In a presentation to my graduate students, I explained the role of coach this way. The city's external, privately supported public education fund PEF decided last year to change the way in which it supports individual schools by selecting a number of them through a competitive process for the specific purpose of implementing standards-based reform.
Standards are part of a national and state reform effort to improve student learning in all public schools. Those schools received not only a grant to support their efforts but also the assistance of a coach who is charged with guiding them through the change process. That coach averages about one day per week at the school, working with the principal and teams of teachers on activities related to reform.
I am the coach for two of the city's early childhood schools which offer full day programs am-6pm to children from three to six years old preschool to first grade. As a coach, it turned out that I engaged in many more activities in the schools and at the agency than my initial overview suggested.
I observed in classrooms; talked individually with teachers about children and early childhood practices; facilitated some school based meetings and participated in others; met individually with principals on a regular basis and at principals' meetings periodically; organized or led professional development sessions; attended coaches meetings and conferred with other coaches about their schools; and spent time in the library or my home office looking for resources to share with teachers.
The role seemed to grow with each visit I made to the school or meeting I attended at the agency. By the end of the first year, I no longer saw coaching as that ideal, cutting edge form of professional development to which I was so attracted.
Instead, I defined it as a complex array of roles that challenged my skills as a teacher educator. In fact, I described it to a prospective coach who called me during the summer between my first and second year like this: It is the hardest work I have ever done. It's part expert, part cheerleader, part resource person, part teacher educator, part colleague, part friend And that only pertains to the role in the schools!
There's also a lot you have to do with the PEF. Trying to represent the school, negotiating and liaisoning Personal communication with J. While I did not approach coaching teachers at the ECSs naively, I experienced the realities of helping teachers change their practices more directly and intensely than I had in any of my earlier roles.
The New Schools Project challenged me to utilize the best of what I knew worked with teachers and yet showed how much more I needed to learn about facilitating teacher development.
It was a struggle that I did not fully understand until much later. First Year Relationships with the Schools: Getting Started Conscious of the importance of my entry into the ECSs as a new person or a familiar person in a new role, I spent much of the first year getting to know the teachers and the school, figuring out who they were and the culture of their settings. At the same time, I searched for something that would unite the teachers as a group--a project, an issue, a need they could collaborate on.
I kept them informed of pertinent events in the area and provided information on other districts' reform plans. My initial goal was to make my presence in the school felt in visible, concrete and helpful ways. At ECS-I, teachers were eager to spend their time on the areas of the program they had previously targeted for improvement, namely assessment and its relationship to children's progress.
They wasted no time in soliciting my input and organized meetings to discuss it. However, the more we discussed the topic, the more obvious it became that teachers had different expectations for children and used different outcomes to measure learning.
These differences in teachers' beliefs were clearly interfering with their ability to figure out a school wide approach to assessment. This realization led to a collective interest in developing a document that would outline what teachers expected children to know and be able to do by the time they graduated from ECS, and further what opportunities could be provided children to ensure that these expectations were met.
Even though the task proved to be time-consuming, periodically frustrating and intellectually challenging, it turned out to be what they were most invested in by the end of the year. It became the common goal that bound us together. At ECS-II, for a variety of reasons, the teachers and principal were not as prepared for a quick start. They did not have the same organizational structures e. Nevertheless, they shared a strong interest in documenting what they already did well. To help that process get started and with their encouragement, I completed an informal review of the program based on a New Schools Project document of essentials for effective schools and made specific recommendations for next steps.
That activity on my part was a turning point for our work together. As I learned later, this was a school with a history of talking about best practices but little concerted effort to come to agreement about implementing them. My assessment of the state of their school sparked strong interest and investment in their own self-assessment and plans for change.
In fact, I noted it in my final monthly report for the year, What has struck me most about [the end results for both ECSs is that although they each approached the task of looking at their programs very differently with ECS-I's major work on the outline of learning expectations and opportunities for children coming from teacher interests and ECS-II's program review growing out of a memo I initiated , their work in now closly aligned as they each focus on what should year olds learn and how should they be taught.
At ECS-I, I followed the teachers' lead in determining a focus for collective work and helped them to discover their need to resolve philosophical differences about teaching and learning in early childhood. Neither could I have predicted the pathway of each school nor could I have planned it any better. Like the learning of children, the learning of teachers takes on different forms and trajectories.
What I did was trust that learning would happen and I did so by relying on past knowledge of teacher development and previous experience as a teacher educator. In both schools, I began coaching from where the teachers were in their thinking about their school and their teaching. Our work together grew out of their initial goals, even though the goals may have seemed far afield of the goals of the reform project.
