 ERLC is pleased to introduce Jim Knight with instructional coaching strategies to facilitate successful coaching. Now Jim has asked me to go through and do some introductions. So I think what we'll do is we'll start with Annie, Annie Drapo because her name is right under Jim Knight's and I know that Annie will be comfortable doing this or starting and we'll just go down the list and as we do I'll ask you to introduce yourself, tell me where you're from and how many people are at your site. So if there's more than one person at your site introduce them as well. Annie can we start with you and I'll give you the mic. Okay, I'm sure I can start but that's what happened when the name starts with Annie. My name is Annie Drapo. I am from St. Albert Protestant but I'm seconded at the Réjeaux Provincial d'Adaptation Scalaire which is the equivalent of the EREX that provides services for students with special needs. I'm currently coordinating a project where I am kind of learning how to be a coach. So and I've been looking around, looking around beside me in my bottle of water, there's only the two of us here. Thanks very much Becky. Go ahead please. To speak Becky, you just click on your microphone at the bottom left and then go ahead. Sorry, I'm new to the webinar experience. My name is Becky Wondeo. I'm at Parkland School Division working at a four screen school and I am a balance and receipt facilitator full time this year for our division and I'm very excited to be here and I'm actually just in my office at home with me and two cats and a dog. Thanks. Great. Thank you. Brenda. Hello and welcome from Milgrove. Brenda, how many people are there? Are there other people besides you there? I think yes. Maybe there are. Yes there is. I'm Brenda Stumber and I'm one of the balance literacy coaches here at Milgrove and as I've introduced Kelly Holden who is doing a math coaching position as well as Gail Wright and we also have Allie Berge who is also our special education teacher. Great. Thank you. Denise. And I know Denise is typing from black gold. There's Steve, Tara, Mike, Greg and Denise, ACICs Instructional Coaches for our district. Awesome. Welcome. Gail. Just type in. Gail, are you from Milgrove as well? Yes, I am. Great. Thank you. Joel. Hi. It's Joel Connet from Fort McMurray Catholic and in the room I have Patricia Nameth, Julie Williams and Victor Steele, all consultants and directors in our district. Welcome. Catherine. Hi. My name is Catherine O'Grady. I'm the science consultant for Edmonton Catholic Schools. So I'm responsible for grades 1 to 12 and I approach teachers in their classroom. So I'm really looking forward to getting some more information into this process. Thanks. And Kelly, why don't you jump on the mic and say hi, even though you've been introduced. Great. I think it's great that so many people were able to come in teams today. So Jim, I'll give you the mic and we'll jump right in. Thanks and welcome, Jim. We're so excited to have you here with us today. I'm happy to be here. I'm sitting in Lawrence, Kansas, looking out my window. The football team is practicing, but I am a longtime Albertan, lived there for about six years and mostly Jasper, but lived in Edmonton in Banff and worked for parks in Jasper. And my favorite place in the world is Mount Youth Cabell in Jasper. So it's fun to be talking to folks at the place that I really feel is kind of like my spiritual home. I love living there and I always look forward to getting back. But today what I want to do is I want to go through kind of just an overview of instructional coaching. But at the same time, I'd like to keep this as interactive as we can. So I've built in spots where it says comments on my slides. Some of you may already have the slides, I'm not sure. But don't wait until that point to ask a question. In fact, I'd ask you to say, if there's something you're really concerned about or some issue, if you could just type it into the chat and then I'll ask Jan to keep an eye out to see what the questions are. And we'll pause and talk about the questions. We can either use it through chat or when we come to those points where we pause and discuss the questions, you could come in with your microphone and ask the questions that way. Either way, if there's something you really want to ask, I'd be grateful if you'd posted so that I could respond. On that first slide, you can see my email. It's Jim Knight at Mac.com. And if we don't get a chance to answer the questions you've got right here, don't hesitate to send me an email and I'll do my best to get back to you. If it's urgent to just hear right away, make sure you put in the subject line, urgent, coach about the quit or whatever it might be. So I know that I have to respond quickly and get back to you. Otherwise, it might take me a few days to respond, but it'd be my pleasure to respond. Now, I wanted to start with just a little question after I map out the content we're going to cover. And the questions to think about before I go through this is just I'm going to ask you to tell us, actually you could do it now, are you currently working as an instructional coach or a facilitator or in some kind of coachy type position? If so, just click yes and if not just click the X mark, the green check mark or the X. Great. Now, let me ask another question. How many of you have heard me speak before? If you've heard me speak before, please put a green check mark and if you have not heard me put a X. Okay. Very helpful. I like this little deal. Maybe I'll just keep asking questions the rest of the day. No, no, no, I'm not going to. But thank you. This will, if you've heard me speak before, this will be reminiscent of things you've heard before. This is a quick overview. We could easily spend two days on this, but we're actually going to spend about 45 minutes on it. But I want to talk about these four things. Why would we worry about coaching in the first place? Why would it be important? Secondly, why is it that it doesn't work? Traditional professional development isn't that successful and I think that's because we misunderstand how complex a helping relationship is and why coaching is essential. Then we'll do a quick review of the partnership process, the partnership philosophy that underlies the way we go about doing coaching. And then I'll talk a bit about the components of coaching. What coaches do? So why do we do it? What are the complexities of helping? What's our response to those complexities and what are the nuts and bolts of what a coach does? We can't go into a lot of detail here, but I'm going to be back in Edmonton and across the province with a chance to share this in more detail. That's why if you've got specific questions, it would be my pleasure to kind of respond. So the first thing I want to talk about is the why question. I think first off, there's probably no one here who would say with confidence that all of our students are achieving as well as we think they should. Probably each of you thinks, you know, whether you're in the classroom working