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.

All this time I have been doing it wrong. So wrong. Wasting so many hours typing feedback on lesson plans that is sometimes read and applied and other times never acknowledged. Last year, I decided to address this issue by foregoing written comments to hold writing conferences instead. I thought that if I could talk directly with my students about a limited number of questions/concerns in the form of a writing conference, perhaps it would better support their understandings and ability to use that feedback to actually revise their lessons. Overall, this was a great improvement on use of time and student outcomes. Yet, I still talked myself into circles when working with a few students. No matter how many subtle or explicit attempts I made to explain a high-priority issue that needed to be addressed...my students remained baffled.