mentors in this particular case but she found that in schools where there was one-to-one mentoring but no collaborative culture the impact was not positive but in schools when there was one-to-one mentoring there was no collaborative culture. The results were multiplicative, if I can say that word. They combined and interacted to generate more. If you do it with an individual and I think that's where the best help comes from it better be part of a concerted effort of a collaborative learning culture for it to have its impact. Thank you. Now Parkland School Division whom I know that you met in a long entry in the chat box that you might want to refer to as I read it out but they're saying there are so many possibilities that the coaching program can be and they're talking about how do we narrow our focus so it meets the needs of our teachers. How do we begin since we don't have any learning coaches right now in schools? Our learning services department is asking how do we establish the coaching program in our school division? What steps or priorities should we start with? Should we narrow our focus to a specific area such as differentiated instruction or are we leaving out something? What do other school divisions think that are participating today? And Michael what do you think? Okay so this goes back to my question about don't search for a coaching model. This is not the name of the game in the same way as we don't want people searching for PLCs as if they were a solution in a literal sense so that I want to go instead of starting with that question I want to step back and this gets close to their specific area's question. I mentioned the importance of focusing on a small number of core priorities then this is where this comes in. Yes you should start with a specific area and if the although I don't necessarily like differentiated instruction as an area because again it begs the question for what we tend to think of literacy, numeracy in high school graduation, personalization of learning. So I think the answer then I would give is this just to organize the answer. One is focus on the instructional improvement you want regardless of the solution for a moment. What is the instructional improvement? Do you want to improve literacy? Do you want to improve in a high school the nature of instructional practice? That's more personalized and more effective. Whatever it is get that as your front end piece. And then secondly how you're going to do it needs to involve some form of capacity building to get better at it. That capacity building you could call it coaching but it doesn't have to be called coaching. It could be teams learning something. It could be people learning from each other across connections and all of those things. When we did this in York Region I guess I would say that almost all of the systems I can think about, perhaps all of them, eventually have literacy coaches if we're talking about literacy because you need the second change agent. You need more ability to influence it. But as I said I wouldn't start with looking for a coaching model. I would look for two things. What is our instructional priority? What should it be? And secondly how are we going to get capacity building help? And when you get to the second question you start to think about the coaching connections. Best team has asked for just a little clarification around the first question of admin and coach. So can an administrator who is in an evaluative role also be a learning coach if there's not someone else available to be a coach in the building? So in other words can they have those multiple roles? Let's try that one again. When I say principal as an instructional coach I mean that their biggest priority is improvement, not evaluative feedback per se. So I can't see how you could, if the principal is going to be key to improvement, I can't see how you can reduce his or her coaching improvement role. It's far more important than the mere evaluation role. I guess I want to put it that way. So it depends on the system. If you're in a certain system in Texas for example or Florida and you have a punitive evaluation system then I think there's a problem. But if you're in Alberta or Ontario or Brits Columbia that it's I think it's very reconcilable to be an instructional leader with a primary focus on improvement and still where appropriate deal with the evaluative side of it. The evaluative side is small, is a very small part of the role of a highly effective organization I think. So I'm just going to exercise a little wait time here while we have a few people typing in the chat. So I see Sandy's got something that he's going to add. Bob says thanks. Well we're waiting for some of those other questions to come forward. Michael, thank you for this excellent overview of some of the components we need to be aware of as we support the capacity of our system, whether to a learning coach model, instructional learner model or whatever. As we wrap up the session or just before the next questions, we'll add some additional materials in the PD resources on the ERLC website and send that link to everyone. I'll let Jan go ahead and Sandy's question. The question is, do you agree that the coach's prime objective is to work with teachers and not to address the needs of specific students in the classroom at either end of the learning spectrum? I would say absolutely without question. Absolutely. The only thing I would add is that the coach has to be also good with students. In other words, has to have that specific knowledge that they can do it themselves. He's a very Bennett who many of you will know because he's worked in Alberta so much. He had that great ability to be primarily a coach and support for teachers. But he would also take over a class anytime with specific students to demonstrate something. So that's the answer. You have to have the capacity to do the work with specific students and demonstrate that for credibility and for clarity. But you have to realize also that that's not your... Don't think that that's your main work. Your main work is doing that in order to influence teachers. So it's the teachers that are your main clients, so to speak. Not the students per se. Thanks, Michael, for that overview as well. If there aren't any further questions, we'll watch the chat box for a moment. Thank you for highlighting for us that it's about our instructional priorities and really it's about how we align and connect the dots of all the multiple initiatives and agendas that are coming forward from multiple places. Our communities, our ministry from different areas as well. But really focusing on our instructional priorities to ensure for student learning. The definition of capacity building or the term that you use frequently as capacity building does highlight one of the agendas we see from the consortium, from the regional consortium perspective is the term learning coach sometimes is causing some angst around districts. How does that term learning coach be used and how is it defined? Who's defining it? I guess is what I'm trying to get at. I appreciate what you said that whatever the term is, learning coaches, it is about building the capacity of the entire system and the role that that person will play to do some of that work. Are there any other final questions just before we wrap up and provide a round of applause for Michael. Jose? Thank you. Thanks Jose. We'll send you a link out. We'll send a link out for the learning forward document that Michael referred to in the before document. We'll send a couple links and then we'll follow up with some of the information that's been shared here as well. Could you please join me or Michael would you like a final comment before we say our final thanks? I think this has one last question. And we'll end with this. How do you effectively coach teams of teachers and EAs? I don't know enough about the actual role of EAs in your schools, whether they're lots of them or few, whether they're dwindling in numbers or whether many of them see EAs as a route to becoming a teacher soon or not. So I think if we take EAs as needing instructional effectiveness then we need to coach both teachers and EAs sometimes perhaps individually all the better if they actually are a good team then working with teams is perfectly fine. And thanks very much again. I just wanted to thank you. Questions were great. I always learn a lot from the question so thank you very much for the session. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much Michael and we really enjoyed it as well and if everyone could join me from across the province with your round of applause you can see all those hands shaking across the province and in Yellowknife. Thank you very much and we'll look forward to trying to access some more of your time in the future Michael. I know that we have a number of sessions listed on our program both that may be of interest to participants. Jim Knight will be back in the New Year, the new school year Laura Lipton will be here as well and there's a number of archive materials where we'll add this as well. So thanks again Michael continued success in your work. Thank you for your continued writing and authoring. We look forward to continuing to learn from you. Thanks everyone. Thanks.