Reflections on Coaching
One Final Navel Gaze.
We’re entering the last two months of the school year, and as regular readers know, this also means that I’m exiting my Instructional Coach role, after three years, and moving back to teaching a full number of classes. Depending on how regular a reader you are, you know that it’s been a journey for me. I’m not going to hold forth on too much of that here. Instead, I’m going to do something that I was asked to.
Until this year, the Instructional Coach role didn’t have anything that really approached a useful feedback channel from the teachers that we partner with. Yes, teachers have been asked to provide feedback on our coaching model, writ-large, twice a year, every year, but that feedback is always much more about the model than it is about the people working as coaches. Given my perspective on the need to lead by example, I was always happy to roll some amount of feedback on my coaching into the structures by which I was getting feedback on my work as a Department Chairperson. But given the deprecation of that role in our department last year, that isn’t an option anymore. So I was glad to be able to have something more comprehensive, centralized, and more focused on my individual work as a coach to have my teacher partners (and my line manager) use to evaluate my coaching this year as our school has committed to evaluating instructional coaches in the same way they evaluate all other leaders through an annual 360 leadership evaluation, administered by a third-party.
Feedback, Fed Back
Let’s cut to the chase: For all of its possible utility, there isn’t a lot of signal in my feedback, outside the note that I am very appreciated by the people I work most closely with as a coach. How appreciated? In something like a decade of being evaluated for various leadership/coaching capacities across multiple organisations, this year’s evaluation is by far the most uniformly positive that I’ve ever received.
Here are my overall means:
(the report tells me that a gap of 0.3 is considered significant, but given that we’re talking about a sample size of 4 teacher partners and 1 line manager, that can’t possibly be the case)
Here are my top three and bottom three rated items:
(there are actually 8 items on my report where the “All but Self” means are 5.0, but I suspect the report just pulls 3 because once the sample size increases to something statistically respectable, mean scores of 5.0 quickly go out the window.)
And here are my three biggest self-to-other gaps:
See what I mean? This is an embarrassment of riches, by any stretch.
I suppose I could spend some time interrogating why my self-perception is so much lower than how I’m perceived by the people I work with, but I think I have a handle on that: When I’m evaluating myself, I’m putting myself up against the best coach I could imagine. The people I work with are evaluating me against what I am. Given that, it’s not at all surprising that I evaluated myself lower than others did for literally every item on the survey.
Qualitative comments are similarly favourable:
Again, what even is there to reflect on here, outside of how nice it is to be appreciated by one’s colleagues?
On some level, the structure of this survey is a bit of a thrown ballgame. The sample size means that anonymity in any real way goes out the window. And my well-known transition out of the role has to mean that everyone filling this thing out has taken a somewhat valedictory approach to my evaluation. There’s not much use in kicking someone who is walking out the door. But still, for all of that, it’s helpful to see that my perspectives on what works best for my colleagues seems to line up with their own. More than anything else, when dealing with highly effective teachers, I don’t know that there’s anything else for a coach to do.
Next Steps
The typical form for this kind of reflection in our organisation involves publicly discussing next steps/commitments. I think that’s essential…when a person is staying in the role (😉). From my departing view, the only real next steps that comes to mind are continuing to support my colleagues as best that I can, and doing my job as well as I can. This basically means business as usual for any of the collaboration and support that I provide. From the standpoint of working with a coach next year (one who may well be brand new to our organisation), it will mean really using the coach to support me and what I want to do as a teacher. But outside of that, I don’t think there’s too much to proclaim here.
Except, of course, for some outright gratitude: Serving as a coach has been my privilege. My thanks to everyone I’ve worked with in the role for everything they’ve done to help me. That I’ve been able to do that in return, in any amount however small, is all the success that I could ever want.
Given the nature of this piece, It feels weird to end it with the normal call-to-action. That said, if you have any thoughts, they are as welcome as they always are!
