And I think if we want the schools we want for our kids, our kids need to be taught by professionals, not technocrats. Implementing a script. I'm Jimny, co-founder of the instructional coaching group, and you're listening to coaching conversations where I talk with coaching experts from around the world so that all of us can learn better ways to make an unmistakably positive impact on the people around us.
Radical Learners is the latest PD development from instructional coaching group founders Jim and Jenny Knight. Based on 25 years of research, this asynchronous platform provides learning at your own speed, unlimited viewing and chat forums in a shared community space all offered on an educator's budget. Content is outlined by chapter and then by lessons allowing for learners to quickly and easily access answers when they need them. To learn more, visit radical learners Icon. Hey everyone.
Welcome to the Coaching Questions Show on the Coaching Conversations podcast with Jim Knight. This show is for everyone that calls the instructional coaching group Home for all of your instructional coaching content. These episodes, the coaching question shows are designed for all of you to think and learn alongside Jim Knight as you continue to make an impact on all the work you do. My name is Brian Sethi, an instructional coach and coach Champion here at ICG. So here's how the show works.
Typically, we sit down with Jim. We take in some questions or some common themes. We unpack those themes with Jim. And then we get to a Final Four round where we get a little bit more insight into what Jim is up to and what is front of mind for him in today's show. We're going to unpack one singular question that comes up quite a bit and has come up for us here at ICG recently and we're going to explore that one question with Jim and then we'll get into our final four round. All right.
So let's get into the show. Jim, welcome. How are things? What's on your mind? Great to see Brian. I'm excited to have this conversation. That's what's on my mind. So I'm not far to it. Me too. I am excited about this question because it comes up quite a bit and it is one of the things that really most coaches and instructional leaders and schools and organizations with coaches really have to think about. So I'm going to jump right into the question, if that's okay with you.
And I want to hear your thoughts and we'll get will get going here. So the question that we have is why shouldn't coaches just tell teachers what to do? Right. It's such a good question. And it's one I hear all the time. And and I would say, first off, what I'm going to say is about our and two decades of research on coaching. Really, we're getting into halfway through the third decade now and for ten years I was kind of embedded in the Topeka School district. Our coaches were in the middle.
Schools and high schools met every week. I was in schools talking to principals, talking to teachers. And since then, we've done two major research projects one funded by I.S., one had other kinds of funding with Beaverton, Oregon, and then Othello, Washington. And we continue to do research. We were in a we have a study right now, a digital promise. We were a part of a different study for a while, and we continue to refine and rethink what we do.
And so everything I'm going to say is, is about that journey. But the way we talk about coaching now is different than the way it was ten years ago, different than it was five years ago. And I would imagine we're going to evolve and it'll be different in about another five years. And so I have enormous respect for anyone who's taking on this hard work of trying to increase the quality of children's lives, increase their learning through that, through professional development.
So if what I say contradicts what other people are doing, if it's working, keep doing it. But I would say if you find yourself asking yourself, why isn't it working? Why aren't teachers implementing what we say? Why isn't it actually leading to unmistakably positive impact on kids? Then I'd say step back and ask yourself, are we taking too directive approach? And should we go more for a dialogical approach?
The second thing I want to say is sometimes you are directed, you know, Christian Van Norberg, I heard asked this question. I've always loved that. He said, If you're walking down the street downtown and a car pulls up and says, Can you tell me how to get to the city hall, they don't want you to say. Other times you've tried to find landmarks. What's worked for you? They want you to tell them how to get there.
And and sometimes people will come to you and they all say, can you can you help me figure out how to use this form of software or can you help me figure out how to fill in this form or I've got this specific situation, How does this actually work? Or. And so if someone comes to you with with a specific request that you can respond to quickly, I think it would be silly to try to take a coaching approach.
You just answer their question, help them figure out how to use the software or how to do the thing. But there are five major reasons. The fifth one is I put a couple together, five major reasons why I think it's important, and I think it doesn't work. Usually tell people what to do. I think it puts the focus on the wrong place. I think it doesn't lead to real change. It doesn't mean people will change. It underestimates the complexities of change.
Advice in and of itself usually isn't particularly effective and it creates dependance. And it's also, I think, positioning teachers that had a this is five be positioning teachers not as professionals. And so I think understanding what we mean by a professional understanding those things are really key. So should I start with why it doesn't work? Or do you want to comment before I go on? Yeah, I'm curious. I just want to make sure that I'm getting them right so it does not work.
The focus is usually doesn't work, usually doesn't work. The focus is not where it needs to be, right? You've got telling people what to do doesn't mean that people will actually change. Giving advice typically does not yield any change or lasting change. And then you've got it creates a dependency is sort of the five A and then five B would be this idea that we're not treating teachers as professionals. Am I getting that right? Purpose Such a good listener. You're listening.
