The benefits of coaching are many and widely accepted. A good coaching relationship can accelerate the development of a new teacher, re-invigorate a mid-career educator, or push an experienced individual to new heights. Many times, people might be resistant to the idea of a coach, but let’s remember that the very highest performing athletes all pay handsomely for the very best coaches. Serena Williams would not be the best without her willingness to seek out and use coaching.

However, being a good coach is not something that just anyone can do. Coaching requires a special relationship and an ability to create trust. This requirement leaves out some of the people who very much want to coach — supervisors. It is extraordinarily difficult to coach from the supervisory chair. Being coached requires a willingness to try on some different thinking, making yourself vulnerable, and taking risks. …

If you have a leadership role in an organization, you probably spend a fair amount of your time discussing accountability — both in regards to those who are accountable to you and those to whom you are accountable. It is this notion of accountability that so many people dread. It is also the wrong kind of accountability.

If you want to increase the efficiency and efficacy of your organization, begin thinking about accountability differently. Accountability is less about who you are accountable to and more about what you are accountable for. …

Most educators know and understand the importance of feedback, but it is one of the most common areas that we see as a need when we visit schools. The general principle of feedback and why students need it in order to increase their speed of improvement is not really a point up for debate. However, most of what we see does not really qualify as feedback. In too many instances, we see generic statements like “Great job!” or “I really like your introduction” that do not do much to help students increase their chances of success.

For feedback to be useful it must be timely, concrete, easy to understand, an appropriate amount, and recurring. Planning out how and when you will give students feedback on their learning is a critical part of developing your unit plan. Develop a clear vision of when students will produce work or behaviors that will give you an opportunity to guide them with feedback. Be sure that your feedback statements are tied to specific language used in the rubric or scoring guide you provided them. It is also important to remember that people can only focus their learning on a limited number of things at one time, pick and choose what you will give feedback on — don’t overwhelm. Last, feedback should be a regularly occurring event to both enable students to make multiple corrections, or increasingly precise approximations, and to feel safe in receiving feedback on their work. …

We all have worries, especially during a global pandemic. What often gets forgotten is that we are in charge of this wasted emotion. We have to remember that worry will often paralyze us, or at the very least prevent us from fully experiencing the present that is so valuable. When you start to feel worry creep into your emotions and affect your ability to stay present, remember this perspective: worry does nothing for you. Stop and think about what you are worrying about for just a moment. Is it something that you can do anything about? If it is, then shift your gears and get busy doing it. If it is not something that you can affect, then let it go. …

Most curricula in the United States is racist. This might seem like a hyperbolic or shocking statement, but it is simply a description of the state of curriculum today. Most curriculum is not racist in the same way it was 80 years ago, with blatant derogatory words and gross mis-characterizations (although you can still find some, here and there). Today, the racism is more subtle and requires a closer examination.

We can examine curricula through a lens, looking for racism, and find a whole host of issues that we should be addressing. The problem rests with the notion that those who write curriculum often do not see the systematic exclusion of other voices. In fact, when confronted with a need to examine a curriculum with a critical race theory lens, they often respond with the startled response that their curriculum cannot be racist… “math is just math, it can’t be racist.” …

I know too many people in positions of leadership who believe that everyone should now be following them. In reality, leaders are much more effective if they think of leadership as something that exists between two or more people working toward a common goal, as opposed to something that one of them does. Of course, if leadership exists between people, that means that they will all need to exhibit both leadership and followership.

That’s right… being a good leader means also knowing how to exhibit good followership. Sharing leadership, power, and information all create better teams and better quality decisions. Sometimes, leaders have a hard time being a good follower because they fear that if they give up the reins, or don’t appear to be the expert in every situation, they will lose credibility. Trying to earn your credibility on the premise of being the expert in all situations is a fool’s errand. It will only be a matter of time before you are wrong enough that people will lose confidence. …

Leaders often surround themselves with yes-men. It may not be an intentional act, I’m actually fairly sure it is usually not intentional. However, we tend to gravitate toward people who are similar to ourselves. That means we hire people who are like us, including those that think similarly to us.

To have a great organization, one that can learn and adapt, you need different kinds of thinkers and an effective way to utilize those differences. It is unhelpful to have 9 people saying the same thing and equally unhelpful to have all voices with differing thoughts dismissed.

Establishing guidelines and living those guidelines can help different voices find the space they need to become louder and more helpful. First, systematize the inclusion of all voices. Do not allow people at the table to either dominate, nor stay silent. Second, Establish processes for managing opinions and decision making — keeping responses respectful and process transparent breeds trust. Third, delay decision making. Allow some time for people to explore a differing point of view, without conceding their own point. …

In most of my conversations with folks who were trying to help me become a teacher, and then a better teacher, I could put them into two camps: those that think students should not speak during class and those that the more student-talk going on, the better. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out which camp I felt more comfortable in. It was only after several years of teaching that I came to realize that neither camp was right, and both were guilty of oversimplifying and inappropriately applying learning principles.

Student talk is important. So is listening. Likewise, not all student talk serves a valuable instructional purpose. The planning it takes to ensure that students are engaged in Academically Productive Talk (APT) has been harder for me than planning for direct instruction. Academically Productive Talk is talk that is meaningful, respectful, and mutually beneficial to the speaker and listener. In other words, two students discussing something on-topic, but off base, or reinforcing misconceptions about the topic, is not academically productive. …