How Not to Be One More Thing, Ep. 81 Buzzing with Ms. B: The Coaching Podcast

How Not to Be One More Thing, Ep. 81 Instructional Coaching with Ms. B

Chrissy Beltran [00:00:03]:

You’re listening to Buzzing with Miss b, the coaching podcast, where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Krissy Beltran, an instructional coach, resource creator, and coffee enthusiast, and I’m your host. Stay tuned for practical tips and honest coaching talk that will help you coach with confidence.

Chrissy Beltran [00:00:27]:

Hey, coaches, and welcome to episode 81 of Buzzing with Ms. B, the coaching podcast. You are listening to your host, Krissy Beltran, and I am here today to talk about how not to consider yourself as one more thing on a teacher’s plate. So this is a really important idea, and what’s happened this whole past couple of years is we’ve had a lot of really difficult challenges in the education world, and in the, you know, the rest of the world as well, and sometimes we feel like teachers are so overwhelmed that it makes us reluctant to step into classrooms and do the work that we’re there to actually do. And it’s true, teachers are overwhelmed, especially as a result of the dramatic changes caused by COVID-nineteen. They have had responsibilities piled on top of them like never before, and the way that they’ve taught in the past is often not relevant, or it’s not meeting the needs of their students, or it’s just not even possible depending, you know, for the last several months, we’ve had to make big adjustments, in in the way that we delivered instruction. So there are a lot of things that teachers have had to figure out. And on top of that, if you’re new to your role as an instructional coach and teachers aren’t seeking you out, it can be really uncomfortable to figure out how to start getting into those classrooms. And, this is a big one, sometimes our administration isn’t super helpful in this department. So I’ve heard from coaches that their admin has said things like, Let’s just give them some time to get adjusted, or Just work with the teachers who approach you. But, you know, the problem with that is that doesn’t change teaching and learning on your campus. It really doesn’t have the impact that you want to have as an instructional coach. So I’m gonna share something now that is gonna change the way you approach your coaching work with teachers. And it’s a whole mindset shift. Okay? And that is the number one thing that you need to do is stop thinking of yourself as one more thing on a teacher’s plate, and instead see yourself as a problem solving support person. So what does that mean? That means that all those reasons that I shared in the beginning of this recording,

Chrissy Beltran [00:02:46]:

the fact that the way teachers have been teaching isn’t really working right now, in many cases, that they have to meet different needs with different resources and they’re overwhelmed and trying to figure all of it out, all of those are actually reasons to get into those classrooms and work with teachers. They’re not reasons to to hide and to step back and to be afraid of getting into rooms. They are reasons that you are needed. They need your perspective, they need your experience, they need your problem solving abilities, and many times teachers get stuck in their teaching bubble, and that is totally normal. It happens to all of us, and sometimes all we can see in our own bubbles are the obstacles and the reasons that we cannot possibly do things differently. But you can help them find another path because as the instructional coach, you will have the perspective of seeing classrooms across the school. You will have the perspective of working in an environment that is not restricted to one room like they are. You will have the benefit of the freedom to think beyond individual challenges because you can see the big picture, and sometimes that is exactly what teachers need in order to get a different perspective on their work and really solve some of the issues and the challenges they’re having or find a new approach or a new way of doing something that has not been successful to this point. So then how do we do it? How do we get really brave and decide that we are going to start coaching in these classrooms even whenever maybe it can seem like teachers have enough on their plates already? Well, first, I want you to reframe what you think your coaching work is. Coaching is not about fixing anyone or making them do things differently. Coaching is about supporting someone to grow as a teacher. That does not mean it’s going to take a lot of their time, and it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be really, really hard or stressful. It means that you’re going to move in this classroom, you’re going to see some areas that can grow, and the teacher’s gonna share these with you, hopefully, And then you are gonna provide support so that the teacher feels and has evidence to support the idea that