Skills are off the charts. There you go. Well, let's start with the first one and then you can remind me as we work our way through. But the idea that it doesn't usually work, what I mean by that is this is, first off, the problem is sometimes telling people to do what to do does work. And so we start to think that's the solution to every situation. But I'm really influenced by the work of Ron Heifetz. He's a world renowned researcher on leadership.
He's the founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard. He's probably one of the top thinkers in the whole world of leadership. And he says this. He says the single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems. And so I want to break that down because that's why I think talent this is the heart of the why the solutions you give the person probably aren't going to work Now. What he means by adaptive challenges, he means complex work.
And when you read the work of complex complexity scientists, people who look at what's complexity, their example of what complex work is, is usually raising a child will have raising one child as complex. How complex is the classroom full of children? That's incredibly complex work. And what Heifetz says is the big mistake you make is to assume that a technical solution will deal with a complex situation.
So what he means by adaptive is you need to try things out and modify them and adjust them as you go. You have to make modifications, adaptations as it works. And so the idea that there's one size fits all or this strategy is going to work, you're taking the technical solution. It's like trying to take square peg and shove it into a round hole. You have to make that thing work. You have to adjusted it.
It's not often the case that what you what we've found is the first thing you pick is your solution usually isn't the solution. You usually have to make modifications whether you change it. So it aligns with your teaching strategies, whether you change it so it'll it better response to the students. I mean, you could have a class where all the kids are headed to Harvard and you could have a class where some kids have disabilities, some kids have autism, some kids are learning English.
You could have a class where some kids, many kids are living in poverty. Some of the kids have dealt with all kinds of horrible, different things. And chances are your class has a combination of those things. And so what's going to work for one student is not going to work for the other student.
And so even though there might be evidence to support it, you're going to have to modify it to make it work for the teacher and make it work for the students and that's why I agree with Heifetz completely that trying to say, here are the five steps to doing this. Here's a simple way and trying to make a technical solution work with an adaptive, challenging situation. It doesn't work. In fact, that makes things worse because then the teacher feels guilty because what they did didn't work.
They must not have done it right or something. A better solution is to do something like the impact cycle or coaching cycle where you're at adapting the models as you go. So to me, that's the first thing I'd say confusing, adaptive challenges with the technical solutions usually doesn't work, but so accurate. And I wish I had that much earlier in my career, but I think much of my career has been made up of these sort of adaptive mindsets to the intricacies of the classroom.
But often what is is sort of put into play by decision makers or what is sort of expected is these technical solutions to like you would like you described in hype.
It's work, these adaptive environments that need sort of multiple iterations or even just year to year, that description that you provided there, your teaching styles may be rooted in a in a style or a way that works one year, but with a different set of variables, 21 or so students or whatever you have coming in, new set of variables are introduced and there needs to be real adaptive solutions and not just sort of a technical repeat of what you've done before. So I love that thinking.
And I'm curious to really get into the next few points you have. So yeah, when it comes to number two, which is this, does it put the focus where it needs to be? Can you unpack that a little bit and tell us a little bit more about how that fits in? Well, I'm going to go there in a second, but you got me thinking.
So I got to respond to what you're making me think is that I think sometimes in coaching there's this false dichotomy between the solitude of coaching where you don't share any ideas, really. If you want to get down to the core of it and director of coaching, where you tell the teacher what to do and it's like you can do one or you can do the other. But what we approach we believe in is something in between a dialogical approach.
So our coaches are really precise on what the strategy would look like, but they share it provisionally. I use the term precise but provisional. And so what they do is they say to the teacher, here's this checklist. Let's look at it. How do you want to modify it to make it work for your kids? We work from the assumption it's going to have to be adjusted and and we don't sort of I honestly think that's the humble approach of saying, here's this work. How do you think we need to adjust?
It is the only fair way. It's the only true, realistic way to address the school. So sometimes people talk about being granular or being specific. We're very specific. We believe in checklists, but we also realize the checklist has to be adapted. They have to be modified as a tool. Go on, he told me. When you use a checklist, there is local validation. You have to modify it to make it work for the local environment. What works in one place might not be exactly the same in another.
So I think it's a false dichotomy to say it's either facilitative or directive. You can share ideas in a way that honors the intelligence of the teacher, that involves them in decision making, and that better responds to the complexities of the classroom because of the adaptive. That's the dialogical approach. You don't have to you don't have to either have to be telling or say nothing.
We can share things in an idea that treats the other person as an equal, a person whose voices were just as clear on strategies. We don't silence ourselves. We just let go of the notion that we think our job is to talk down to the teacher and talk them into doing what we think they should do. So let's go to the second one getting fired up here, Brian. A lot of them love it, but I mean, the issue is what's best for kids right now. How do we move forward with kids?
