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Moving From
Teaching Students to
Coaching Teachers
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.
—George Washington Carver
(agricultural chemist, former slave)
In Frank Smith’s chapter called the “Myths of Writing” (1983), he discusses commonly held beliefs about writing and then exposes them as myths. Several are especially applicable to this book.
For example, he states that a commonly held belief is that “writing involves transferring thoughts from the mind to paper.” However, the reality is that “thoughts are created in the act of writing, which changes the writer and changes emerging text” (n.p.). This book exemplifies that reality. Its earliest origins sprang from a decade of work by coaches in a variety of school districts from rural to urban. Yet writing it changed both the writers and the emerging text.
This is a descriptive work that illuminates the coaching of a handful of colleagues as they interacted with hundreds of educators. Our goal was and still is to support teachers in improving classroom instruction and, in turn, improve student achievement. Even though my name appears on the title page, this book is a collective effort of several coaches who have used literacy strategies to support teachers across the content areas.
However, just as important is our goal of supporting teachers to find their writing voices—creating spaces where they will view themselves as writers, no matter what discipline they teach. We believe that writing is a powerful vehicle teachers can use to develop ways to customize their own learning in order to meet the needs of the students. Frank Smith (1983) also states that unless teachers write and are writers themselves, they will not teach students how to write.
How do we, as coaches, create spaces for teachers to release the writer within, risk writing in order to learn what they think, and reflect upon those thoughts in order to improve instruction? How do we give voice to teachers’ writings? Even more challenging, how do we encourage and support teachers who do not think like us and do not have a background in writing?
This book shares how we meet that challenge at the elementary and secondary levels. Included also are the writings of several teachers with whom we’ve worked. As you read these teachers’ writings, you enter their minds and classrooms and begin to understand how the power of coaching creates an environment of safety for their writing voices to emerge. The final chapter in the book describes the transformative power of a writer’s workshop. When teachers find their writing voices and become writers themselves, they model the act of writing for their students, embedding writing as an integral piece of classroom instruction.
In addition, each of the coaches described in this book is a writer immersed in a social consciousness of equity. We believe that each human being is a unique individual with a unique cultural lens who has the fundamental right to grow to his or her potential. We believe writing offers individuals a vehicle to reach that potential.
Smith (1983) also dispels the myth that “writing should be the same for everyone,” and he tells us that “each of us develops an idiosyncratic set of strategies we’re comfortable with for us” (n.p.). This book offers you myriad ways in which to reach the teachers you coach with an “idiosyncratic set of strategies” to match the individuals with whom you work.
Whether you are a beginning coach or one with several years of experience, you will find in this book suggestions and avenues for exploration, reflection, inspiration, and application.
THE CHAPTERS
Chapter 1 defines coaching, including questions to assess qualifications, readiness, and desire. Chapter 2 examines the “inner coaching” life and offers you tools to use as you coach. It also includes information we wish we would have known before we began coaching. Chapter 3 discusses how to coach teachers who don’t think like you and the qualities you need to develop in order to do that. Chapter 4 consists of several narratives by working literacy coaches that include concrete strategies for your work world. Chapter 5 gives you the time structures we used throughout a decade of coaching and ideas for how you can find time to coach. Chapter 6 offers you scenarios to test your coaching savvy. Chapter 7 presents a demonstration lesson and professional development workshop outlines. Chapter 8 outlines the coaching we did in a district to improve student achievement on state assessments. Chapter 9 describes a decade of coaching teams of teachers using a year-long professional development model that ends in teachers having their work published. Chapter 10 outlines how to support teachers as writers using an action research model. Chapter 11 gives you an outline for a writer’s workshop to use in your work. The appendices include multiple resources to support your coaching work, including frequently asked questions as well as classroom and workshop resources.
FOR THE TEACHER CONSIDERING COACHING OR FOR THE NEW COACH
Are you considering moving from teaching to coaching? Are you a beginning coach currently coaching staff in your building or district?
If these descriptions fit, read on.
Why coaching rather than teaching? Are you at a place in your career where perhaps you need the challenge coaching provides? Do you think knowing how to teach qualifies you to be a coach? If so, think again. Although coaching shares similarities with teaching, coaching is not the same as teaching. Coaching requires additional skills.
If you are a classroom teacher, you hold the power to create the learning environment. As a coach, we support the work of the teacher, but we can’t force change. With coaching, we need weapons. This book tells you about those weapons. It tells you how to arm yourself. It giv...
