Impact Coaching

Scaling Instructional Leadership

Julie R. Smith, Raymond L. Smith

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506361826
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506361802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Invest in building talent. The best principals don't just happen. 

When new principals are handed the keys and left to make decisions about their schools without adequate, sustained support, what happens? Too often, school improvement efforts don't gain full traction, principals often give up and leave and real student gains remain out-of-reach.

Impact Coaching bucks the notion of leaving principals to learn the ropes on their own. This book offers a solid, sustainable, and laser-sharp focus on instructional leadership and helps leaders hone, model and lead new learning through deliberate practice by:

Engaging in rich, rigorous, and reflective open-to-learning conversations with both coaches and colleagues to improve instructional leadership practices

Leveraging their 5 Big Winner Practices for highest impact

Using Linking Walk templates to apply new ideas to real scenarios that improve lead learner practices

This book could be your single most impactful investment toward eventual student achievement. 

"The authors do a great job of sharing the benefits of coaching and elaborating on how the coaching partnership should and could look. The book is very relevant, clearly based on research, and has some great checklists to further clarify the recommended steps."
–Kathy Rhodes, Principal
Hinton Elementary, Hinton, IA

"Impact Coaching provides school leaders with the tools to turn opportunity into action. Educational leaders possess an incredible capacity to influence the system and impact student learning. Ray and Julie Smith present strategies for focusing on leadership practices that maximize impact on student learning and achievement. This book will re-ignite your commitment to creating effective change, bolster your confidence to persist through challenges, and renew your motivation to reach your fullest potential. The authors will simultaneously inspire your soul and challenge your mind!"
–Russell J. Quaglia, President/Founder
Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations

Chapter 1 Why Do School Leaders Need Coaching?

There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable—and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable. We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.

—Atul Gawande, Personal Best (2011)

This chapter addresses the question “Why Do School Leaders Need Coaching?” We could provide exhaustive testimonials from our own public education experiences about the power of coaching and the difference it has made in the leadership capacity of educators. However, as an introduction to coaching, we think it might be more illustrative to draw from our experiences outside of education. Along with our friends, coaches Sean and Chenin Charlton, we have a passion for wine and music. Coaching examples from these two fields can go far to illustrate the power and impact of coaching in the lives of all professionals and in all meaningful pursuits.

We recently watched an episode of the reality talent show The Voice. As many of you may already know, The Voice is an American reality television singing competition. The purpose of the series is to find new singing talent (solo or duets) in a contest of aspiring singers, age fifteen or over, drawn from public auditions. Television viewers voting by telephone, Internet, text message, and iTunes Store purchases of the audio-recorded artists’ vocal performances determine the winner of any particular series. The series employs a panel of four coaches who critique the artists’ performances and guide their respective teams of selected artists through the remainder of the season. They also compete to ensure that one of their acts wins the competition, thus making her or him the winning coach.

In conversation with Sean Carlton, he mused that

there are two aspects of The Voice that I find compelling regarding coaching. First, the coaches are each masters in the art of music, and someone who is a master musician must also be a master of harmony. In each of the twelve scales of music, there are specific combinations of eight notes, all of which are in varying degrees of harmony with one another. Inclusion of any of the other four notes introduces dissonance, or disharmony. One of the qualities of a good coach then is someone who can help you orient your growth around harmony rather than dissonance. Second, all of the feedback the coaches give is positive. Sure, they point out flaws and errors, but the vast majority of the coaching is 100 percent “grade A” inspiration.

This analogy perfectly parallels winemaking. As winemakers, we aim to be masters of grape harmony, or a balance of flavors. That is, all of the different elements to winemaking focus on this idea of harmony. For example, grape ripeness has to balance flavor ripeness. And we have make sure all the base elements are in harmony with the grape itself. A pinot noir is going to need a different balance between flavor, tannin, acid, and oak than cabernet sauvignon would need, but each has to be in harmony with itself. It is the relativity of these elements that is important. (Sean Carlton, winemaker, personal correspondence, March 19, 2017)

The takeaway here is that coaching, whether it’s for wine or for music, involves parallel coaching processes. Each of the contestants on The Voice is assigned a coach because there is an understanding within the vocal music industry, as within the wine industry, that for artists to produce their best performances and help their coaches win the contest, each of the artists needs a personal guide observing their performances and activating the path to improvement. As accomplished as the musical artists are, few, if any, of them would be able to produce their best performance on their own. The coaches provided these vocalists critical outside ears and eyes to help them make needed refinements to their performances.

“Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance,” observed Atul Gawande (2011) in his fascinating New Yorker article. Skillful coaching is the epicenter for high-performance teams and athletes worldwide. Similarly, skillful coaching is the heart of peak leadership performance, whether it is surgical, musical, relational, or instructional performance (Bickman, Goldring, De Andrade, Breda, & Goff, 2012). The next section of this chapter will address the question “If we know that there are specific practices, which, when learned and executed well, elevate human performance, why has traditional professional development failed our principals?” (Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, Meyerson, Orr, & Cohen, 2007).

The Dubious Quality of Traditional Professional Development

Regardless of which side the political aisle you find yourself on, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, followed by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) legislation, has riveted the nation’s attention to the way teachers teach, leaders lead, and the impact teachers and leaders are having on student learning. The need for professional development to focus on instruction emanates from the critical research finding that the quality of instruction is a key determinant of the variation in student achievement (Hattie, 2015b). In order to support teacher effectiveness and reduce the variability among teachers and the effect that they have on student learning, school leaders need to acquire and develop capacity in understanding and improving instructional expertise. However, the professional development that many school leaders get is of dubious quality, long on seat time, and short on transfer of training (Darling-Hammond et al., 2007; Prothero, 2015; Rowland, 2017).