I started where teachers were in their thinking about their own teaching as a way of getting at their thinking about reform.
In their latest work on teachers, Lieberman and Miller remind us once again that The literature on adult and teacher career development and the processes of teacher change supports the need to adapt professional development to the specific teachers for whom the development is intended. Every staff is a collection of individuals, with his or her own personal and career history.
One size does not fit all; this is as true for teachers as it is for the students they teach. I was not like those other outsiders who pursued their "own agenda irregardless of ours". In short, the teachers saw me as an outsider they "could trust", a consultant who "understood our perspective" and a colleague interested in figuring out a reform agenda "tailored to our school".
Their trust in my openness to their perspective became the foundation for our joint work and made it possible for them to eventually entertain notions of change. Starting where teachers are and integrating their perspective into the agenda has remained a guiding premise of mine over the course of my time with the New Schools Project.
As I stated toward the end of the first year, Just as teachers need to take risks, trust their students' abilities and guide rather than force learning, so too coaches must take risks, trust their teachers and guide them through the change process in a way that works for them.
I sensed I would be a major source of communication between the schools and the agency. I recognized that much of the burden for implementing the project rested with me and my ability to function as a go-between. I even expected some tensions to result from my interfacing with both parties and my need to help them reconcile any differences in their perspectives. However, I was not prepared for the extent of tension that grew between me as well as other coaches and the agency during the first year.
Nor was I able to understand the source of such tension while I was steeped in it. Because the New Schools Project was innovative and unique to the city school system, there were minimal guidelines for coaching, no clear expectations for change and only generic literature outlining best practices in reform. As participants in cutting edge work, all of us coaches, reform agency staff, teachers in schoolswere simultaneously doing reform while trying to figure out how to reform.
Such experiences can be intellectually challenging and stimulating. Unfortunately, at the same time they may also prove to be fraught with frustration, anxiety and miscommunication, especially when confronted with the realities of life in schools. I did not worry about these possibilities when I became a coach because I thought the reform agency and I shared a strong commitment to and similar beliefs about school reform.
From my early discussions with agency staff and my reading of their written materials, I thought we had agreed about the need for reform to take place school by school and teacher by teacher, and that change in schools takes both time and effort. Yet the more we interfaced, the less obvious our agreement.
During the first year, most of my interactions with members of the reform agency occurred at meetings and through memos. The focus of discussions and information centered on the steps that the project felt schools had to follow in order to implement change. These steps were dubbed as essentials and addressed the components of school improvement noted in the literature. Coaches attended bi-monthly meetings where we were updated on project thinking about the essentials and trained in a variety of strategies for helping schools meet the essentials.
For example, coaches participated in training sessions on a protocol for collaborative assessment, a manual for completing a school resource audit, and the development of comprehensive school plans that expedite reform.
The end result of these early interactions was valuable information about what needed to happen in schools, but little help in the ultimate struggle of coaching, that is, how to make it happen. After one of the meetings, I wrote in my field notes, Why are all my notes from meetings in the form of directives? Somehow I thought it would be more about what's really happening in schools and how can we support the schools' efforts I know time is of the essence but I don't think just pushing the changes will make them happen.
Or do I just not know how to do it? Typically, meetings were both polite and argumentative. Project staff would explain a new idea or mandate a new activity for schools, coaches would listen at first and then question the idea or raise concerns about its implementation, whereupon project staff would counter these points and disagreement would follow.
The discussion would continue in this fashion until it inevitably ended with the original directive repeated for coaches to implement in their schools. In the margins of my notes at one meeting, I asked, "Why are we spending so much time debating this?
Is our purpose in the schools to implement or to guide the implementation [of reform]? Rather than being confrontational, I tried to explain my thinking about the issues and the project's plans as they pertained specifically to the ECSs. In this way, I hoped to convey what it was like to be caught in the middle of two potentially valid points of view.
I saw the monthly reports as an opportunity to present the insider perspective on change in hope that it would open up the possibility for negotiation between the schools and the agency.
As the following examples suggest, these reports were full of comments about time constraints, the process of change, and the culture of the schoolthe very factors that made it difficult to make change happen.
Systemic reform does not happen in seven-hour days. They will unfold over time and than can be addressed. I assumed my points were being made but the communication loop was never completed formally, though occasionally in conversation I learned my points at least had been received. The lack of open and ongoing communication became a major obstacle during the first year. Without some form of dialogue, my relationship with the agency did little to illuminate what was working in my schools, what was not and why.
Another layer of frustration, having to do with coaches' professional growth, was operating between coaches and reformers. Like other coaches, I joined the New Schools Project in part to seize the opportunity to be part of the design and development of a school reform effort.
