Tag Archives: Cognitive Coaching

Context is king in teacher growth: connecting with the Upper East Side

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It is not down in any map; true places never are.  ~ Herman Melville

school on the Upper East Side

school on the Upper East Side

Today I visited a school on the Upper East Side of NYC which is in many ways similar to my Australian school. While they have vertical campuses and we have horizontal ones, both schools have some similar structures, similar values, a focus on the whole child, similar expectations of teachers and a similar desire to build a context-appropriate model for teacher growth, collaboration and professional culture.

Like us, they have been grappling with how best to design a model which fits their school context and their teachers’ needs. Their challenges are similar to ours: finding a model which is school-appropriate, and time for managers and teachers to enact it in a meaningful way (rather than as a tokenistic ‘tick a box’ process to be gotten through).

In speaking with administrators and teachers, this school’s model for teacher growth has a similar goal to ours: to facilitate meaningful, evidence-enriched conversations around teaching practice which encourage teacher reflection, collaboration and growth. It is being piloted with middle managers this year and its components include:

  • A supervisory model in which the line manager is the observer who leads the pre- and post- observation professional conversations;
  • A set of school-customised descriptors which emerge from fitting the school’s expectations of their teachers within some elements of the Danielson Framework for Teaching;
  • The teacher receiving a score from the line manager based on how the line-manager rates the teacher against those school-customised descriptors, on a four point scale;
  • The teacher receiving clear specific feedback from the line manager about areas of strength and weakness; and
  • Use of Folio Collaborative to manage the lodging and monitoring of the process. One thing I particularly liked about Folio Collaborative was its ‘spotlight’ function in which staff are able to ‘shine a spotlight’ on a colleague’s practice by adding moments of celebration or excellence they have seen.
class windowscape

class windowscape

I can see the value of, as this school has, developing a customised series of descriptors of ‘what teaching looks like at this school.’ It allows staff to see clearly the alignment with the school’s core values, allows the school to own the language, and provides a more streamlined document than the hefty-feeling Framework for Teaching which can seem daunting. This streamlining may be seen to dilute the complexity of the Framework for Teaching and the precision of its rubrics which allow teachers to easily find a place to fit their lesson evidence, based on clear research-supported descriptors at each level of performance.

Where this school’s context is different to ours is in their history of performance review processes. While my school has a series of well-worn processes for recruitment, permanency/tenure and appraisal/review/evaluation, this school does not have existing processes and is looking to put them in place in a way which is beneficial to its teachers. They are looking to develop a feedback system which stems mainly from managers, while we are looking to move towards a less manager-driven and more teacher-driven model in which teachers are self-managing and self-directed in their growth, relying less on external influence to judge and grow their practice.

music corridor

music corridor

Our use of Cognitive Coaching is the cornerstone of our conversations, placing our emphasis heavily on the coach (that is, a peer-teacher for 2 years, and then a line manager in the 3rd year) as non-threatening facilitator of teacher thinking, rather than feedback-giver and scorer.

The one thing this visit certainly affirmed for me is that context is king. It is important for each school to work with its own mission, values, plan, teachers and managers to grapple with what the most context-appropriate design is for their particular situation.

Many of us seem to have the same goal. We each need to find the path that works best for us, our teachers and ultimately our students.

the world is our neighbourhood

the world is our neighbourhood

Ideas to anchor school change

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Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken. ~ Frank Herbert

NYC art journal page by @debsnet https://theeduflaneuse.wordpress.com/

One of my art journal pages: ‘Don’t quit your daydream’

I recently completed the Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar during which some of Garmston and Wellman’s foundational ideas really resonated with me in terms of school change (these are outlined in the course and in the source book The Adaptive School: A sourcebook for developing collaborative groups, 2nd ed., 2013).

1. Centrality of identity, beliefs and values

The Adaptive Schools book and course place emphasis on the importance of being conscious of teachers’ identities: their core beliefs, values and senses of self. These, rather than being set aside, are acknowledged and drawn upon in collaborative school practices. Graceful disagreement is seen as a path to developing group cohesiveness, empathy and shared identity. The teacher as person is honoured as an individual within the school, and a part of the school group.

2. The importance of talk

How we talk in schools, say Garmston and Wellman, influences our schools and our personal and collective experiences of them. Talk creates reality. This is why at my school we are using the Danielson Framework for Teaching (to provide a common language for talking about teaching) and Cognitive Coaching conversations (to provide a common way of encouraging teachers to think about their own teaching, in a way which allows the coach to facilitate the development of a teacher’s thinking, while at the same time getting out of the way of that thinking).

3. Tiny events create major disturbances

This is Garmston and Wellman’s third underlying principle of what they call ‘nonlinear dynamical’ systems, like schools. This principle affirms my experience of the unexpected, chaotic butterfly effects of incremental changes, which are sometimes unnoticeable or unmeasurable.

Teachers involved in our coaching cycle have commented that seeing another teacher’s lesson impacted their own practice in the following days; that reflecting on their teaching against the Danielson Framework brought foci and deliberate intent to their subsequent lessons; and that coaching conversations sometimes impacted their thinking long after the conversation had finished. Teacher coaches have noted that their Cognitive Coaching training has shaped the ways in which they communicate, not only with colleagues, but also with students and even with their own friends and families.

The Cognitive Coaching course has also impacted on my thinking around teacher growth and school change.

4. Holonomy

The notion of ‘holonomy’ is not from Adaptive Schools, but is from Costa and Garmston’s Cognitive Coaching (see Cognitive Coaching: A foundation for Renaissance schools, 2nd ed., 2006). It is the conceptualisation of the bringing together of individual (teacher) and organisation (school). The teacher is both influenced by and influencer of the school, involved in a continuously responsive relationship. The teachers as parts, and the school as whole system, work organically and symbiotically together.

For me, this notion of the interdependence between human individualism and organisational systems should be a key focus in school change initiatives. For my school, part of our approach has been designing a professional learning cycle based on the school’s strategic vision, and then having teachers pilot, drive and design the change. For us, the importance of honouring both organisation and teacher in a slow and deliberate process has been more important than fast change.

This coming week I will be at the Australian Council For Educational Leaders conference, sharing our story with other schools and departments who are working to develop the capacity of their teachers. And this time next month I will be in the middle of my visits to New York educators and researchers. I’m looking forward to having face to face conversations with those with whom I have connected via email and online, and seeing how they negotiate the tensions (and connections!) between teacher and school.

New York Is Always A Good Idea by @debsnet https://theeduflaneuse.wordpress.com/