with teachers or whether you're working directly with coaches, you probably all know students who you think they're not achieving as well as they could. You don't even have in your own family, I do, that's for sure. And so we want our kids to improve and that's probably why we focus on these things. But I wanted to share with you some research and this is a review of the session yesterday initially. This comes from a study that was done in the state of Tennessee and Sanders and his colleagues did this study and what they looked at was they use what's called the teacher value added assessment and the teacher value added assessments doesn't compare the sixth graders this year with last year's sixth graders. What the teacher value added assessment does to compare us to sixth graders this year with where they were in fifth grade, with where they were in fourth grade, with where they were in third grade. And you're comparing the students against themselves so you can document their growth. And what the teacher value added assessment method does is it allows you to see Which teachers are having the biggest impact on students? In other words, which teachers are having students who show the most growth on that teacher value out of assessment? Because kids are with different teachers every year. And what Sanders did is he went to two major districts in Tennessee and he said, what happens if you have three years with a teacher who's in the top 20% in terms of their impact on the students? And then you have another student who's in three years with teachers who are in the bottom 20%. What's the difference on the state assessment scores of the students' achievement? And what Sanders found in the first system is if you had three years with a teacher who's in the bottom 20% in terms of their impact, three years in a row, that your scores would be 6% below average if you were a student who happened to be in that situation with three of those teachers. But if you were a student who had a three years in a row with a teacher who was in the top 20%, your kids would be 46% above average. So you have a difference of over 50%, in this case, 52%, on their achievement scores with everybody starting out sort of at average. In the second district, there's a similar difference of about 50%, 54%. But here, if you had three years in a bottom 20%, you would be a 21% below average on the state assessment scores. And if you were in the top 20%, you would be 33% above the state assessment scores. And so, simply put, who gets to teach you is gonna make a difference of around 50% than yours, up to 50% on your scores in three years. I mean, if you were in the second system and you had three years with a teacher in the bottom 20%, you would be very far behind the chance to be achieving. What the data shows, and you can look up the study if you want, you just look up Sanders and the Tennessee Value Added Assessment. If you, what the data shows to me is something we've all known. Anyone who's ever taken a university course knows the first class you ask is who's teaching the class and how a teacher teaches a class has a significant impact on the quality of kids learning and how much kids learn. So, there are lots of reasons why kids might not be where we want them to be. There's gonna be problems in the community. We might not like political moves. We might not be happy with administrators. We might not be happy about what kids put in their bodies or what they watch on TV. There's just many, many things that are gonna affect people. But one thing that is sort of in our control is the way in which kids are taught. And the way in which kids are taught dramatically has an impact on how they learn. So, of course, given all of that, what happens is that many school districts offer workshops to provide training. What the trouble with workshops is, in my opinion, they don't make much of an impact on instruction. We have a paper, it's at that website there at the bottom of the page, instructionalcoach.org, backslash, research, where we look at several studies that compared workshops where there was no follow-up with workshops that did involve follow-up. And what we found was that without follow-up, workshops really don't make a dent on instruction. There's a fellow named Marcus Buckingham. He wrote a book called Mojo. And Marcus Buckingham studied more than 250,000 people who came to executive learning workshops. He followed up to see that they change as a result of the workshops. And his conclusion was that if you don't provide follow-up, nothing happens. So some kind of follow-up needs to be offered. And we focused on the follow-up that we call coaching, because we think with that follow-up, you can make an impact. Now the trouble is, even if you have coaches, though, the coaching might fall for any number of different reasons, but one reason might simply be that the understanding of helping isn't where it needs to be with respect to the coaches and the leaders in the school. So I want to talk about the complexities of helping and sort of look at how they influence what happens. Here's my little picture of what helping looks like. So the first issue is that people, in my experience, and I'll tell you where we get this from, we have videotaped many teachers and coaches working together this year in a study in Beaverton, Oregon. We've watched basically every interaction the coaches had with the teachers and all the teachers' practice attempts in the classroom. What we've found is, and this is borne out by Porchaska's research on change, is that people have absolutely no idea what they look like when they do their work. I had the same experience. I recorded myself in a meeting and I could not believe what my communication skills look like compared to what I think the communication skills I would ordinarily demonstrate. And when we watch teachers, they are blown away by what they see in the classroom. One fellow, his coach, said, so what did you think when you watched the recording? His response was, who is that man? And that's kind of the way everybody feels. When they see themselves in a recording, they can't believe the way they look. And so the issue here is simply this. The simple truth about change is that most people have no idea how they do what they do. And that means that you could have, for example, a room full of teachers who could really need help with classroom management and they would likely be sitting there going, this all sounds great, but I don't really need it because they don't know what their practice is. So the simple truth is most people don't realize that they need help, even if they need help. The second truth is around identity. And that is that people's personalities and their sense of who they are is totally connected with their professional practice. When you criticize the way a person teaches, it's almost like criticizing the way a person parents. If you think of trying to talk to a friend of yours about how they parent their children, you know how cautious and tentative you'd be in that