We shouldn't get hung up on ideas. And I think we're we're going to change as time goes by. We're going to see things differently. But this is where we are now. But I do think the idea a one size fits all is not borne out by the reality of of school. In school, as Eric Leo said, it's one size fits one when it comes to learning. The second thing is the focus is on the wrong place.
So if I let's say I go to the teacher's classroom, I take a bunch of notes, do some observations, Then afterwards I say, Here, let me tell you a few things you did right? Well, probably. First off, the teachers like waiting to get to the stuff that they know is really going to happen. And then I say, here are the three things I think you should do. You should do this. You should change your questioning or you should teach your expectations.
Or did you realize that 90% of the time you are doing the talking, 10%? Here's things you can do to do this. The trouble with focusing on the strategy is usually it doesn't get sustained. The focus should be on the kids. First question shouldn't be what strategy to be is. The first question should be what are our students not doing that we want them to do? And once you've identified a student focus goal and that's student focused goal, could be engagement or achievement.
Once you identified that goal, then you start to talk about the strategy. But the idea that I just go in and tell the teacher what to do, it's usually focused on telling them, do a strategy. I wrote an article a few months ago about stages of change, and the first couple stages are just like awareness or I'm not using it. Then you move to mechanical level of implementation, then routine levels of implementation, ultimately proficiency.
It takes a lot of work to get from mechanical implementation to routine implementation to proficient implementation. And more than likely, what's going to happen if your focus is on the strategy without the compelling reason of a change in students is you're going to get to mechanical, you're going to drift back to where you used to be. And so I think but if you have a compelling student focus goal, then you have to keep going. You have to get good until you hit the goal.
And it puts the focus on the right place, which is focus being on students. I'll just give you one more thing about this. I really have learned a lot from Randy Sprecher. He's a he's a I consider him a friend and a mentor. And he's taught me so much about data and all kinds of things. And in fact, Randy, Trisha Skiles and I wrote a book together called Coaching Champs.
And before that we had a book called Coaching Classroom Management and Randy talks about the power of expectations for behavioral activities. He talks about Champs conversation, help, activity, movement, participation. Now, I've been in hundreds of classrooms where behavior is not positive, where you don't have a great learning environment happening and what I would call learner friendly environment. And on the wall are all these champs expectations. They learned about them.
They were told what to do. They put them up the first day of school and they never refer back to them again. But if they had a student focus goal, I want so much classroom discussion. I want these kind of answers to your questions. I want this kind of engagement measured this way. If you have a student focus goal, then those charts wouldn't just be on the paper unused. You'd have to keep trying them out until you hit your goal.
And so having student focused school keeps us from what we might call nominal implementation implementation in name only. And then we drive back to not doing it. When you got the student focused goal, you got to stick with it until you hit the goal, which means you get good at what you're doing and you put the focus on the right place. Because the other thing is I've seen a lot of people we have a pretty directive set of teaching practices at the University of Kansas.
Now, I've observed a lot of teachers using those strategy. Sometimes they do everything on the checklist of what it's supposed to look like and the classrooms are boring and spit. Kids are learning because they're not listening. If you have the student focus goal that that drawer that puts the focus where it needs to be, is it helping kids or not? If it's helping kids, I'll keep doing it. If it's not working yet, I got to make some modifications so I get really good at it.
So that so that's the second thing. But if I just push back on that just a little bit, not, not push back. I'm just push backs. Okay. Maybe maybe the direct maybe the right terminology here is to sort of double click would be the the key here. I just want to double click on one thing that you said, which is you talked about the stages of change and then you talked about direct implementation in a directive way.
So if we had the strategy and we're directive about it, but we're not really being pulled forward by the change we want to see in students. And then you sort of moved into this space around where if we're pulled forward by the goal and the change we want to see in students, then we're more likely to implement anything that we're doing in an adaptive way, but also with a little bit more fidelity and adherence to the students.
So is there is there a are you drawing is there a correlation, I guess, to be made in speeding up the stage, not speeding up the stages of change, but maybe making the stages of change a little bit more efficient to get to this routine sort of way with a strategy by having a more student focused goal. Well, I don't think you'll go through those stages without a student focused goal. Okay. Because I think it's it's too much work unless you can see the impact.
I mean, it just it's not work in the sense that, I mean, teachers are the hardest working people ever, right? It's not about work, but it's just too awkward. You know, I trying something else for the first time the whole different way. Let's say I'm doing learning maps at the start of every class, which I think is a great idea, but it feels awkward and I don't feel it's a lot of work to create them initially, but more importantly, it just upsets my regular routine of teaching.
And the easiest thing to do is to drift back to my old my old way church. But if I have a student focused goal and I'm working with a coach who's reminding me of what the data says and where we are, and then with the coach, I make adaptations to make it really fit the way I teach and it really, really reaches the kids. And then the kids hit the goal. That's a lot more compelling that I'm doing it just because you told me I should do it. Which gets to the third thing.
