​One of the culminating activities of our Coaching Practicum course is the creation of a one-page document to articulate central Coaching Belief Statements. In the past, this assignment has taken a traditional, text-based format. As we hoped for this document to serve an authentic purpose at participant sites, we wondered if a visual representation might better support these aims. Using a variety of different technology tools, our students created visually-appealing belief statement representations that pushed them to clearly and succinctly communicate their vision for coaching. But for every gain this format offered, we had to weigh corresponding losses.

Having wrapped up another successful semester of online coaching labs, I wanted to take a minute to reflect on an emerging pattern in my notes. As most of our participants are just beginning their work in student-centered coaching cycles, they are just testing out the process. And for many of them, the central goal of this work is to help guide the process by: (1) balancing talk time and control; (2) to allow teachers to drive decision-making; (3) based on evidence of student learning. Most often, the selected focus for coaching labs is using reflective dialogue, which inherently sets the focus on the types of questions coaches pose during goal setting, planning, and analyzing student evidence. 

What became clear, was that at this stage in developing coaching practice, many coaches are focused on guiding the process by using paraphrasing and clarifying questions organized around open-ended questions that give direction to the conversation. These prompts are akin to sentence-stems and similar to many of the ones we share with our participants:

• What are the learning targets connected to this standard?
• How will we know what students understand and can do?
• What will that evidence look or sound like?
• What criteria are you using to sort student work?
• How would you support that with students?
• Do you see any follow-up instruction needed?

For the most part, these are almost interchangeable across participants and cycles as they move through the process. However, questioning rarely went beyond this level. As I constructed ideas for potential next steps to move questioning forward, I found myself asking where are the probing questions? 

Yesterday as Steph and I were planning for our 'supervision through student-centered coaching' study, we found ourselves digging into the challenge of teaching academic language demands. Our goal was to generate a series of probing questions that would help students uncover the language function and associated demands relative to their lesson focus. While I thoroughly enjoyed Heineke & McTighe's Understanding by Design in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classroom, we found this resource to be far more useful for our own planning as opposed to our students' planning. To put it plainly--there's just too much 'going on' for the planning templates to be useful for our preservice teachers. In other words, it is beyond their zone of proximal development. So we needed to build some more reachable scaffolds that would help to push them along without overwhelming them from the start.