Chrissy Beltran [00:04:57]:

kids are learning in different and effective ways. And if you’re a classroom teacher who has been struggling to reach certain children or struggling to make change happen in certain ways, you’re probably gonna be really glad afterwards that you have found some solutions to those challenges. Getting started might be scary, but once you’re going and you’re seeing the result of the changes, you’re gonna feel like, okay, I can do this. I have learned something that has improved my teaching and made things easier or better or more effective or whatever it is that they need to get out of that interaction with you. So here are four different ways that you can actually be the instructional coach support right now without waiting. You don’t have to wait until everybody figures out their job in order to help people figure out their jobs. Right? So because our role is to support every teacher and help them grow, these are things that we can do that will help us move into that role and kind of embrace that role and, serve our teachers right now instead of waiting until things get easier, because guess what? I don’t think they’re ever gonna get easier. Teaching is always hard, and there’s always a reason not to get in there. Some years have more reasons than others, but there’s always a reason to be afraid. And instead of embracing the reasons to be afraid, why don’t we embrace the reasons that we are really positive support people? So the first thing I want you to do is something that was a challenge for me for a long time, and that is listen beyond the frustration and the anxiety that teachers are sharing with you when you talk to them. So this is really difficult because sometimes we are tied to initiatives at a campus level, and teachers have frustration or stress or anger in dealing with those initiatives, and it may be misplaced and it may be accurate, right? We know that teachers are asked to do way too many things, and so sometimes what they’re complaining about is totally legitimate. But whenever we are tied to those initiatives, it can be really easy to feel defensive. It can also be really easy to feel defensive about kids if you’re hearing a lot of negativity about students, and obviously we don’t want

Chrissy Beltran [00:07:10]:

that and we wanna change that kind of interaction, but we can’t change it until we understand it. Right? We have to show teachers that we are listening and that we are empathetic and that we understand that they are struggling and going through some problems right now. We have to kind of remove our feelings from those interactions whenever teachers are just really lit up and upset. Instead of responding with defensiveness and responding with justifications of why something is important for us to do, which is, you know, an easy way to respond for many of us, maybe our knee jerk reaction, we have to really hear what teachers are saying and really try to understand what is the root cause of this complaint or this issue that they’re having. Where are they coming from with this? And we can’t do that if we can’t listen with empathy. So I really encourage you as the first thing that you wanna embrace whenever you’re trying to make a change in the way that your coaching role is working and you’re trying to be brave and provide coaching support even whenever it might seem like nobody wants you to, the first thing I wanna ask you to do is really listen to where teachers are coming from so that you can understand what they really need from you. And I’ve I’ve said it many times, complaints are often cries for help. Right? Some things we cannot change. Things like what the state test looks like or how much time is in the school day or parents. We cannot change those things, but we can sometimes find systems to respond to them, or we can find tools that will support teachers in doing the work that they need to do. Just because we cannot change what they need to do, maybe we can change how they do it. And sometimes we can just help them learn more about something and try a different approach that is going to be more effective than whatever it was that they were doing before. So my first big tip to you is listen to understand, hear what is actually being said beneath the words, and try not to take that personally. Everything isn’t about you. It can feel like everything is about you, especially whenever you’re being attacked. Right? But a lot of those attacks

Chrissy Beltran [00:09:21]:

are frustration due to everything that’s going on in the teacher’s world, and a lot of that is out of your control. So we didn’t create the situation, so we don’t have to be defensive about it, for the most part. For the most part, we didn’t create it. So we need to try to avoid those reactions because they get in the way of our listening. The second thing I’m gonna suggest to you is to be the resource that they actually need right now, And what that looks like right now might be different than what it looks like in a normal year whenever we’re not responding, recovering hopefully, from this this national pandemic. We have to identify where teachers are struggling the most to make sure that our support is actually relevant. In episode 58, I talked to Erin Cottman about really using teacher feedback to guide your coaching work, and she gave us some really thoughtful strategies and tools that we can use to figure out what teachers need in the moment and how we can use that to kind of create some direction for our work. So that is a really good place to start, making sure that you are giving them small wins and helping them solve these issues that they have and focusing your work around questions and concerns that they have so that you will be valuable and worth their time to work with. If someone comes in and says, oh, I have this really great strategy for this this thing that you’re not even concerned about right now, it’s not even on your radar, teachers are less likely be to be excited to work with you. But if you come in and say, hey, I was reading in your your survey that you were having some struggles with, with grammar, that the kids were were struggling to internalize grammar skills and their and demonstrate them in their writing, what what if we took a look at a resource here that might be helpful to you or a different approach? That could be something that they would say yes to because you are responding to a specific need. So make sure that you are the resource that they need and not just the one that you think that they need or you think they should want. My third recommendation is to make

