The Assistant Principal Podcast

Episode 8: Who Should I Coach?

In this episode we look into the surprisingly complex question of “Who should I coach?” We examine the five ways that teachers grow, we overview what a systemic approach to teacher growth looks like in a school, and we answer the question. If you only have time to coach one or two people, then you can’t afford to choose the wrong person to coach. This podcast should help.

If I can only coach one teacher, who should I coach?

I’ve been working with the APEx assistant principals on coaching this fall. Knowing that people are very busy, we’ve been focusing on coaching just one person.

In all honesty, it hasn’t gone that well. There have been some successes, but lots of stumbling blocks as well.

What I am learning from this is just how complex coaching is. Of course, we can do very basic coaching without needing a ton of training, but every step carries its own complexities.

Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals. Today, we are taking a deep dive into one simple question – who should I coach?

After listening to this podcast, you might want to head over to my website, frederickbuskey.com, to watch the video. There are several key graphics that go along with today’s show and watching this show after listening to it should increase the value many fold. I will also include images in the show notes.

Before going further, please know that most of this podcast was written before I listened to Jennifer Gonzales’ Cult of Pedagogy podcast from October 19, 2021. I’ll include a link in the show notes, but her main point is that teachers are in an extra fragile state right now… now being the 2021-22 school year which, for many people, has been even more disruptive and challenging than 2020-21. Jennifer’s podcast has forced me to reflect on my message of growing people. So, I am going to go through the podcast as I had originally intended. At the end, I will share my current thinking on how to adapt the content to this unique and, I hope, temporary context.

Okay, on with the show.

There are three main things we need to consider to identify that one teacher to focus on:

·      First, what are the other avenues of professional development that teachers have open to them?

·      What system of supports does the instructional team provide for teachers?

·      What do you hope to gain from coaching?

We’ll explore these questions and at the end of the podcast I’ll provide my generic answer to the primary question, “who should I coach?”

Coaching does not happen in a vacuum. Coaching is just one strategy to help teachers grow. In the ideal world where resources are infinite, every teacher would benefit from highly personalized intense coaching. However, in the real world we need to view coaching as just one way to help teachers grow.

To better understand this, let’s look at what I call the cube of development. 

The cube of development is simply a metaphor for the multiple ways that teachers can grow. While a cube has six sides, I’ve only identified five paths for teacher growth. Maybe I should call it the pentagram of development, but cube sounds much cooler and I’m sure there is one thing that I have missed. Feel free to email me if you know what the missing side is!

The most common, and most powerful, way that teachers get better is through self-reflection and individual initiative. Self-reflection is the top of the cube. Good teachers routinely reflect on their practice and when they find things they want to improve, they look for resources, learn from those resources, and work to implement that new learning.

However, many teachers are not as self-reflective as we would like. Let’s be clear though, that lack of self-reflection is usually not their fault. In fact, we could say the same thing about ourselves: most school leaders aren’t as self-reflective as we should be. And again, it’s not really our fault.

I might dedicate a future podcast to helping teachers become more reflective, but for today I will just enumerate the challenges to being reflective:

·      Lack of time. If there is a magic bullet in education, providing more time for teachers to learn, plan, assess, and design is it.

·      Pressure and fear both inhibit reflection and there is lots of that going around.

·      The work that teachers do has become very fragmented. It isn’t simply a matter of prepping for three sections of English 10. There are so many other demands that not only cost time but which also fragment thinking and erode the concentration and focus required for deep reflection.

·      There is often little to no accountability or follow-up support for implementation beyond what the teachers can do for themselves. When I say accountability, I mean that in a positive sense. If we are going to put energy into learning something, then we should also put energy into supporting full implementation.

Internal training and workshops is the second side of the cube. Professional learning communities, or PLCs, are the most common example of this, but there are also book studies, lunch and learns, and a plethora of other formats. Instructional coaches and school district personnel may also lead small or whole group training. Topics may be identified by teachers, but more frequently someone else, an instructional expert or administrator, has determined the topic. It is also important to understand that these are group trainings and are rarely individualized for the needs of a specific teacher. An advantage of internal PD is that follow-up and implementation support are much more likely to exist.

External trainers and workshops are similar to internal ones except they may happen either on or offsite and the trainer is not a district employee. This allows for bringing in trainers who are true experts on a specific topic. When the trainings occur onsite, they are for a group of teachers. Typically, an expert will come to the school during a PD day or for an afternoon and do a training. The expert may also work with small teams of teachers during the school day, but when trainings occurs offsite they can serve as individualized professional development for teachers who chose to go. The biggest downsides to external PD is cost and the lack of follow-up support.

Mentoring and peer networks are the fifth side of the cube. Mentoring typically occurs when veteran teachers are paired with entry year teachers, but mentoring can happen in multiple other situations both formally and informally. Peer networks involve more than two teachers and are usuall...