This post on taking a critical coaching stance is, simply put, on point. While it might be a stretch to say the author created critical coaching, as a number of scholars have been drawing on similar frameworks for some time (including some from our UW family...), I truly appreciate the clarity with which the author asserts the need to ground literacy coaching work in asset-oriented perspectives that seek to address issues of equity. 

I've been reflecting on this topic a lot lately since we began searching for literature to guide our SIG on Coaching for Equity. It has also become apparent in our current coaching study that equity is taking a backseat within our participant coaching beliefs, as it has been subsumed within the broader belief of focusing on student evidence. But a focus on student evidence does not in itself drive deeper into structural questions about equity or how they play out within classroom instruction. Even a more strategic focus on the use of culturally responsive practices or analyzing the ways in which assessments construct language demands that may or may not be relevant to learning goals could be easy inroads to engage more constructive and equity-oriented dialogue in coaching conversations.

All of this speaks to the larger point made by ILA in distinguishing between coaching to conform, coaching into practice, and coaching for transformation. How we support coaches to engage in this work is essential to the potential impact of coaching efforts, especially if we hope to see instructional coaching live up to the high expectations that have been placed upon this form of PD.

Inclusive coaching (Sweeney, 2016) begins with a cohesive vision for coaching that is shared and consistently communicated by administrators and coaching staff. Without a concerted effort to embrace the cultural shifts associated with a 'coaching is for everyone' mindset, the outcomes will likely fall flat. In other words, coaches cannot tackle inclusive coaching on their own. Nor can they hope to embrace this aim within individual coaching cycles alone. BUT. The goal-setting that takes place within those cycles is fundamental to making this shift. So what does this approach to goal-setting look like? 

​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? 

Literature on teacher PD continually emphasizes dimensions of adult learning theory to position educators as professionals driving their own learning. Collaborative coaching models that seek to build partnerships between coaches and teachers thrive on mutual ownership and expertise to guide the coaching process. At the same time, we spend a lot of time addressing coaching discourse: both what coaches say and how they say it. In analyzing language, we look closely at use of reflective dialogue and questioning strategies as often derived from Cognitive Coaching. Within our coaching program, we put these ideas to practice through a number of video analysis activities that focus on balance of talk time and noting and naming coaches moves through language. In these cases, we bring in the 7 Norms of Collaboration to identify examples of paraphrasing, asking clarifying and probing questions, putting ideas on the table, validating teacher expertise, etc. 
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Yet, underlying these instructional approaches is a focus on coach behavior as it contributes to the collaborative experience. I recently found myself wondering if spending so much time on coach contributions is inherently limiting our understanding of teacher contributions and undermining the partnership framing to begin with. 

It's been a whirlwind this week as our Practicum course moved from the first half of our time together, focused on PLCs, and into the second half, focused on Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The SIGs are a new approach to designing our course experience by providing more CHOICE and OWNERSHIP to our participants. Organized into 8 topical groups, participants have been engaging in relevant readings as they work to plan a facilitated discussion and create a coaching resource/tool for peers to utilize at their own sites. The tricky part about this process is remembering that it all takes place virtually-- the collaborative planning and the conversation itself. This would be tough enough for a group of my younger, millennial undergraduates. While experienced educators, many of our participants are embarking in the online learning milieu for the first time as they participate in our program. And here we are, asking them to design and lead their own virtual PD of sorts.

I'm really excited to engage in these conversations, explore the tools they create, and celebrate the success of pushing our work forward by taking on this risk. The next few weeks will present a number of challenges, no doubt, but I'm hoping that the final products will be a launching point to continue this work in the future.

Lately, I've been 'on the hunt' for observation tools to share with my Coaching Practicum participants. Teachers often request for coaches to do informal observations to help them collect data about the goings-on in their classroom spaces. Within our program, we position coaching observations as:

• taking a descriptive tone to avoid judgment
• informing instructional decision-making to avoid evaluative stances
• focused on student evidence rather than teacher practice

Teacher practice comes into play as coaches partner with teachers to analyze student evidence and determine next instructional steps. This approach avoids a deficit perspective of 'fixing' teachers by beginning with student needs, interests, and strengths to drive the design and responsiveness of instructional planning. 
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This article, Two Heads Are Better Than One from Teaching Tolerance, shares strategies for coaches to partner with teachers as anti-bias allies. The toolkit provides resources to help coaches observe for equity. Some of these tools align well to our student-centered observations, while others take more of a management lens by focusing on what teachers say and do. While these may be less relevant to our purposes, they do offer opportunities for cycles where a teacher-centered goal has been selected. I also like to think about how the process of collecting evidence can be slightly shifted to also encompass student evidence that will help teachers to discern the impact of their instructional choices 'in the moment' as they elicit, interpret, and respond to student evidence. In fact, this is the mindset I take into my student teaching observations where teacher evidence is still necessary for guiding our reflections. In those cases, the observational notes must still be situated alongside student evidence in order to keep students at the center of our analysis and keep our discussions in context.

As I'm currently teaching both ELA Methods and the Practicum in Student-Centered Coaching, I often find great resonance between the ideas being discussed by beginning teachers and experienced coaches. It's amazing to know we are all often much more 'on the same page' than we might think.

One of my coaches is currently embarking on a coaching cycle with a teacher who wants to design a menu of assessment options for his students to choose from in order to demonstrate their learning within a unit. They are currently working through the steps that we have been thinking about in ELA methods over the past two weeks--how to make sure that assessments are aligned to the standards, to compare the rigor and experience of students engaging in those assessments, and to determine how to scaffold to support needs.

They are working with this resource which might be helpful to consider. It connects Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge (another way to think about how activities ask students to engage with content in different ways). It also gives a nice list of examples for what different activities might look like depending on what level you are focusing on.