Maybe I'll jump to the third thing. Yeah, which is understanding change. I think the notion that we tell people what to do and they do it ignores what we know about change. We are not motivated about other people's goals. We don't do what other people tell us to do. And a dolts, all people, probably children too, but especially adults. We're really good at nodding your head yes and doing nothing. Passive resistance.
And so, you know, you'll have an administrator say, I really think you should do this. This is the strategy. Should you use you should implement it and you should implement it. Well, and and people are really good at saying that's a great idea and but they'll do the bare minimum. What's the least bit I can do to keep my job unless they believe in it, unless they can see its value. And unfortunately we don't see the value of things until we experience it.
The teaching practices you believe in are ones that you try and use. Are the results, right? So to me, if you start with an emotionally compelling goal and one where the teacher says, Oh man, I think it hit that, that'd be great. That's exactly what I want to do. And then let's figure out the strategy as opposed to me showing up and telling you what to do because I might show up and tell you what to do.
It's not very in fact, I think, telling the other person what to do, if you look at the literature on motivation and so you want a simple example would be Dan Pink's book Drive or DC and Ryan's work or other stuff that Dan talks about. The idea that telling people what to do motivates them is backwards. I think actually telling people what to do decreases their motivation, right? Right. If they can choose it for themselves, or they could look at video and see it for themselves and identify.
Now, I don't silence myself, but I want the process driven by them, not by me, because that's where the motivation and so we talk about alignment and we would say in coaching, the concept of resistance doesn't exist. When you have resistance, it's a mismatch of alignment because I'm not trying to get the teacher to do what they want to do or with.
I'm not sure I get the teacher to do what I've decided they need to do, but I'm trying to do is unleash a powerful goal that I have an unmistakable positive impact on kids. The teacher really wants to hit and then help them hit that. That's the that's the process that I think makes sense given what we know about human motivation that's so powerful.
And I just think about the idea that, I mean, it's so true you're not motivated by the goal that somebody else sets for you or the way that somebody else sees your particular classroom or your experiences. I think that's that that's sort of the big key there. So point number three, as you mentioned, is telling people what to do doesn't mean that people will actually change. Right. And now you're moving into number four, which kind of gets to some of that, too.
And you mentioned at the outset it's this idea around giving advice. Right? That's funny. I can't resist going back to the other one for a second. But yeah, you know, I have work with hundreds of educators and I have them get together. And when we talk about change, I have them identify a major change they made in their life. And so far, nobody has said I did this because somebody told me to do it. Hundreds of people.
And now people might say, I change because my partner said they're going to leave me unless I changed. Or I could see, you know, there might be something like that. But it comes from within. Not with that. We've already had that conversation last last, last conversation, but inside out versus outside. But telling people to change the key thing there is it doesn't mean they're going to change. People are really good at nodding yes and doing nothing.
We have decades of that happening as an effective professional development. So advice, you know, this year at TLC, Michael Bungay Senior is going to be there and he wrote this book called The Advice Trap. Michael is the most successful coaching expert. And this millennia, the coaching habits all over a million copies. And the essence of the advice trap, he says, is that we we assume Everton and he has a lot of evidence to support this.
We assume our advice is way more valuable than it is, and we assume the other person wants it way more than they do. And he would say, once you shift into advice, you diminish the capacity the other person to succeed. And I don't know their story, I don't know their context. And he said the assumption behind it is and this is, I think, a direct quote that I'm better than you want to tell you we have to do. And then then you should do it. And and that's probably not going to work.
The other thing is that it's reinforcing to give advice because the other person usually nods her head yes and says, Oh, what a great idea. I went out with a friend of mine a couple months ago and I don't know if I shared the story before, but he he wanted advice on how to make his classes more engaging. He's a university professor and I thought, well, how lucky for him that he's got me to tell him, because I've written all kinds of things about engagement.
Of all course, on engagement, I have a book called High Impact Instruction, and the first thing I did is I asked him, What have you done? That's been engaging for your kids? And he had this thing he did that was really kind of engaging. And then I well, I have a responsibility to give him all kinds of suggestions. So I listed off a bunch of things to increase, engage. You're using thinking prompt small group activities. Turn to your neighbor looking at the kind of questioning use.
And I just rattled off all these things. I felt really good because look at all the great advice I'm giving him and his nodding his head, Yes, these are great ideas. But it just struck me at the end of the conversation, he's not going to do any of it. He's just not going to do it because it all came from me. It didn't come from him. And you can kind of see the light go out in people's eyes when you give them advice and they'll reinforce you and encourage you and say, thank you, this is great.
They just don't do it and they're not going to do it because they don't want his advice as much as we want. It just doesn't work that way. It's when it's starting with the change key. The other thing is I don't think you get a good solution with this now. Keegan Lahey, I've got this book open. Look at all the stickies here. Wow. Hall The way we talk affects the way we work and they have this great cartoon in here.