conversation. You probably wouldn't even have the conversation because you'd be afraid the person would take it personally. But I think teaching is almost as personal as parenting. And yet we just assume we can tell people what they need to do and they're gonna thank us for it. And so the second thing is that when it comes to helping people about instruction, they're gonna take it personally to give them some comments. Well, the third thing is about thinking. There's a fellow named Thomas Davenport who wrote a book called, I'm Thinking If You're Living, and he looked at the characteristics of a group that he calls Knowledge Workers. It's a Drucker's original concept. But what a Knowledge Worker is, is a person who uses their imagination, their wisdom, their skills, their ability to problem solve, their brains to do their work. And I can't think of anybody who's more of a Knowledge Worker than a teacher standing in front of 32 kids trying to figure out how to keep those kids engaged and make sure they're learning and excited about what's happening. Anyway, Davenport said the defining characteristic of a Knowledge Worker is a person who means autonomy. He says, if you take away autonomy, a Knowledge Worker is always gonna resist. If someone else does the thinking for a Knowledge Worker, they don't like it because what they wanna do is they wanna think for themselves. And so if you're in a situation where all the decisions are made elsewhere for the staff, there's a good chance they'll resist. So the third simple truth about helping is that people need to do the thinking. And when someone else does the thinking for them, they're gonna resist. The fourth area is status. And Edgar Schein has a book called Helping, which is a really great little book. And he looks at the dynamics of interpersonal communication in helping relationships. And what he says is it always involves status. If I'm working with you or you're working with me, and one of us doesn't feel we're getting the status we deserve in this particular situation, we're gonna resist. The way Schein puts it, and he quotes another author, he says that you can have a situation where you are the parent, or you can have it where you are an adult, or you can have it where you're a child. Whatever your age is, are you perceived as the parent as an adult as a child? And he says when an adult takes the role of a parent with another adult, the second adult is gonna resist. The way he puts it is, if someone puts themselves one up and they put us one down, we're gonna resist. And so if someone that we consider appear to us tells us what to do, monitors us to make sure we do what we're supposed to do, treats us like children, holds us accountable, so to speak. It's gonna be hard for us to accept that unless we think that person really does have much more status than we do. A peer-to-peer relationship, it's gonna be hard to accept a parental type conversation from somebody who's equal to us. So the simple truth about status in respect to helping is that when another person puts themselves one up and puts us one down, we're likely not gonna open ourselves up to that helping relationship. The last thing is motivation. And I wanna just tell a little story about this. Let's imagine that there were two people. We'll call one of them Rocky and we'll call the other one T-Bone. And they're flying on a plane and Rocky opens up the flight magazine and he sees in the flight magazine that there's this really great diet. And he reads about the diet and he thinks, man, that sounds like a good diet. I should do that diet. And then Rocky gets off the plane in his hometown and he goes to the health food store and he buys all the food and he goes home to his house and he says, that's it, I'm doing the diet, I'm in. Then on the same plane, there's a fellow named T-Bone and T-Bone's sitting right near Rocky. He's going to the same town. He opens up the magazine, he sees the same diet and he looks at it and he goes, wow, that sounds like a good diet. My wife should do that. And T-Bone gets off the plane, he goes to the health food store, he comes home and he says, honey, have I got a diet for you? And he gives her the diet and says here, party on. Well, who's going to be more motivated to affect change? T-Bone's wife might be motivated, but it's probably not to implement the diet. It's probably to get back at T-Bone. But Rocky, who chose to do it, probably wants to implement it. Well, Daniel Pink has written a book called Drive. It's a nice summary of motivation. And he says that goals don't matter to us unless we set the goals. When it's somebody else's goal, it's really hard to get excited and motivated. There has to be something about the goal that matters to us for us to be motivated. So for me, the first issue is we need to improve instruction because it's such a critical part of the person's learning. And secondly, the way we've done it traditionally has ignored many of these things and consequently, traditional forms of professional development haven't had the desired effect because the teachers don't recognize you need to make the change or they take it personally or they haven't had a chance to do the thinking. Only the field they're being put one down by the leaders of the change and they're often right or because they're asked to do something that isn't a goal that matters to them. And in many ways, professional learning has ignored all of these complexities, I think. And that's why coaching is so important. So does anybody have any questions or comments regarding the first part of the session of what we've talked about? So far, we've talked about why we would do this and the complexity is helping. If you have any questions, you can just put them up here on the comments page or write them into the chat and I'll just wait a minute. And Jim, I think Joel already popped a question in the chat. So are people aware of these things at all times? Good. I mean, Joel, if I understand the question, let me paraphrase, prayer phrase is make sure I've got it. Are people worried about all five of these things and the relationship? I suspect they're not worried about all of them. Different people would have different concerns but it could easily be that all five are part of the helping relationship. I mean, some people are more concerned about status than others. It might even be gender-based. Maybe some men are more concerned. The people, in my experience, it's very rare to have a person who has a pretty clear idea of what they look like when they do their practice. So I'd say the change idea pretty much applies. But I would say it's like everything else. It's a person-by-person situation and for some people, some of them apply and other ones don't. Now the question is, should we always be thinking about all these things? I think so, yes. I think that the professional learning should be designed so it takes into account all of these things. Catherine's got a question. Was the Tennessee study done in specific subjects around overall achievement? And what they use, Catherine, is