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Why I Am Not a Good Instructional Coach (Yet)
Some thoughts on unease in my current role
In my last piece, I discussed some of the reasons why I considered (and subsequently discarded) the idea of putting down my role as an instructional coach next school year. Fundamentally, it was a question of feeling like I was doing too much, and not doing enough of the things that are most important to me, personally and professionally. But another, sizeable, piece of my thinking was due to my feeling that I am not particularly good in the role. My work as a coach is very much a work in progress. That I believe that my work in other areas of my professional life (teaching, Head of Department) is really quite good probably means that my expectation for the work that I do as an instructional coach is somewhat unreasonable. Be that as it may, it doesn’t change how I feel about my coaching work. I’m learning.
There are other dynamics at play, too. Initially, when our school first started developing the coaching program, much of the work that we did was based in a model of coaching that is largely congruent with the Cognitive Coaching™️ model. This is a model that I have familiarity with. The model is somewhat similar to experiences I have had in analysis, where the coach serves as a means to help the teacher being coached to process their own thinking around an aspect of their practice that they are interested in working to develop. It’s a very participant-driven model of coaching. Generally, I’m a fan of this kind of coaching.
When we began this year, all of the coaches received professional development around a different model of coaching. This model, called the ”Better Faster” model, does not seem to me to put the coaching partner at the front of the process. Rather, it proposes a framework for what it positions as “great” teaching, and a process by which coaches can move the teachers that they work with toward more completely mirroring that vision. From what I can gather, the model largely developed out of the “no-excuses” charter school model of education and its various offshoots (ex. the work of Doug Lemov). It is hard for me to find value in this model of coaching. Admittedly, I consider it to be fruit from a somewhat toxic tree. I am primed by my ideological opposition with the source of the model to easily find…
