Embrace Inclusive Coaching by Shifting the Focus to Students

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? 

The expectation that 'coaching is for everyone, so everyone can benefit from coaching' draws on a growth mindset for adult learners. Yet, not all teachers are operating from a career-long learning stance. Furthermore, professional learning opportunities that position teachers in need of 'fixing' or latch on to trendy initiatives without integrated strategic planning inherently undermine the efforts of an inclusive coaching mission.

Teachers need to know that their experience, knowledge, and beliefs will be valued within coaching partnerships--that the purpose of those partnerships is not to remedy or replace their practices but to collaborate to refine and hone those practices as an element of professional growth that all professionals across professions should undertake. 

To that aim, focusing goal-setting on student evidence helps to position coaching collaborations in response to the immediate, authentic, and unique needs and interests of students in classrooms right now. By beginning with students, we avoid using instructional practices as silver bullets that can be applied devoid of context. Instead, we ask questions about these students in relation to state/district standards in order to set specific learning goals that coaching cycles can center on. 

This doesn't mean that instructional practices become irrelevant, rather they become strategies in support of student outcomes as opposed to representing the outcomes in and of themselves. In this way, teachers are more likely to embrace these partnerships in supporting their own questions about their own students, and coaches can use their wealth of content and instructional knowledge to guide the process of parsing learning targets, selecting appropriate learning experiences, designing meaningful assessments, and interpreting student evidence. And all of this comes in response to the teacher's wealth of knowledge and experience in their content, grade level, and relationships with their students.

But how do coaches take this approach when charged with implementing curricular initiatives, which is often the case when coaching is content-specific or lumped into other leadership titles (ie literacy coordinator). My colleague and I share some ideas in our contribution to this week's ASCD Express. ​