Chrissy Beltran [00:11:21]:

every meeting or interaction result in something useful. Now I know if you’ve been in education for any length of time, and if you’re a coach, I hope you have, you know that many meetings are a waste of time for different reasons. They’re a waste of time because we didn’t even get to the agenda that we set. They’re a waste of time because there was no agenda set in the first place. They’re a waste of time because they’re redundant. They’re a waste of time because they’re really just a series of announcements or notifications or reminders that didn’t need to take place during a whole conference period. As coaches, we don’t have control over every meeting on our campus, of course, but many times we have a hand in shaping what certain meetings look like or what certain PLCs look like. So I want you to think about every single PLC or meeting that you have with teachers. How can you make that useful, And how can you make sure that by the end of this meeting or the end of this PLC, they are walking away with something that they can implement right now? That means that whenever teachers are really overwhelmed is not the time to develop tons of theory. It’s more the time to grow specific practices that can be implemented quickly. You want to keep your meetings and your PLCs practical and keep them focused. Make sure everybody knows what the goal of that work together is going to be by creating an objective just like you would for students and letting them know what they’re going to accomplish and what they’re gonna walk away with. So, for example, if you are meeting with teachers and you are looking at guided reading data, Okay. Data is great, but then what? By the end of the meeting, you wanna make sure that teachers have looked at their own student data and sorted their students into guided reading groups and built their schedule. That is something they would have to do anyway, and you can knock it off of their list during that meeting. If you spend the whole time chatting about data and what it means and what it can mean for all the different there’s so much that we could talk about. Right? But we have to get down to the practical implementation,

Chrissy Beltran [00:13:26]:

And that is the way that teachers are going to say, this meeting was not a complete waste of my time because I walked away with something that I can use right now. So think about your next PLC and your next meeting, and think about how you can set that objective to have a really purposeful session and then to have the teachers walk away with a tool or a resource or something they are going to use that they are going to be glad that they have, that’s going to save them time in the future, and that’s going to help them do something they have to do in the classroom anyway. We also want to keep the turnaround short, so if it’s something that teachers can use six months from down the road, let’s maybe not work on it right now. Let’s work on something that teachers need next week because that’s where we are. Whenever we are really underwater, we’re trying to stay afloat, we are thinking short term because that is all we have the mental energy to do. So let’s make sure that all the tools that we give them are useful right now. My last recommendation is one of my favorite recommendations of all time because once I figured it out, it changed everything. This kind of relates to the first tip that I gave about listening beyond the frustration and anxiety and complaints and anger to hear what people are actually saying, and what you need to do as you’re listening to those things is you are listening for opportunities to turn complaints into goals. And I’ve talked about this several times, but I don’t think I can say it enough because it’s so important. When you’re turning complaints into goals, you listen for a complaint and you try to understand what the issue is behind it. And then you’re going to frame that in your head as something you can actually work on with the teacher to make a positive change in that classroom. So, for example, if the teacher says, my students do not follow directions. They’re always talking when I’m giving them directions, and then they don’t know what to do. They are just the worst. I’ve never had a class like this. You know how they how it goes. Once you just get started, sometimes it’s really hard