I had envisioned participation in an innovative project where roles and responsibilities had not yet been outlined and the process of change had not yet been delineated. When that opportunity did not come to fruition, frustration set in. While coaches may have seen the New Schools Project as an ideal forum for inquiry on reform, the project staff was reluctant to make changes based on our input and remained controlling of our work in the schools. By the end of the first year, coach and agency differences seemed irreconcilable.
It took a study of the coaches' role by outside evaluators to make clear how far apart our perspectives had grown and how strained our relationship had become. Still, there was considerable tension between the coaches and the [reform agency] staff about how to implement the [New Schools Project] so that schools would make changes that improved student learning. The conflicts did not arise, fundamentally, out of the design of the [New Schools Project]. Neufeld and Woodworth, Coaches wanted to be involved in shaping the project not only because we felt our perspectives from within schools offered a significant contribution, but also because we needed that kind of collaborative learning and problem solving for own professional development.
The very conditions coaches wanted to put in place for teachers were the very conditions we intuitively knew we needed themselves. When these differences were identified and acknowledged prior to the beginning of the second year of the project, tensions subsided. Second year relationships with the schools: Refining the role of coach A major difference between the first and second year of coaching in the New Schools Project resulted from the addition of a second set of coaches to work directly with schools.
Recognizing the importance of content knowledge in improving teacher practices, the reform staff decided to hire content coaches to work with teachers in their classrooms. Rather than finding another consultant to spend another half day, each week in their schools, the ECS principals requested that I function as their content coach and increase my time on-site. The additional time was a considerable help to implementing plans formulated during the first year. While time remained a central issue, my presence in the ECSs one full day and one additional meeting time each week allowed us to establish and maintain a momentum of change.
In addition, it modeled the kind of integrated teaching and learning the teachers tried to emulate with children. As [one principal] suggested content does not separate from process at this level as easily as it might at another. Field notes, August My second year of coaching brought teachers and their instructional practices into focus. While we continued with school-wide, grade level and other group meetings, there was equal amount of time available for me to work directly with teachers.
Whether it was co-teaching during literacy block, demonstrating new instructional techniques, or thinking together about children, this classroom-centered time was reserved for teaching and learning. At ECS-I, our goal for Year II was to translate the expectations and opportunities that we had spent so much time articulating into daily classroom practices.
I supported the school again in a spontaneous and flexible way by working with teachers on topics of their choice and in ways they chose. Thus, I spent several weeks working with one teacher to develop a video on her version of the early childhood literacy block.
I worked with another on her use of literature as the center of her weekly curriculum plans intermittently over a semester. My work with each teacher was different, but all of it was based on a mutual understanding of teacher's self knowledge and interests as the deciding factor in the focus of coaching. Because all the teachers at ECS-II wanted to spend Year II assessing their own practices by comparing them to those described in the literature and those in schools where literacy programs were already well established, I scheduled time in each classroom on a rotating basis.
The aim was for every teacher to develop not only a similar sense of best practices in early literacy, but also a unique sense of how her classroom compared with exemplars. That meant I co-taught at times, demonstrated new instructional techniques at other times or discussed children as needed. In each case, the teachers were ultimately in charge of the content of my coaching. In the second year of reform, the school district became increasingly involved in the ECSs because of its own reform plans.
As a result, there were multiple competing demands requests from the agency and mandates from the district often with conflicting messages. One particular case involved the way in which coaches, and teachers reviewed student work. New Schools coaches had developed a protocol for collaborative assessment and begun using it with their schools when the district developed another protocol and required its use as well. Not only did teachers at the EC Ss feel they were being asked to do two versions of the same thing but also they became confused by implicit messages inherent in very different approaches to the same task.
It took a great deal of time to explain and sort out the messages with the teachers and then renegotiate requirements with the systema great deal of time distracted from the agenda the teachers had set out for themselves. Nor can the emotional toll these distractions took on teachers be underestimated. Several teachers became frustrated with the lack of alignment between the reform plans; others were deeply disappointed that the project they hoped would lead to improving their schools might turn out to be no better than others before.
The lack of coordination between the district and the. Even though the external influences were never intended to distract us from our internal work, they did keep us from getting to the heart of transforming classroom practices.
It was in too many ways proof of the potential "fragmentation, overload, and incoherence that can result from the uncritical acceptance of too many different innovations" Fullan, , p. Navigating second year experiences once again tested my ability to function equally well in the world of the schools and that of the reformers. As the person in the middle of the reform agenda and the teachers' agenda, I saw how the EC Ss were improving as a result of both agendas.