they use the state assessment scores, the very same scores they use to assess AYP. So I don't know the assessment but it's a comprehensive assessment that we look at across the board, not just in one particular area. Any other questions? Okay, that's all the silence I can take but feel free to ask your questions and I'll keep watching for them but Janet will probably catch them as the way it'll probably go. So how do you then deal with this helping situation? How do you, what's the simple way to deal with all those complexities of helping? Well, we say the simple way is to take the partnership approach with teachers. And in a nutshell, the partnership approach is that we see other people and we treat them the way we would wanna be treated if someone was telling us how to do our work. In other words, if somebody's gonna come and give me advice on how to be whatever it is I do and give me help on how to do it, how would I wanna be treated? It's the golden rule. Treat others the way you would like to be treated. And chances are that if we're being treated by other people who are helping us, there are certain things we'd want them to do. And we've articulated these as seven principles. You can actually download a book from the coaching website, instructionalcoach.org, called the Partnership Learning Fieldbook, which is free and it talks about six of these seven principles. It doesn't talk about reciprocity, but it talks about the other six. So the idea is that there are founding principles and principles underlaw everything we do. They help us as we look back, they help us look at the current circumstance and they help us look ahead to what we wanna do. They're a way of doing what we wanna do. And so I'll say a fair bit about this because I think they're important for coaching and then we'll spend some time on the specifics of what coaches do. The first principle is the principle of equality. And equality doesn't mean that everybody's equally talented. Obviously, Wayne Gretzky, when he was four, was probably a better hockey player than I ever was. But different people have different kinds of talents but different people have different kinds of status in organizations. But when someone who has more status than another person thinks they're better than that person, they're headed for destruction. If we think we're better than anybody else, we're in trouble. Equality means that we are equally valuable, equally important, and our words count as much as other people's words. And so when we sit down to talk with somebody, we communicate this sense that I am not better than you, I am equal to you. And this is where we address some of the issues that Edgar Schein talks about. The second thing is the principle of choice. And it's really hard to summarize as it's a pretty complicated concept. But on one hand, if there's no choice at all, you can be almost certain that people will resist. If we have a partnership, one person doesn't make the decisions for another person. And so to address the whole issues of motivation and so forth, choice is critical. It's almost like a little leader. The less choice a person has, the more likely they're going to resist. But there are a number of good books about this topic of choice. The Barry Schwartz's book called The Paradox of Choices is an especially good one. And he points out that we don't want all the choices under the scent. We want some choices. And there's another book called The Art of Choosing, while there is Eyingar. And what Eyingar did is she did a little study where she set up a table in a high-scale grocery store with 24 different jars of jams, some days and other days she had six jars of jams. And what she found was, when she had six jars of jams, they sold way more than when they had 24. When people saw all kinds of choices, they kind of freaked out and they didn't like it. They didn't want all those choices, they just wanted some choices. So choice doesn't mean that everything's up for grabs and we're always trying to decide what we're going to do. But people want, at least according to both Barry Schwartz and Eyingar, is they want freedom within form. They want a structure that allows them to feel like they have autonomy, like they have freedom. And so what that would mean is you'd establish professional learning in a system so that everybody has a voice in what happens, but ultimately you create structures that lead to change. There are certain things that are non-negotiable that how you accomplish those non-negotiables is critical. In the coaching situation, we would give really precise explanations but then we turn to the teacher and say, so what do you think about this? Do you agree with this? Do you want to change it? What are your thoughts? The third principle is the principle of voice and it's the idea that people feel they have input into what they do and they can say what they think. They don't have to pretend one thing and think something else. And so for example, after a workshop, if they have the principle of voice, people should say the same things in the workshop that they would in the parking lot afterwards. That's the principle of voice that people do for you to say what they think. You're talking to the real person when you talk to them about professional learning. They're not looking at you and saying one thing but thinking something else. And then the language of partnership is dialogue and lots has been written about this but at the heart of dialogue I think is the notion that I go into a conversation humbly expecting the other person to tell me something of value. I go in hoping and expecting and believing that it's a two-way conversation. And so I'm not coming in to tell that person what they have to do. I'm coming in to meet them as a partner, share my ideas but hear their ideas in a back and forth kind of conversation. And that means I have to believe they have something in them of value and that they have a choice to say what they think and then it's back and forth, free flowing. And a big part of dialogue is that I approach others with humility. If I come in certain that I'm right and I know what the truth is and I just have to tell them I think it's gonna alienate the other people but it's certainly not gonna lead to dialogue. And central to dialogue is the idea of reflection of two people thinking together about what they believe. And so many people refer to coaching as a thinking conversation or talk about it as two people thinking together. You put your ideas out there where you can see them rather than tell you what it is, and we'll think about it together and work it through. And then all of that has manifested in a principle of what's called praxis. And really praxis at its heart is the notion that in our dialogical conversations, in our back and forth conversations, we focus on a real life implementation of this whatever it is we're learning. There's not a lot of theoretical stuff. It's like well how do we do this tomorrow in our class? How can we make this work? How can we do this? And then the final