There's a boss and an employee boss behind the desk, and the boss turns to the employee and says, Come in, Frank. I've been eager to communicate downward to you. It's kind of the idea. But he says several key technology say several juicy assumptions seem to be to us to be ineffable, although none of us and then him has acknowledged or made explicit.
The first is that the person back through the feedback giver, the coach, let's call him the supervisor, what he sees and thinks his feedback is right is correct. And an accompanying assumption is that there's only one correct answer. When you put those two assumptions together, they amount to this. The supervisor has the one and only correct view of this situation. We call this supervision assumption and that and then they have superior,
superior vision. And and the trouble with that is the notion that there's only one solution is kind of crazy, especially in a complex environment. So if the two of us can work it out rather than me giving you advice, and if we could start with your concerns that we can go back and forth, engage in dialog, we've got a much greater likelihood of the person embracing it. And so when we give advice, the person's not a part of the thinking. They are just a vessel to be filled with our wisdom.
And it's not an equal situation. It assumes that I'm I'm better than the other person and it probably inhibits the success of the other person. Yeah, it's interesting to think about that. I feel like I've been on both sides. And as you were, you were talking, I was envisioning I for whatever reason, I started with myself being on the receiving end of the coaching.
So the coaching where I was able to recount a few instances where the person that I was working with had a very directive approach around a particular strategy. And I was receiving this information. And I feel like there was a predictable art to that conversation from my vantage point, which was, again, maybe not nodding my head yes.
So much as still wanting to get clear, asking some questions, but ultimately knowing that it wasn't my decision, that that I was at the adherence of whatever was being described and my job was to implement with fidelity and to try it and to play nice sort of in the sandbox, if you will. And so implementing that thing I, I felt like I just shut down my own ideas and I didn't didn't do any thinking.
And I was at the mercy of just sort of what was being described or put forward and trying to match what I did, the actions I took to how it was being described by the other person, the coach in that situation.
And I don't I don't know that I would walk away and say that it was ultimately diminishing, but I can say that there was definitely a lack of engagement with those interactions where once that person left, I was going to do basically whatever I saw fit with that strategy as it pertain to my classroom at that time. So yeah, you bring up some really good points with that idea of advice. It's like you think it's better than it than you think your advice that you over inflate is your own advice.
You definitely feel that it has a higher value than than is being received. And I feel like that is, like you said, that puts people in a one up, one down sort of scenario for sure. Well, here's the thing.
I've spent 25 years studying instructional coaching a full time, but in schools for a whole decade, talking to coaches every day, spending 2 hours each Friday, analyzing what worked and what didn't work while I was doing that before I did that, I work with Michael one and study with him, the world's leading expert on change. We've continued to do research. We've done many presentations at the American Educational Research Association. I read nonstop about things related to coaching.
I have interacted with some of the great coaching experts in the world, like Sir John Whittemore and Christopher Norberg, Melina Aguilar, John Campbell. And I'm relentlessly in pursuing coaching. So I would say also my book on instructional coaching was the first book on instructional coaching. I wrote the first article in the Journal on Staff Development, on instructional coaching. So I would say I have expertise in this area.
So then if I go to someone who believes in the directive approach and I say to them, Look, I'm an expert, you should do it the way I say, Do you think they'll take my advice? Probably not. Probably they'll say, No, I've thought it through myself. And what makes that person who won't listen to my advice on coaching any different than a teacher who says, Actually, I want to look at my own experience, make my own decision. So I think I think the first question would be how does it end for me?
I want to hear other people's ideas, but ultimately I decide how it fits my professional climate, Whatever the situation might be that I'm dealing with, I'm going to process and work at it. And I think that's the way that's the way it is for teachers as well. It's powerful. And so just to just kind of recap where we are, why shouldn't coaches just tell teachers what to do? One, it usually doesn't work. Two, the focus isn't where it should be.
Three, Telling people what to do doesn't mean that it's going to lead to any change. Giving advice is a bit has a very limited upside when it comes to this idea of coaching and instructional coaching. And then we're on to number five here. Number five is about creating a dependency. So I want to hear a little bit more about your thoughts on that and why this point is so important. Yeah, there's two parts to it.
Part A, Part B, So one part is if I'm solving the teacher's problems, then that creates dependency. Then the next time they have a problem, they're going to come to me and say, Hey, can you help me solve this problem? And hey, I've got another problem, can you help me solve it? And it communicates that I don't think you're capable of solving your problem.
But if we work together as partners, then you develop independence and the capacity to solve your problems without my help, or at least to grow and develop as a human being, but mean solving the problem, whether it's as a parent with a child or whatever it might be, that that that builds a dependency. Michael Pollan talked about that decades ago in that the meaning of educational change.