I had first hand knowledge of how the requests of the reformers were enacted and how well they served or did not to get teachers to work collaboratively for school-wide purposes. When progress was slow, I tried to convince the agency that teachers were not trying to thwart change, rather they were trying to make sense of change in the context of their working environment.
I prefaced many comments about the schools with "This is a group of teachers who until recently Many of these explanations at meetings were prefaced by It's not that someone at [the reform agency] or [the school system] is trying to make your life as a teacher more difficult.
They're really trying to help in the long term. Their requests stem from what we know now, what studies have shown about effective schools and how they got to be that way.
Toward the end of the second year, I began to redefine coaching in light of its broader context. In my second year self evaluation, I wrote I really see the role of coach as similar to that of a consultant, but a consultant who is part "higher ed" partner, part ethnographer, and part liaison. I think this approach to coaching has worked for PEF as well because school reform involves updating schools the higher ed piece , understanding schools from an insider's perspective the ethnography piece and negotiating individualized pathways to change for each school the liaison piece.
While an exciting position to be in, it was also a frustrating one, one which could potentially strain my relationship with either or both parties. It was during periods of high frustration that I again turned to the reform agency for support and had it not been available my work probably would have been compromised.
Second year relationship with the agency: Needing professional development for myself The report of the outside evaluators led to a full day meeting of the New School project staff and coaches early in the second year to discuss differences, consider potential solutions and plan for the upcoming year. Hearing from other coaches who shared many of the same concerns, experienced similar difficulties in their schools, and were looking for supportt to help them figure out next steps helped me recognize that professional developers also need professional development.
Until that time, I was worried that I was the only coach who was feeling inadequate, and worse yet that I did not know as much about facilitating teacher development and early childhood program improvement as I thought. The funny thing is that we all thought the quotes in [the evaluator's] report were our own when in reality it's just that we were all saying the same thing! Even more important, we're all crying out for additional training, support, learning about coachingnot just me.
The folks from [another project] and [university] know we don't have the answers yet and we need help in discovering them. Her presence led to structural changes in the way the project was organized, opportunities for coaches to voice their perspectives on how well reform was proceeding and more time for collaborative work. Under her leadership, coach workgroups were organized, small study groups formed, and meetings planned with input from coaches.
These new structures provided a forum for coaches to reflect on and gain insight into coaching. They made it possible for me to better define some of the problems I was encountering at the EC Ss. For example, the workgroup of which I was part became a place for wrestling with issues related to aligning the agency's and the district's reform plans. Even though the specific charge of the workgroup was not alignment, alignment was central to what we were working on and thus served as a resource for ideas on that problem.
From such meetings, I returned to the ECSs with new insights about reform and what might be contributing to our struggles on site. Furthermore, the changes in the way the reform agency treated coaches made a difference in how supported I felt. My participation in a workgroup that articulated and renegotiated one component of the reform effort was confirmation that I could contribute not only to the implementation of the project but also to its development.
Discussion with a small group of coaches who shared my concerns about our roles legitimized my need to continuously reflect on my coaching experiences. And attendance at meetings that were planned from a coach's perspective were further proof that coaches could accomplish more as a team than individuals. Roland Barth's. Had the reform plan remained the same in the second year, the new structures probably would have sustained coaches in our work on-site.
However, there was incredible pressure on the reform agency to accelerate the progress of change in the schools, competing demands on the schools from the district, and little feedback to schools from either the agency or the district regarding how well things were going. In many ways, the push for more progress actually detracted us from the progress we were beginning to make in classrooms and reinstated my feelings of frustration and inadequacy.
The more pressure to show outcomes of our work, the more alienated from the project I became because I perceived the push for change as indication that the agency was returning to its old way of ignoring the voices of the very individuals most steeped in the reform effort.
In one of my final reports that year, I noted [The reform agency] once again leaves me with only my own perspective on my work I would like to see [our self assessment process, our meetings, our work] become a learning experience for everyone. Based on our collective [experiences] and knowledge, how can we improve on the role of the coach?
How do we contribute to reform? This would be a great opportunity to rethink everyone's roles and working conditionsmaybe even write an article on what effective coaches do [for reform]. In my role as coach, I was a change agent who also experienced change in my own thinking and the way in which I worked with teachers.
In the first year, I focused more on learning about the ECSs from the inside, and offered guidance from outside knowledge only at opportune moments. I resisted the efforts of reformers and school district personnel to accelerate the process of reform, instead sharing with them my belief in the ability of the ECSs to achieve the outcomes of reform via their own pathways.
At the same time, however, I was influenced by the reform plan, the training I received as a coach and the pressure to show change in the schools. I did introduce new concepts to the teachers based on research as well as follow directives from the reform agency. I expanded my repertoire as a professional development provider by experimenting with new forms of professional development, such as study groups and looking at student work sessions.
