Member-only story
Sticking With It
In consideration of why I didn’t quit being an instructional coach
My last couple of pieces have tried to explain some of the thinking I have been doing this year in my new role as an instructional coach for my school. It’s been uneven. To the point that I seriously considered quitting in the role for the 22–23 school year. Ultimately, I didn’t decide to quit, and since that crisis point (for want of a better descriptor), I think I have rededicated myself to the work fully and with enthusiasm. In this piece (my last on the topic for at least a little while), I want to discuss some reasons why I decided to remain in the job.
I’m Not Good At It I discussed the reasons why I don’t think I’m good at the role in last week’s piece. I won’t rehash any of that here, but I will note that a primary reason why I decided that this was a role worth continuing in is because doing the reps is really the only way we improve. Fundamentally, if I want to get better at this thing that I don’t feel I do particularly well, I need to stick with it. It says a lot about my career (or maybe my perception of my career) that I have never previously felt that I needed to stick with anything in my work as an educator to get better at it. As a teacher, as an administrator, as Head of Department, as Union Vice President, as everything that I have done in schools, I have always felt that I filled the role very well for as long as I did it without a sense of needing to grind on it a bit. This doesn’t mean that I was ever unbelievably great at any of them, only that it has always felt like some amount of native talent and a capacity for doing the work has served me quite well. I’ve never felt that the way to improve at them was to explicitly need to lean in on them, the leaning in came along for the ride. But I do feel that way in this role, and I think that’s cool. In a role where I am asking my teacher partners to stretch themselves, I’m also being stretched. I don’t see how that can be a bad thing.
A Particular Conversation My last piece also talked a lot about the tension I have with some approaches to coaching that my school is folding in to the developing model that we are building. Just like above, I’m not going to get into those again here. I’ll only note that it’s a real source of some of the discomfort that I feel in the…