There are many reasons why traditional professional development for principals has failed to meet school leaders’ leadership development needs. A few of the more frequent explanations for this failure include such things as traditional professional development offerings

1. Are inconsistent with our best understanding of how learning occurs
2. Are a one-size-fits-all experience that lacks customization
3. Are squeezed into the first few years of a principal’s tenure but are not ongoing
4. Are not job embedded
5. Are not focused on principals applying new knowledge and skills to real-world leadership problems
6. Are reinforcing isolation and don’t promote networking opportunities
7. Regardless of the quality of the professional development, sitting principals suggest that the demands of the job limit the time she could devote to her own professional development

These failures in professional development, however, can and must be overcome. School leaders require professional development (new learning) that employs four key principles for optimizing learning. These four professional development qualities align nicely with the professional development standards set forth by Learning Forward (2017). First, the professional development (PD) must be learner centered. Rather than simply expecting school leaders to attend prearranged, one-size-fit-all workshops, we need to be asking school leaders where they need help and then specifically structuring learning to meet those needs. Next, the PD should be knowledge centered. School leaders must be introduced to high-impact instructional leadership practices at the same time they are afforded the opportunity to understand why, when, where, and how the practice might be valuable to them. More important is the need for school leaders to integrate these high-impact practices with the district’s school leader evaluation process. Then the PD should be assessment centered. In order for school leaders to change their practices, they need opportunities to try things out in their schools and then receive feedback. Lastly, school leaders’ PD should be community centered. School leaders must be provided the opportunity for continued support, coaching, networking, and follow-up as they work to incorporate new ideas into their leadership practices. In Rachel Hazel’s view,

Traditional [professional development] lacks the ongoing relationship and follow-up. Even with the best of intentions, it is impossible to present to a group of forty or more people . . . [and] follow up with them to ensure that they have implemented what was taught. I love that coaching allows me the opportunity to discuss with my coach when something doesn’t work and try it a different way. I view [professional development] as two-dimensional. You gain ideas and can ask questions while you are engaged in the lesson, but the opportunity to talk through success and failure is not there. Coaching is three-dimensional. You have the opportunity to try ideas, discuss the impact, and follow up. (personal communication, September 24, 2015)

Schools must have high-impact instructional leaders.

Characteristics of High-Impact Instructional Leaders

• Make frequent formal and informal classroom observations
• Provide effective feedback
• (Together with teachers) Interpret and use the results of test scores to inform next steps
• Stipulate that teachers are proficiently collaborating in planning and evaluating the instructional program both vertically and horizontally
• Insist that teachers expect a minimum of a year’s worth of learning for a year’s worth of teaching
• Establish that the staffroom and classroom atmosphere is conducive to learning for all

To achieve these rigorous expectations, school leaders need to learn continuously and effectively implement high-impact instructional leadership practices. As our friends and colleagues Jane Ellison and Carolee Hayes (2013) write in their book Effective School Leadership: Developing Principals Through Cognitive Coaching, “When principals are coached, the likelihood that new practices will be sustained and institutionalized is increased to statistically significant levels. Given the rate of change and learning in today’s educational systems, we must provide structures for assisting principals in becoming more effective and efficient in learning the changing skills required by their profession” (p. 70). Impact coaching for instructional leadership represents one efficient method to help school leaders learn better, more impactful ways to lead teachers and students, thereby improving learning for all and increasing student achievement (Bickman et al., 2012).

Common Forms of Coaching

As long as humans have lived on this planet, coaching has been a fundamental element to the advancement of the human race. From our earliest days, the older or more skilled among us taught the young how to hunt, protect ourselves and our families, cook, paint pictures on cave walls, and be useful and effective members of our tribes and communities. The contemporary practice of coaching involves helping others to improve, develop, learn new skills, find personal success, achieve aims, and manage life change and personal and professional challenges. Coaching, in all manner of professional (and personal) endeavors, is a useful practice to enhance the performance of leaders and the productivity of organizations. What follows is a brief description of various coaching models so that we can make clear what characteristics we borrowed from previous coaching models and which characteristics are unique to impact coaching.

Executive Coaching

The most comprehensive literature on coaching comes from the business world, where executive coaching has become a booming industry. Workplace or executive coaching is essentially a one-to-one learning and development intervention that uses a collaborative, reflective, goal-focused relationship to achieve professional outcomes that are valued by the coachee. Robert Hargrove (2003), in his book Masterful Coaching, describes the process as “expanding people’s capacity to create an extraordinary future” (p. 2) for themselves and their organizations.

The Core Features of Executive Coaching

• Formation and maintenance of a helping relationship between the coach and coachee
• A formally defined coaching agreement or contract, setting personal development objectives
• The fulfillment of this agreement (i.e., achievement of the objectives) through a development process focusing on interpersonal and intrapersonal issues
• Striving for growth of the coachee by providing the tools, skills, and opportunities he needs to develop himself and become more effective

Source: Smither (2011).

Leadership Performance Coaching

Our colleague Elle Allison (2011), like so many of us, was drawn to coaching because of the impact that coaching had on her personally. Elle described the process of being coached as “[providing] an essential support system [for] . . . leaders who want to accomplish great things . . . [because they] should not have ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Chapter 1 Why Do School Leaders Need Coaching?
• Chapter 2 Leveraging Your Five Big-Winner Leadership Practices
• Chapter 3 What does Impact Coaching Look Like?
• Chapter 4 Partnership Principles And Theories Of Practice
• Chapter 5 Impact Partner Communication
• Chapter 6 Engaging School Leaders and Starting The Journey
• Chapter 7 Modeling, Observing, and Collaboratively Exploring Data
• Chapter 8 The End Of Impact Coaching: Scaling Instructional Leadership
• Appendices Impact Coaching Tools You Can Use
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• Publisher Note