After two years, I was not the same coach I started out to be, but neither was a completely different one. The way in which I changed as a coach resulted from the interplay of my current thinking about teacher learning and the professional development practices I used to support that learning with new ideas on teacher development in an era of reform and new strategies for transforming classroom practices I learned as a reform coach.
Thus, I incorporated new ideas and strategies I learned at coaches trainings into my work with teachers at the ECSs when I assessed them to be useful and meaningful. The very process that I understood to happen to teachersa slow integration of new concepts into current ways of thinking and doing--also happened to me. In much the same way the teachers with whom I was working were slowly changing by wrestling with new ideas in light of old ones and adopting aspects of the new that made sense in relation to the old, I was also changing by rethinking my approach to them within the context of reform.
At the time, I was not as fully aware of the parallel between what was happening to the teachers and what was happening to me. What I did know was that I needed more support and technical assistance as I continued coaching. As my work with teachers became more complex, I became increasingly cognizant of my own struggles as a professional developer. Although I possessed both content knowledge of early childhood education and skills as a teacher educator, the change process I was charged to facilitate was more intense and required different skills than those in which I had become proficient.
My experiences with student teachers, beginning teachers and teachers who saw themselves as learners just did not transfer so easily to all the teachers in this project. I often felt overwhelmed by extenuating circumstances, multiple levels of interpretation, and an inability to meet expectations I and others had set for my role.
The context of reform made it difficult for me to apply old skills to new situations, challenged my understanding of professional development and made me realize that I, too, needed further professional development. My second year as a coach was less stressful primarily because of the professional development experiences organized for coaches and led by a coach's coach. Not only did they help me acquire or improve on skills, but also they served well in pushing my thinking about professional development.
Until then, I ignored my own professional development almost as if I was in a position not to need it. Although I have always taken the stance as collaborator rather than expert in my work in schools, that orientation took on new meaning as I worked as a coach. Because there is little research about coaching in reform, I had no professional guidelines to which to turn. Problem setting and solving at the ECSs took the best of my thinking in conjunction with the best of the teachers' thinking.
It was our collective thinking and learning that led to change. The more I got to know the real problems faced by the teachers and principals in my schools from their perspectives, the more able I was to work collaboratively with them to craft solutions and the better able I was to contribute ideas toward those solutions.
My coaching in turn has enhanced my own teaching at the college level as I strive more than ever to integrate theory and practice on campus so that prospective teachers are better prepared to do the same in the schools. Different lessons from those already reported While much of what I learned about coaching is similar to the lessons of other projects, some of my learnings have been different.
Unlike other professional development experiences described and analyzed in the literature, my case was framed by my role as a middleman, the person who links the reformers sponsoring change and the teachers and principals in schools undergoing change. Being positioned in the middle allowed me a unique perspective on the reform process, one I welcomed initially. Nonetheless it became an increasingly difficult position to navigate, especially in terms of my relationship with the reform agency.
The obstacles I faced here were only partially mitigated by the supports I found in other coaches, the teachers and principals in the ECSs, and the professional development I received during the second year. Preparing this self study, especially in light of the literature on a learning perspective toward change, helped to elucidate the assumptions operating on my part as well as those of the reformers and the subsequent ways in which we often operated at cross purposes.
While not mutually exclusive, one or the other category usually dominates the thinking of the individuals involved and drives the decisions that are made. The current literature is full of arguments in favor of one or other approach.
Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin argue for reform agenda professional development for teachers that supports a learner-centered view of teaching and a career-long conception of teacher learning.
Leaders who listen will develop stronger relationships with their people by gaining trust. This trust will help in getting buy-in for change. Fill out the form to get program details and access to valuable resources. Fill out the form below to get started and take the next step toward your educational goals. I understand calls and texts may be directed to the number I provide using automatic dialing technology. I understand that this consent is not required to purchase goods or services.
What is a Change Agent? In order to become a truly effective change agent, look to develop these five qualities: 1. Flexibility Being open to change requires an entrepreneurial attitude. Diversified Knowledge Successful leaders avoid getting stuck in the confines of their industry. Accountability and Responsibility People respect courage and accountability. Effective Listening Skills Effective change agents are able to explore perspectives and take them into account when looking for solutions.
Explore Programs. Enroll Now Online Fill out the form below to get started and take the next step toward your educational goals. First Name:. Last Name:. Email Address:. Phone Number:. Company Name:. Program of Interest: Select a program of interest Let's Chat! Have questions about any of the programs offered?
0コメント