principle is the principle of reciprocity. It's the idea that one person teaches to learn. It's the old quotation. It's the idea that I go in expecting to learn. In fact, we get a study of the characteristics of effective coaches from pool over 2,600 coaches. And one of the defining characteristics of an effective coach was that they love to learn. They're people who are learners first as they do what they do. So in combination, those principles provide sort of a theoretical framework. They're a grounding for what we do when we work with teachers. And I wanted to know if you have any questions about the comments. Joel's question is what are some phrases that illustrate these kinds of conversations? I heard a little buzz there. Somebody gonna speak up? I think, Joe, it's more about the kinds of questions. I don't know if there's a phrase, but there's sort of set questions like they're usually gonna be the characteristics of the open-ended questions, and then there would be questions that you can't get wrong. There's lots of different ones, but for example, what's the most important thing we're gonna talk about today? What I mean by an opinion question is it's a question where the other person is gonna write a wrong question and just saying, what's your perspective on this? How do you see this? And you go in really, truly expecting the other person to teach you something. So for example, if we're describing a teaching practice and it's called QD Review, it's a sequence for instruction, I would say to the person, let me give you a precise explanation of this, but then you can tell me what you think. Does this work for you? Do we have to modify it? I mean, researchers did it, but they don't know you and they don't know your classroom and one size doesn't fit all. We might need to make it work for you in a different way. So I want them to be thinking along with me as we do it. If it was in a workshop, for example, and I presented a film clip rather than telling people, this is the way you should do it, I would say, well, here's a film clip and you tell me what you think about it. It's really about letting the other person do the thinking. And now I've got a question, does this work for me? Oh, that's one of the questions I would ask. How does this work for you? What would you do? So Joel, it's really, if I wanted to summarize it, it's really about everything I do rhetorically, if you want to put it that way, it's about letting the other person be an active thinker in the process. So I don't tell them something like it's a done deal. Everything is open for discussion. That's the way I would kind of put it. Okay, I want to spend a little time on what the coaches do. And I want to particularly emphasize, these are all the components of coaching, but I particularly want to emphasize how you get people on board in the first place and a little bit about the conversations. I'm thinking at this point in the year, you're wondering, well, how do I get people enrolled in coaching? So I have several little suggestions about this and then I'll see if you have questions. The most powerful way to get people on board is through one-to-one conversations, I think, in our experience. In fact, in the whole of professional learning, I've convinced the one-to-one conversations are incredibly important. The, I'll give you an example of this. I went to high school in Ontario in Glenview Park, secondary school in Cambridge, Ontario. Used to be called Galt and that was there. And my teacher in high school was Ms. Stumpf. And I was on the first grade, excuse me, ninth grade football team. And Ms. Stumpf was a brand new teacher. She'd never taught before and she had most of the football team in her class. And we went in and we just did terrible things to Ms. Stumpf. We would disturb the class. We were just terrible kids in her class. And I want you to know I've been paid back to the power of 10 for everything I ever did to Ms. Stumpf. But anyway, one day, this is back in the 70s, I was walking home and Ms. Stumpf pulled up after practice and she said, would you like a ride? And I had been meaning to her in that class. I had just been snarky and not very good to her. And when I got in the car, I was in there about a minute. She was listening to the CBC. She was listening to classical music on the FM channel. I remember it like it was yesterday. And I was in the car left at a minute and I looked at her and I went, wow, she's a real person. And she cries what she had done in her class. She must just feel awful. And honestly, it had seemed fun. This is a terrible thing as a ninth grader, but it seemed kind of fun to get under her skin. If we could get her upset, it was kind of enjoyable. But when I saw her in that one-to-one experience, for only about a minute, it was only a minute before I realized this, I was transformed and I could never do those things to her again. And what happened there is what Martin Buber talked about is I could do the horrible things I did as a little kid because I didn't see her as real. I saw her as an object. But when I sat down one-to-one with her, suddenly she became real to me and no longer could I treat her the way I did. So when you as a coach can have one-to-one conversations with teachers, you're gonna have a better chance moving forward because they'll stop treating you like an object, they'll see you like a real person. Because truthfully, teachers can treat professional developers the way those ninth graders treated Ms. Stump. They will treat them as if they are a job object and not a real person. But once you connect with them at one-to-one, then stop seeing it that way and they'll start to see you as real. So for me, there's one-to-one conversations are a critical way to get the whole coaching conversation going. So I would set up meetings in the school, go around and talk to different people and maybe just say, I'd like to get advice from you on how I can do a better job. What suggestions do you have for me? I might go ask a few questions like, tell me about how the year is going, tell me about the strengths and weaknesses of your children, tell me about what roadblocks you're experiencing, what have been your successes, and mostly just get there and listen. And during the listening, I will explain what I can do. Here are the things I have to offer and I hopefully will be able to find some kind of connection with them where they can, I can say I've got something that might help you with the fact that your kid's writing is disorganized. That's the whole one-to-one conversation piece. To do that, I would say it's helpful to have a one-page summary of everything you can do as a coach so you can leave it with the teachers but just to get the ball rolling. Now sometimes as a coach, you will give a large or small group presentations. You know, all I would say about that is keep it short. Don't talk for more than 30 minutes and give them some kind of form to let you know right there in the workshop if they wanna work with you. If you give them a form, 25 to 75% of the people in