Teachers find instructional coaching valuable, but also don’t feel they get enough of it. Primarily, coaching is about building relationships with the teachers at your school. They need to see you as someone who they can turn to get the support they need without fear of judgement and someone who has their best interest at heart. They need to see you as someone who is both knowledgeable and humble, and who hears their needs, builds on their strengths, and enables their success. The nature of this relationship will look different between each teacher and each coach. For some teachers, your interaction with them will be a quick email where they ask “I need a tool to do X” and you reply with “try tool Y” and they figure it out and that’s it. For others, you may have to sit with them every step of the way, even co-teaching or modeling a lesson for them. And for a small group, you will have to make the first move - the power and knowledge gained through your relationships will tell you how. ITFs are also able to have critical conversations with teachers about their practice, and can create a feeling of support in times of trouble. This, by nature, has to be a relationship built on trust and mutual respect. Coaches also serve as connectors, connecting teachers with other teachers who are doing interesting things, or with resources that may be useful. When ITFs fail, they will typically fail because they struggle to build these relationships and their staff doesn’t view them as someone whom they can count on. Learning Forward has created a coaching self-assessment based on their Coaching Matters book. Effective coaches will be able to answer these questions honestly, even when they may not like the answer. In 2019, Learning Forward published an edition of their magazine exclusively focused on coaching.

Once you have done the hard work of building these relationships, you’re able to actually be a coach. ISTE has standards for the work that effective technology coaches do. Texas also has a very comprehensive guide for instructional coaches. Some of this work is also based off of the work of Costa & Garmoston (2002) focusing on Cognitive Coaching.

Part of being a good coach is understanding how you work with others. Many teams I’ve worked with have completed the Myers-Briggs assessment as well as the True Colors assessment. Both of these tools offer insight into personality, how best to work with others of different personality types, and where you can be most effective as a coach. Completing this as a staff in a school can also be useful in forging new connections and helping team members understand the perspectives of themselves and others. It’s also important to remember that the coaching relationship is a reciprocal one - approaching any teaching situation from with a deficit mindset is ultimately damaging to the relationship. Approaching coaching as a relationship where both parties stand to learn and draw on each others strengths can improve both a teacher’s skills and your own.

Professional Learning Communities

Coaches should be deeply embedded in professional learning communities within a school. This may mean attending grade-level or subject area PLCs to act as a thought partner with the group, proactively sharing resources, or helping the group look at problems with a different lens. The coach’s job is to support the PLC, and in some cases to help organize and wrangle the PLC, but effective coaches can’t lead the PLC or have an evaluative role in the PLC (or in teacher performance in general). Again, this will look different with every PLC. As a math teacher, I had a lot more ideas about how to present content differently with technology and could be a bit more proactive than in my English PLC, where I had limited content expertise.

Effective PLCs with a culture of collaboration and shared vision are rare, many PLCs in many schools function more as a compliance activity or a place to review test data. However, a professional learning community with a shared mission and vision can be highly effective for improving teacher practice. The State of New York has assembled a good PLC quality rubric based on the work of Rick DuFour (skim this book, Unity ID required). While many schools have organized PLCs around grade-levels or subject areas, ITFs and curriculum coaches may also organize PLCs around a topic area such as a pedagogy or initiative (i.e. a PBL PLC or a 1:1 PLC).