Chrissy Beltran [00:15:32]:

to get to get them to stop. So what I want you to do is listen to what they say and validate it somehow by responding to something that they’re saying and then flip it into a goal that you could potentially work on. So the example of the kids don’t follow directions, the kids don’t listen when she’s giving directions, You could say something along the lines of, yeah. It’s really frustrating whenever they don’t know what to do and you’ve just told them. Right? I bet that’s something that we could work on together. I think if we actually approached it as a challenge for us to figure out what classroom management routine might help kids be more responsive to directions and pay better attention to them, that we could figure out a solution to this. There are some whole brain teaching practices that might work really well for that. Do you wanna work together on that? Let’s set a date. How about Wednesday? And you just keep pushing forward until you have a date and a time set with that teacher to tackle that issue. That’s a management example, but it could also be something completely academic. So if the teacher is saying something along the lines of, My kids have no attention span for reading. Every day we start independent reading, and then it’s like within two minutes they’re poking each other and they’re giggling or they’re pretending to read, like they’re flipping pages and they’re, you know, sharpening pencils, things like that. They’re just not even reading. I don’t even think I’m gonna do independent reading anymore because it’s just a waste of time. And you know that independent reading is powerful and necessary and can be done well if the right circumstance and situation is set up for students and if the right management approach is taken with this with this strategy. Instead of saying, well, it sounds like you need to set up some behavior management, or it sounds like you need to set up some expectations, or it sounds like, which might be the instinct. Instead, we say, oh, yeah. That’s really frustrating. Whenever they don’t whenever they don’t take the time to read, you actually give them the time, and they don’t use it. Right? I bet that’s something we could work on together. What if we got together next week

Chrissy Beltran [00:17:34]:

and we created some some work around independent reading for you and me to figure out exactly what’s going on and what we can do to change the kids’ response to that reading time. So I’ll come by on Wednesday, and I’ll just kinda see what’s going on. And then from there, we can figure out what to do next. What do you think? And most of the time, we’re gonna take you up on that because it’s first of all, it’s really hard to say no whenever you’re excited. And second of all, it’s going to solve a problem they’re having in their classroom. Sometimes they’ll just say, yeah. Sure. Come on in because they wanna see what happens when you try and fail. I have known a few like that, so just don’t fail. Right? Just get in there, try something, and if it doesn’t work, you can try something else. We don’t have a timer on how long it takes us to be successful with these things. We try something. If it doesn’t work, we can try a different approach. We can learn something from that first approach and apply it in a different way, but either way, the point is we’re taking that complaint, we’re flipping it into a goal, and we’re using it to get into that classroom to provide the support that teachers need right now, and sometimes you’re not going to get teachers saying, I’d really like to work on this or I’d really like to learn more about this, because when we’re super overwhelmed, we’re just trying to keep track of all the stuff we already have going on, and when we’re getting burned out and frustrated, that sounds like a lot of complaints. So So we have to work with what we’ve got. Complaints are what you’ve got. This is a strategy that you can use to turn those complaints into goals, and it really does change the relationship you have with that teacher, and it also gives you an opportunity to get into that classroom and work on something that is super important to them. So that’s how not to be one more thing. Those are my four biggest tips. One, listen beyond the frustration and anxiety to really hear what teachers are saying. Two, be the resource that they need, and you can figure that out by surveys or

Chrissy Beltran [00:19:27]:

just conversations or any of the tools that we talked about with Aaron Common. Four or three I skipped a number. I’m excited. Three, make every meeting result in something useful and make sure people know what they’re walking away with. And four, turn those complaints into goals for your work together. Next week, we are going to be chatting about using rubrics to provide feedback to teachers with Gretchen Bridgers, and that’s gonna be episode 82. So definitely tune in for that episode next week. We’re gonna talk about some really big important ideas that might give you a good way of providing feedback to teachers if you’ve kinda struggled on, what do I say? What do I tell them? This is going to be a really tangible tool that you can use that’s going to help you provide feedback that is structured and purposeful and consistent. So definitely tune in for that episode next week. And until then, happy coaching.

Chrissy Beltran [00:20:22]:

Thank you for listening to Buzzing with Miss b, the coaching podcast. Want more coaching ideas? Check me out at buzzingwithmissb.com and on Instagram at buzzing with miss b. If you love the show, share it with a coach who would love it too, or leave me a review on iTunes. It’s free, and it helps others find this show. Happy coaching.