the room will let you know they'd like to get together and talk to you about something. But if you say email me if you're interested, maybe one person will email and he or she is probably related to you. Not many people will email you. But when you give them the form right there, we've seen somewhere like 25 to 75% of the people will let you know right away that they wanna do it. And you can download a sample form on the coaching website in the tool section. Now, principal referral can be one of the best ways to enroll people in coaching and it can be the kiss of death. If the principal says to a teacher, you're not doing well enough, you have to work with the coach. Then the teacher goes to see the coach and says, okay, Wilson says I gotta work with you, so fix me, you have 15 minutes. What happens there is the teacher sees the coach as a punishment. But if the principal says to the teacher, look, I did an assessment, you've got 65% engagement, we're committed to getting to 90%, that's non-negotiable. You and I are gonna work together to make sure you get to 90% engagement. And there are lots of ways you can do it. I can recommend a book, I can recommend a video series, there's some websites you can go to, there's some other people you can talk to about this. But you might wanna work with the coach. She's a pro at this. She's really helpful with respect to engaging instruction. And so you may wanna work to her, how do you do it is up to you. But what you can't do is you can't keep having 65% engagement, we gotta get to 90%. Well in that circumstance, and this is a good example of freedom with inform, in that circumstance, the structure is the non-negotiable is we have to get to 90% and the teacher has the freedom to do whatever they wanna do to get there. But in most cases they'll say, man, the coach sells like the easy way to get there, and they go to the coach and say, look, Wilson wants me to work on this, I don't really know what it is, can you help me? And instead of being a punishment, the teacher becomes a lifeline, they help them do it. Now the last idea is that there's gonna be workshops during the school year, there's gonna be teams, and at the end of any workshop, I think there should be time for teachers to say, how can your coach help you implement this? People won't implement without follow up. And so I don't think there should be a workshop without time built in where the teachers are able to say, I wanna work with the coach on these kinds of things and to plan out exactly how the coach is gonna support them. Whether we're talking about proper profession, learning communities or teams or whatever learning is taking place, workshops, it should end with some kind of opportunity for people to plan to work with the coach to get it implemented. And these things are not a one-time thing. You're kind of doing all of this all the time to role people in coaching, part of it being that the principal is powerfully behind us and supportive. That anybody, does anybody have questions about the enrolling process? I've never done wait time talking to a computer before, but I think that was good. So I'm gonna move on. The next thing is to identify what happens. And I'll just say a few things about this. For us, the piece of technology that's become essential for us as coaches is the use of a flip camera. And this is a sample flip camera. Many of you have them that cost about $200. They're essential because of what Prochaska said in his book called Changing for Good. And Prochaska says, quoting GK Chesterton, it isn't that they can't see the solution, it's that they can't see the problem. And in many, many cases, what we found is people really have no idea what their practice is until you show them a video. But when you show them a video of their class, they do wanna make a change almost immediately. One teacher we worked with said, I watched the clips, I was so upset at how bored my kids were. I stayed up to one o'clock rewriting all my lesson plans as soon as I saw the lesson. And it's dramatic and it's powerful. And honestly, it's a little painful to watch. But what you're doing is confronting reality. And once you confront reality, you can do something about it. Now our goal is to have the teachers get a clear picture of reality by videotaping the class and having them watch that videotape, the video record and have them watch the tape. And then we wanna sit down with the teachers and identify where's the leverage, what's something we can do that's not too hard to do that can have a really big impact. And most of those tools you can find on the Big Four Ning and they're focused on these four areas, planning your content, that's curriculum, weaving an assessment for learning into your class, a number of different instructional processes you could use for differentiation like effective questions, stories, cooperative learning, using thinking devices, channeling assignments, experiential learning. And then classroom management techniques like being really clear on your expectations, reinforcing kids with more praise and corrections, being fluent with your corrections if you have to give them. And just working on community building. Those are the, for us, the four areas that are a little analogy is it's like a journey. Content planning tells us where we're going. Assessment for learning is our GPS tells us where we are, instruction is the fuel, and community building removes the fraction and makes for a smooth ride. And the tools that are underneath these, you can download from the Big Four Ning, which is a free Ning where you can download the manuals for all those areas. And our coaches generally focus on most of those things, curriculum planning, community building, and so forth. And they're free and you can photocopy them and if you go to that Ning and you go on the left-hand side, you can download all the manuals in PDF file format. So let's just say that the teacher has watched the tape and I've talked to the teacher about what she's done, then she and I, he and I get together and we set a goal and we want a goal that really matters to the teacher. Jim Collins says you want a goal that hits you in the gut. That is we're focused on something and in most cases it's a student goal, a difference we'd like to see in our students and the teacher and I identify a goal that matters to them after they've watched the video and then we work to try to do what we can to hit that goal to make the target go. And that involves explaining the practice. Just to say two things about the way we do explanations. One of them is you have to be very precise. And I really like this idea of using a script one here. No, I really like the idea of a precise checklist that explaining exactly what the practice is gonna look like. This is how for example, if we're using a graphic organizer, we might teach how to use the graphic organizer. We cue the kids to let them know we're gonna use a graphic organizer and then we walk through the organizer in an interactive way and shape responses and then we review to