Collegiality

Collegial Coaching:

The colleague that agreed to be coached has led a very interesting life so far and brings unique diverse experiences to the school. During her undergraduate studies she was offered the opportunity to travel abroad to Spain and work in the classroom as an English Language Assistant. Here she received her first experiences in the classroom, both positive and negative. There were times where she was fulfilled by helping a student through a problem or watching as they discovered a sense of confidence through engaging in the work, but she also was put into a position where she felt uncomfortable. There were times where the teacher would do something that she didn't agree with or the teacher would ask her to do more than she was comfortable with, like settling classroom management disputes. Through all of her experiences she came to work for our school with a simple but positive teaching philosophy: “Students do well if they can”. Currently, her focus is on classroom management, her specific role is as a teacher in training. She is in the classroom everyday, but is not teaching the class everyday.When she is not teaching she is observing a mentor teacher. The dichotomy of her teaching style and the mentor teachers is where the classroom management becomes an issue. Her concern is that she does not hold the same authority as the mentor teacher does in the eyes of the students, therefore they are more unruly and less engaged. When she told me this I was surprise-from what I had casually observed before this interview was a teacher with confidence in her subject and a deep well of compassion and empathy for all her students. This initial judgement of her character as a teacher was even more evident when I observed her class specifically for those classroom management concerns.

The observation was the easy part of the coaching. I found our debriefs to be the most difficult. They were chunky, the conversations didn’t flow like I had intended, and, personally, I wrestled with the idea of what my role was. I am older than my colleague and have been at the school longer, so there were times where I felt like a mentor, prescribing solutions, and then times where I felt like an unhelpful colleagues talking about problems with no solutions-I couldn’t strike the right balance. Ideally, I would want to pull the solutions from her own thinking using Cathartic, Catalytic or Supporting style interventions (Heron, J. 2001). In the debrief I started to use that style, asking questions like, “How did you think that worked when you?”, or, “What made that difficult when …”. Unfortunately my colleague was not interested in that style and specifically told me, “Please just tell me what you think and what I can do next”. At this point I felt thrown off and unprepared, and I anticipated that we would have a conversation about the lesson where we identify some or one specific area for her to change to help improve her issue. This conflicted with my idea of what she needed, but I couldn’t ignore her directly asking for a specific style of coaching. We continued the conversation and I gave her direct feedback of things to do to change the outcome. I did inform her about my initial approach, however, and explained why I wanted to have a conversation where the information that was gained was pulled from her. Aguilar talks about a cognitive coaching model that “focuses on exploring and changing the way we think, in order to change the way we behave” (The Art of Coaching, pg.24, 2013). I thought that the coaching model would be what my coachee needed and that through our discussion her mental models of classroom management would change. However, like I said before, she is a very confident and capable teacher and I have no doubt that she can figure these issues out regardless of my coaching techniques. At the end of the debrief we settled on some changes to make: moving the tables in the classroom or using a different room to teach the lesson, so that she could remove the presence of the mentor teacher and be in a more neutral space. Both were my ideas, but she agreed to them. Reflecting on the experience I am happy that it didn't go as anticipated.I learned that I need to prepare more resources and not be afraid to push her thinking with my opinions. I need to be more comfortable with striking a balance between push and pull styles of intervention. For our next debrief I plan on having some resources to give, specifically books that I use to help develop my classroom management skills, as well as finding that balance in styles in our conversation. I plan to do this by giving my opinions in a way that leads to self discovery and identifying changes she wants to make.

This experience had me wrestling with my ideas of what it means to be a coach and helped to define my philosophy. Aguilar says that “Coaching is not consulting” and I agree. (The Art of Coaching, pg. 19, 2013) I believe that a coach is someone who is in a neutral position and doesn't need to teach their coachee, but instead guide them to self discovery. I also think a coach does not reserve their opinions, rather, they can use them to guide and weigh decisions. I think my coachee would have come up with more ideas for change if I were to have given more of my opinion on the issues she brought up. This would have been a better strategy for debriefing and idea generation because it would have allowed for my voice in her decision making. Ultimately, it let her have the final say in what she wanted to change. This experience has been tremendously helpful in informing how I will guide coworkers through the coaching process.