The second thing is that ability to make decisions is at the heart of what it means to be a professional professionals. They use judgment. Rational judgment is the thing. When I go to see my doctor to talk about my hip or whatever it might be, my neurology or something, they don't treat me like I'm going through the drive thru at McDonald's reading a script to me. They look at me and they make decisions on me. They make professional judgments.
And if we believe teachers are professionals, I need to let go of this idea that is just technical. I just need to tell them what to do. They're not unskilled laborers working at McDonald's. They're professionals who have to make decisions for themselves. And so the very kind of discourse you have should position them as equals as professionals, people thinking of or let's just don't pretend it's a professional thing to treat somebody like their one down.
And I'm going to give them a technocratic solution to an adaptive challenge. Just recognize that I don't actually think teachers are professionals. I think they're at best skilled laborers, maybe unskilled laborers. The last thing is it creates dependance and it the professional analyzes the profession of teaching. And I think if we want the schools we want for our kids, our kids need to be taught by professionals, not technocrats. Implementing a script is the way I would put it.
Now, having said that, I think there is a place for some scripts, but the teacher needs to adapt it, make it work with that, that particular group of students. I think sometimes there's there's there's very precise tools that are really helpful. You know, when I started teaching writing, I used a pretty scripted model and it was really, really helpful. But I had to make it work for my kids. So so I would say I would.
And the person I work with who was my coach, essentially, she was very much letting me make the decisions about how I would doing it. She was really, really supportive and encouraging and really helped me a lot. Model in my classroom, gave me feedback on what I was doing in a and a real dialogical way, but she was still there to help me. But. But she treated me like a professional. Yeah. So now this is all.
This all has me thinking your five key points that you've made when it comes to the question of why not just tell teachers what to do? And now I'm wondering, what can we do if you know? So if there's if there's a a sort of a list of why it wouldn't work, what are some things that coaches, leaders, organizations, schools, What can they do? What would be like the antidote to that? Well, you know, we've landed where. We are. And we have our approach.
And I think there are other approaches that could take you there, too. But the way we would do it is we would work. We would consciously position ourselves as equals. One professional talking to another profession, coaching as we describe it, as a teacher, talking to a teacher. And so that means we see the teacher as the person who makes most decisions about what happens. Now there's that doesn't mean everything's up for grabs.
You know, you can't you can't choose to start teaching at 11 every day. You know, you can't lot of things you can't do. But but in the professional discourse of coaching, I see you as an equal. I'm not trying to control you. I'm not talking down to you, working as an equal. And we're solving these things together. So you should feel completely comfortable telling me what you think. You shouldn't feel. You're being forced to comply with my vision of what you should do.
There's a real back and forth, and then I think you need a process that helps you through that. And that process for us is the impact cycle, you know, where you start with an emotionally compelling goal, what you want to see and keep the focus on the kids, not on the strategy. We want a student focused school, and in those conversations we have, we don't silence ourselves, but we share things provisionally. We say, Is that all right with you?
If I share a couple of thoughts I've got and you tell me what you think. And I really want the teacher to feel completely safe saying, I don't think I'll do it because that for this as a they don't feel safe saying what they think and then the conversation's pretty stilted. I mean, they need to feel comfortable pushing back and I need to feel comfortable hearing hearing that I don't even know if pushing back is the right way of putting it, but they need to be able to.
We're we're working on it together. It's not me giving it to you. And even when we explain an ideas, we explain them precisely. We go through them with it. We often use a checklist, but provisionally we say, Now, would you do it this way or do you want to modify it? Or how do you want to do it? And then if the teacher says, You know what I'd like to do, I'd like to just ruin it, Is that okay? And I could do in a way that's never going to work.
I would say, Well, we have a goal, but here's what I'm thinking. Let me tell you about this and you tell me how you see it. But if you want to do it that way, we'll try it. If you don't hit the goal, we'll come back to the checklist. We'll modify it. Because just because I tell them to do doesn't mean they're going to do it. That's the thing. They're going to do it. They're going to do. So let's at least have the we have a better chance of getting fidelity.
If the person feels comfortable telling me what they're planning to do than if they're going to pretend they're going to do it. And then our standard of excellence is changes in the quality of kids lives. It's not some checklist on what the practice looks like.
Did we reach the goal we set around emotional engagement or around transfer of knowledge or whatever the goal might be, and as I said, we see teachers as professionals because I think to get the schools we need, we need professionals teaching our kids. We're not going to get them if we treat them like unskilled laborers. So powerful.
And if you're listening to this and you're like me and you're always looking to add to your coaching repertoire and build your craft, you're probably sitting back and thinking to yourself, There are some there are some real gems in there that I need to continue to add to my repertoire.