make sure kids know what they've learned and know how the graphic organizer works, it's cute to review, it's a little ritual for the class. So during the explanation phase of the precise tool we're using, I would give precise explanations to the teacher but I would make them provisional. I would say okay this is what research says but what do you think? Do you wanna modify this? This is the way you'd like it to be. I hate to tell you this but I have this vision of you all just zoning out there at the end of the day in your rooms but I'm gonna let that vision go because it's gonna freak me out and I'll stick with my discussion. At any rate, the idea is during the explaining phase you have to be very, very precise but you have to be very, very provisional. And so I give a really precise explanation and leave room for the teachers to think about it. And in my experience, often when coaches are explaining whatever this new teaching practice might be, their explanations aren't nearly as precise as they should be. And if you are precise, to go on to talk about this in this really great book called The Checklist Manifesto, if you are precise, often the reason why people don't implement it isn't because they don't wanna do it, they just don't know how to do it. Well after we've enrolled the teacher, after we've identified what to do, we sit down and explain it and then we mediate, which means we work with the teacher to make this work in their classroom. We modify things and we adjust them so they've got, let's say it's a graphic organizer, the teacher and I would create the graphic organizer together. And then I say to the teacher, do you want me to model this practice? Do you want me to come in and show you what it looks like? And in our experience, I interviewed 13 first year or second year teachers about their work with a coach and what they told me, and this has been borne out over time, is that the most important thing for them was watching the teacher do it in their classroom. They said it wasn't until she did it in my classroom with my kids that I realized I could do it too. So for us, modeling the practice is critical. Now the modeling is only gonna be something the teacher wants if they've done all the preliminary stuff. If you walk down the hall and grab a teacher and say, hey, you want me to come in and model best practices in your class, she's not gonna be too hot about that. She'll probably say, oh, everything's cool. No, it's all right. But if you're teaching a teacher how to use thinking prompts or a cooperative learning technique, the teacher will probably want to see it first before she implements it. So if the teachers don't want you to model, there's a good chance they're not really thinking about implementing. It's modeling that makes it happen. You don't have to model the whole 90 minutes or 75 minutes or 42 minutes of the class. You just show them how to do the thing itself and then you move on. And what you move on to is observing the class and now what we do, whenever possible, is we video record the class with a flip camera. And then we share the video with the teacher and we ask her to look at things that she liked and we'll look at things that we liked. When we come back together and we have a conversation about what happened in the tape. And usually when we do it like that, we ask a few questions like how close is this class to where you'd like it to be? How would you feel if nothing changed in your class? What changes do we need to make to get it to a 10 if you think you're only at five right now? We have sort of open ended general questions we ask and we explore with the teachers what happens on the tape. And we like the idea of them picking and watching the tape first, I watch the tape, then we come together and then we pick a few clips to watch and we try to set it up that it's not me telling the teacher, it's the two of us engaged in dialogue, looking at the data and in this case, the data is what's on the tape. And so those things are really how we do coaching. We just keep it going by doing explaining or modeling or observing until the teacher is fluent in learning the practice. If you've ever been an athletic coach, you coach hockey or whatever it might be, you know that the defining characteristic of a good coach is somebody who breaks down the steps so the kids can learn how to do it. And they say, let me show you how to do the first one, they'll all watch you, okay, you've got that, let's move on to the second part. You watch me, I'll watch you until it's fluent. In that sense, what instructional coaches do is quite similar, they do it from the perspective of partnership, which means they have teachers really thinking about what they think about the practice. So those are the ideas of the components of coaching. The role of people, through the various ways I mentioned, you identify, ideally by video recording the class, although the teacher might already know what they wanna work on. You explain the practice, then you make that practice fit the teacher's classroom, you shape it to fit their needs, you offer to model, you observe, and then you sit down and talk about, okay, what did I see? And then you go back and sometimes you explain more or sometimes you model more or sometimes you observe more. If it's classroom management, it's probably observation. If it's a planning routine, you probably spend most of your time explaining. If it's a complex reading strategy, like, say, reciprocal teaching, it might involve a lot of modeling. But you keep going until the teacher is fluent in their practices, until they've implemented what they have to implement. So I'm wondering if you have any questions or comments about all those things we've looked at with respect to coaching. This is in a nutshell, a quick overview of how we go about doing instructional coaching. You could put questions on the comment board using graffiti, or you could send chat, or you could turn on your microphone, whatever you feel like doing. Annie said she was gonna check her home fridge to see what she's got there to drink, so maybe she's done that. I know the wait time is tricky, Jim, but I can see that Catherine's typing something, so we'll give her a minute to put that up. Okay, how about permission for recording? I think that's a district by district question, but what happens is in our experience, if you record the teacher, and we just share the recording with the teacher, then we're able to record whatever you like. We were in the classroom, the teacher was in the classroom, so were the students. We can't record the class and then put it on the web, or use it in a presentation, or share it with anybody else, but if it's just used for the professional or any of the teachers, then we're off to the races. But I don't wanna double check board by board, or district by district criteria, but that's really not an issue for us if it's not going beyond the coaching conversation. We've never really had any concerns. Then in our research studies, we have people sign consent forms because we know the study, the video is gonna go beyond the two of us, but so long as it's just between two of us, it's really not an issue. There was another question about the next session. This is, are we gonna do coaching strategies in our next session? And we wanna know, when you say coaching strategies, do you mean how we go about doing question coaching, or how we do modeling, how we do observation, how we do feedback, or do you mean the teaching practices that you're sharing? Okay, yeah, why don't you do more in what coaching looks like from the perspective? I think over the session, we're gonna do both. We're gonna have two instructors in their classrooms in order to make their practice better because I can understand that theoretically, but I'd like to know more about the processes. Well, it's my intention to just give us a quick overview of the process itself, but next time we're together, we'll look at video of coaches working together with teachers. We'll see little snippets of everything they do, but I also want you to email me the questions you'd like to see. So if there's, and we're together face-to-face, We will look at video of the teacher working. But there's a question you want to make sure I address in one of these sessions. Just let me know. There's like now something like 31 days of different workshops we do at the University of Kansas. So there are a lot of things we could talk about. At this point I'm planning on looking at watching when we get together face to face, looking at video of the coaches and teachers talking together and sort of see the process all mapped out. Yes, that's exactly what I'm hoping for. Is that what you're hoping Catherine? Okay. Okay, great. So while we have to answer any other questions or suggestions for things that you're particularly looking for in that in-person day on October 28th, maybe I'd have something. Am I being heard? Okay, good. What I wanted to know is you're talking about referral principle. And I know from having gone to different things we have to be careful in getting the trust of the teacher and not being there to cure the teacher because that's what the principal wants us to do. So how do we balance between what we do with the teacher in the classroom and what the principal wants to know what's happening? Okay. Boy, there's a lot packed in that question, Annie. It's a great question. First off, what I talked about yesterday with the principals was how the whole system has to be focused on a few key things. You can't change every year and this year we're doing understanding about design and next year we're going to do formative assessment and we're going to do differentiated instruction but we're going to follow a pacing guide. I mean, it can't be changing all the time. There has to be a focus on a few key things. And the teachers have to be involved in the development of what I call a target that describes those few key things. And professional learning supports it and the principals know our leaders and their experts in those practices. They're the lead learners. They even lead the workshop sometimes. And so there's a real sense that we know we're trying to get to and all our professional learning supports it. So we don't have one way of evaluating teachers, another way of coaching and another way that our workshops are on something else and it looks like it was just picked this week. It all is focused on a few key things. So the first thing is there's a genuine commitment to try to get to a destination that's articulated in a simple document, not a 70 page school improvement plan but like a one page document if yours where you want to get. And I think embedded in your question was about the issue of confidentiality. What should a teacher share with the principal or coach share with the principal? And it's hard for me to give you a quick answer. But I will talk about it later but just to cut to the chase, I'd say first off, if it's not confidential, it's going to be a hard thing for the teacher to embrace. I had a coach and the coach helping with time management and my comments with the coach would have been modified if I knew the coach was going to go back and talk to my boss. I was talking about time management. It got into an honest appraisal of how I used my time and how I waste the time. And if I knew the way I was, that my conversation was going to go back to my boss, I wouldn't have been as candid and I wouldn't have learned as much. And I might not even have wanted to do it. So I think you want to, you want to bear in mind that the less confidential the conversation is, the more likely the person will resist. So where we draw the line is we say we will talk about who we work with and what we do but we won't offer any kind of evaluated comments. Not even like how do you think they're doing? It's the administrative team's job to observe, we just provide, my technical term is freaking awesome support. We go in and we do all we can to make it happen. Now if by chance, there isn't clarity between the principal and the coach on this, one of the first things you have to do is sit down and have a conversation about where the draw, the line will be drawn because what will really get you in trouble is if you say one thing to the teachers and you do something else with the principal, if you tell me this is confidential, it better be confidential. So I would rather have a situation where I tell the teachers anything you tell me, I might take back to the principal and be honest about it, than to say it's confidential and not have it be confidential. Because if you breach the teacher's trust, they will know it and they won't want to work with you and significantly damage your relationship. Okay, my clock says 6.05, these are troopers. I know it's 5.05 there but you know, any last questions? Thanks, Jim. Well, I just really want to thank you on behalf of all of our participants in the ERLC. This has just been an excellent discussion and I think that your presentation was so clear that at this point of the overview, there aren't a lot of questions but that last section, that clarification you gave around relationships was really great. And I think too, I just wanted to comment that all of the characteristics you were presenting, the characteristics there, I was thinking that that really needed to be authentic. So it's not just lip service to those characteristics, but it actually has to be authentic in developing those relationships between the people that you're coaching and the coach. So thanks again, Jim. We will be meeting face-to-face October 28 at the Fantasyland Hotel. And as Jim said, if you have any comments or specific things that you would like to talk about or discuss during that day, please do email either Jim or myself. As you leave today, an evaluation survey will pop up. It's just a very short survey, not a full survey, but just to give us some feedback for the next session. So if you would take two minutes to fill it out, we'd so greatly appreciate it. Other than that, thanks everybody and have a great night.