One of the things that really hit for me there was this idea of carrying with me that that idea of if we want the schools we want for our students, then we need to treat the teachers as professionals that they are in every situation. And that means that they're at the decision making center of everything, right? Like how repositioning them as a decision maker.
But the other thing that that that got me a little bit there too, was even a sort of a craft move in your coaching to ask a question after you introduce a strategy with precision and you offer it provisionally, that question that you talked in the nurse, this is how we would describe it or this is how it's described. Is this is this the way that you would do it? You know, what would you change? And then letting go of that attachment to whatever is is being described thereafter?
Because if I have a way that I think it should go, then I'm going to be sort of posturing to get that thing versus letting go of that attachment, asking that question and really wanting to hear what my partner has to say. And I think that is something that I will continue to tuck away and and work on. Now, let me let me pick up on that for a second. Is the notion that I have the only solution for the complexity of the classroom. Right?
I don't think I don't think that's probably borne out by reality. E And so to me, to have the humble approach of saying, look, I've got this, I want to share them with you, you tell me what you think of them, see if they'll work upfront. The teacher knows I'm not trying to get them to do something. It makes the conversation much more back and forth as opposed to somebody sitting there nodding and listening and not planning to implement.
But I think, you know when we when we look at the complexity of the classroom, the only the truest, the fairest response is a humble approach to say, I'm not sure this will work, but here's an idea. What do you think about it? So to think that we can it's so much easier to sit on the outside of the class and tell the teacher what to do. But when you get in the classroom and you start modeling within 2 minutes ago, Oh, now I see what she's talking about.
It is a whole different thing to stand in front of the class and it is to watch from the outside and give people advice. Great point. All right, Jim, we are nearing the end of our initial segment here on this show. And I just want to just hear your thoughts and just recap again the question we we explored today, which is why shouldn't coaches tell teachers what to do? You illustrated five key points.
And I just want to hear you just sort of recap them at anything else you would add to those key points before we move on. First off, I don't think it's going to work to take a technical solution to that NAP challenge and directive Coaching is usually a technical solution. Here are the five steps you need to make. In fact, if it's not a technical solution, then you're not being directive, you're being dialogical.
Second thing is when you focus on the strategy, I think you're focused at least what our research has shown in our work is the focus is on the wrong place. The the focus should be on students. What do we want to change in the students? And then we'll figure out a strategy that puts your emphasis in the right place. But it's also way more compelling for a teacher than I got to get the strategy.
I don't know if it works or not, but I got to do this thing because somebody told me I need to do it as opposed to I have this thing I really want to see my kids do. They're not doing it and helping help me hit that goal. Once you got an emotionally compelling goal, Jim Collins has a goal that hits you in the gut. Then you got something that mattered. Third thing is telling people what to do probably diminishes their their interest in doing it.
It's probably this is a little strong, but it's probably naive to think mean telling somebody what to do is going to lead to change. People are changed by something internal, not external. They're I've never met a person who said the biggest changes in my life happened because I was told to do them.
And in fact, I would a guess, given what we know about human motivation, that telling people what to do, we know this with our two year olds as much as we know with our 82 year olds telling people what to do actually diminishes the likelihood they'll do it. When we started out coaching, we used to do take a pretty direct approach. We'd say, Here's a checklist. You need to do it that way. The teachers would say, Well, I don't want to do it that way. I want to do it my way.
Now we take out the checklist and we say, Here's a checklist. You can change it if you want. Sometimes I'll say, Why would I change it? Let's start with what research? I mean, they're openness to it when they have choice, actually probably increases fidelity and fourth thing is, we know that we think our advice is better than it is, and we think people want it more than they do.
But actually, when you give advice, if you really watch the conversation, even though, the person's encouraging, you follow up, they often don't implement. It's disempowering. It assumes I'm better than you.
It assumes that I'm up here and you're down there and then my five and five be is that when we take the directive approach, it creates dependance because we're solving the problem for the person and professionalized as teachers because it it diminishes their capacity for professional judgment by telling them what they have to do.
So powerful and so much for all of us to think about and consider and continue to engage in dialog as it relates to our campus and our schools and continue to think about are the implications for this type of work and how do we maybe move towards something that will work for all of our students and all of our organizations?
Well, Jim, we are at that point of the show where we get into our final four questions and some of these knowing the content I've kind of readjusted based on some of the notes that I have here. But I'm curious to just sort hear it and some of these things you've already hit on. But I really want to hear just sort of your thoughts as it relates to some of these questions.
Now, generally, these are meant to be asked and it is sort of a quick way, but I think for some of these questions, it's possible we have to go a little bit longer on some of this. The first question that I had is what are two practical tips that you can give to help us as coaches to re professionalized teaching and learning.
So one is a question I learned from Michael Bungie's tenure, and I've probably mentioned this before because it's currently my favorite question, but the question is you've probably thought a lot about this. What are you thinking you might do when you ask that question? Sometimes a person will say exactly what you were planning to tell them they should do, and and if nothing else, it it puts the ball on their court. It opens up the conversation and gets you started.
And they might say, Look, I have no idea. You told me what to do, but that I think that questions are really helpful. And then you push it a little further by saying, well, and what else? What else would you add to the conversation? Second thing I'd say is asking yourself, when you communicate, am I trying to control the person or am I honoring their professionalism and expecting them to make the decision about what they do? You want to put it simpler?
Who's who's making the choice in this situation and in a conversation between peers, which is how I see you coaching. When one person tries to control the other, it often doesn't work very well. Usually it needs to be Let me share something and see what you're. And one way of putting that would be coaching when you're talking to teachers should feel the way it felt before you became a coach. Should still feel like we're two teachers just collaborating, sharing ideas should be the same.
Respect for the professionalism of the teacher. That's perfect. That is perfect. Question number two What is one thing you would have done differently earlier in your career as a coach? Well, I would have been less, you know, in light of today's conversation, right. I would have been way less direct it. If you go back to the teaching channel. Yeah. And you look at the videos that I did some time ago, more than a decade ago. Okay. Is a lot of advice giving a lot of direct it.
And I think starting with questions instead of you know, ask ask more tell less. As one famous book says, I think that that's that makes a lot of sense because it leads to greater ownership, greater capacity, problem solved, better results for kids and for teachers. And I saw what this area feel much the same way that I said I'm still working on it, too for the you know, like I it's it is really tempting to say this is what you should do. Sure. You know, but now I did that with Jenny Leeds.
And Jenny is an Iron Man. Mm hmm. And which is you run, you swim 3.6 miles, you bike 116 miles, then you run a marathon. That's what she did. And one day I was giving her tips on how she should run and she just kind of paused. And at the beginning she said, you know, I did do an Ironman, was like, who am I to give her advice right at The Tempting? You know, I guess, like, what do they call that mansplaining as is mansplaining is not limited to the male gender either.
I think anybody could be doing mansplain. Yeah, it's very tempting to get into the advice and telling rather than asking the next question. Just curious, is there one question that you've been grappling with lately? I've really been focused on getting a clear picture of reality and in different ways, but I would say this conversation, what's the best way to have this conversation in a way that isn't inconsistent with what I'm saying? Like, I gave a lot of advice in this conversation.
So how do I how do I go doing that as I watch instructional coaching, growing and evolving and kind of becoming a global phenomenon? You know, I wonder what's the best way for me to make sure people know all about the mistakes we've made and what we've learned over there over time. That's not, I hope, not personal. It's merely that it took us two decades to get where we are.
And some people are jumping in right now where we were maybe 15 years ago and how can I communicate what I think we've learned in a way that's of their their struggle to do good work? So I think that's really been an issue for me. How do I do it? How do I communicate what we've learned in a way that's not disempowering of those I'm I'm speaking to.
Well, as somebody who's on the receiving end of this conversation right now and are incredibly talented listeners, I'm sure that is taking this in and feeling a little bit more empowered based on how you described it today. So I would say the question you've been grappling with, you're dealing with head on and it feels very dialogical, it feels very responsive to where we are.
And then the last question that I have, you are a man who is in a different location in your schedule, depending on where you are in the world. And I'm just curious like, is there one place that you do your best thinking I had this experience about a month ago. I get up and I do I have a little routine every morning. Mm hmm. Drink mai mai, pour over coffee. I eat my toast with Vegemite and then do these readings.
I sit down, I read various things, and then I. And it's kind of the start to the day. That's the day starts the same way every day, wherever I am. Unless it's just not possible. And I. And then I went, okay, I've done that. Okay, what's next? And it just hit me in that moment that I'm always doing what's next. And I'm not really.
So I would say I do my best thinking when I can pause and stop doing what's next, not in terms of a space, but you know, it could be could be taking a walk here on the road out here in Kansas, or it could be anywhere. You could be on a plane. Well, where I can actually, PA, But sometimes you're so wound up and all the things you're doing and what I mean, are you? But for me, I get so drawn into all the tasks that have to be done or has to happen that the opportunity
to really do thinking is problematic. So. So I do my best thinking. I think when I'm able to pause everything else, just kind of be open to a chance to think about things so powerful. And a great way to end this episode. And to all of you out there, we certainly appreciate you being here for the coaching questions show. Thank you, Jim. Appreciate your time, your energy, your thoughts. Anything else you would add to the show to just sort of take us out if people made it through to the end?
Thank you for listening. This is a longer than average one. So thank you for being here. I'm sure they're still here. And we certainly want to thank you for all of your time today and being here. And thanks to all of you out there who are having a positive impact on everyone around you. We truly appreciate your support for all of this content that we're putting out through the instructional coaching group and this particular podcast.
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