How to Talk to Teachers So They Hear You: Giving Better Feedback with Dr. Jo Lein, ep. 228

How to Talk to Teachers So They Hear You: Giving Better Feedback with Dr. Jo Lein, ep. 228, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran 00:00
Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked now, I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode.

Chrissy Beltran 00:28
Hey coach and welcome to episode 228, of instructional coaching with Miss B today, I am talking to my guest, Dr Joe Lein, about how to talk so teachers actually hear you. We want to provide better feedback to teachers and make sure that our messages are received and that they create response and reflection. This is a part of the better coaching conversations mini series that we’ve been working on for the last few weeks. Last week, we talked about breaking through resistance with difficult conversations. We’ve talked about how to track your coaching work in conversations. And today we’re thinking a little bit about feedback, how we can make our feedback sound like something teachers want to hear. Not that it’s always going to be roses, a bit of roses, but the reality is that people have to be ready to listen to you, what you have to say. We want to think a little bit about different coaching personas and how they receive feedback, and what the research says about feedback, because sometimes we’re basing things on our gut, but that’s not really what research tells us. So because of all those things, I’m excited to welcome my guest Doctor Jo Lein. She has been doing so much research on this, and I think she’s going to have a lot of great information to share. Of course, if you’re needing some support and working with a resistant teacher, you can head to buzzing with Miss me.com/resistant, and you will actually get a free mini course sent to your inbox that will walk you through how to support a teacher who is resistant to your feedback and not interested in working with you. That’s a free email course, and I think you’re going to love it, but let’s go ahead and welcome our guest. So let’s welcome Joe to the podcast. Welcome Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. And I know people would like to get to know you a little bit, so it’s a quick way to introduce yourself. If you could share about a few things, I think that’ll help us get to know you. Who do you help and how do you spend most of your time and energy at work.

Dr. Jo Lein 02:21
So I help school leaders, and also I help aspiring school leaders. So I lovingly call myself the queen of the pipeline, because my work involves supervising three different Emerging Leaders programs for my system. I’m in Tulsa public schools, and I also coach administrators in their first couple of years of being in their role, whether that’s principal or assistant principal. So I work with school leaders who work their tails off every day and deserve so much more than our systems give them

Chrissy Beltran 03:03
awesome. And then my next question is, I have sort of a passion project, I guess, this year that I’m sharing with people. I think we don’t have enough hobbies. I think that we spend all of our time thinking about work, and then we get absolutely nothing left over for ourselves. So what is a hobby that you love to do.

Dr. Jo Lein 03:21
I am an international Backgammon player. Oh, wow, which is an obscure hobby. I like to call it a sport. I mean, people get to travel for sports all the time, and it takes just as much training as any other sport. But I play backgammon, and I travel all over the world with my dad, and we play in tournaments, and it’s a great applied mathematics. It’s

Chrissy Beltran 03:47
great. That is so neat. I love that. What an exciting to do, and to be able to travel with your dad. That’s nice. Yeah, it’s really good. So I’m going to ask you today. We’re talking about the feedback we provide to teachers, how we can make it better, how we can make it to where we are providing teachers with something that they actually go? Maybe I should like listen to this and think about it a little bit and so it’s part of a mini theory that we’re doing about better coaching conversations. So what I would like to know to start is, what does reach research say about the feedback that we provide to teachers? Oh, gosh.

Dr. Jo Lein 04:19
Okay, so I in true Doctor fashion, I brought my sources good. That’s what I asked for. So, perfect. Yes. And, you know, it’s hard to distill it into, like a couple of Bite Size sound bites, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna say a couple of things. Feedback is your friend. I think we always, we always say that feedback is a gift, but it’s not just a gift in terms of improving someone’s performance. Which it does, it’s it, it improves performance at a 12 and a half percent or something, but it, but it also has a lot of other potential impacts that. I think people don’t often think about like, for example, the connection between feedback and engagement. So 80, 80% of employees who receive weekly feedback are considered fully engaged, which means that they’re more engaged at work because of the feedback that they received. And of course, there’s a connection between employee engagement and retention. So while I think some believe that feedback could drive people away, which is a common misconception, right? If I give them feedback, they’ll run it’s quite the opposite, that with with feedback, we get more engagement, more participation, more opportunities for career advancement and and just better future focus orientation. We get less stuck in the weeds around problems, and we move to solutions. It just orients us better towards improvement, which is ultimately what we need to do. Like, that’s literally the business we’re in, so we we need to do it

Chrissy Beltran 06:11
that’s interesting. And I wonder, just feedback at all, regardless of the quality or the type, 80% of, ah,

06:18
that’s, I think, an important point. Yeah. Like people suck at feedback. Like,

Chrissy Beltran 06:24
suck at it, yeah, and,

Dr. Jo Lein 06:27
and it’s not because they don’t want to, it’s just that they have to get over their own egos and how that feels to them. And of course, there are sometimes implications for relationships, and also thinking about crossing lines of difference and how things might land, and which is why people of color receive just less feedback in general, which of course, impacts their career advancement and their opportunities, because we’re afraid to give feedback. So we actually are are holding our staff back, and especially if we’re trying to develop a more diverse workforce that is representative of our students. It’s it to me, this is a civil obligation to improve our society, like to improve our systems, we have, we have to give feedback to make it, make it a more equitable and just system, yeah,

Chrissy Beltran 07:30
yeah. So what did that? What is better feedback sound like? What does it sound like if we’re doing it well?

Dr. Jo Lein 07:36
So it’s specific, really specific. And I mean as much as someone loves to hear good job, that doesn’t actually change the way we orient ourselves towards our work. It has to be really, really specific and timely in format matters a lot, both in terms of whether it’s face to face or written, but also sort of the structure in which we follow. Because I have been pushed on this recently. Actually, I have always, I always prescribed to the like quantitative is better because it takes your opinion out of it. It just allows you to get concrete in what the evidence is supporting. But actually evidence says that we need a combination. We also need to say, Hey, I’ve noticed this thing about you, that that is really strong and really important to your work. And yeah, like, numbers can tell a story, and that’s important for how, how we orient our feedback generally, because we don’t really care about personal preferences. Like, personal preferences actually need to be out of our feedback. Like, do not begin feedback with I love how you like, cut it out. No more of that. We say it was effective when, and then we can name exactly those moves, those preferences matter none when we have to consider the impact. Mm, hmm,

Chrissy Beltran 09:11
yeah. So then, in terms of like structure, what kind of format and structure, what you

Dr. Jo Lein 09:17
Yeah, I got, I got two. Okay, I got to, and I think, I think they’re important distinctions here, the difference between feedback and coaching. So the feedback structure that I generally prescribe to is something that I learned from CT three. This is not my idea. It is called AIC, a firm Impact Challenge, which is So an example might be today, I saw you cold call three students. As a result, you had, though you had 15% more hands up after you did that cold call, right? So you name the move, you name the impact. Impact that it had. And they say next time, try doing that cold call a little bit earlier in the lesson, so they feel on the hook, right? So you give them some sort of concrete challenge that will and it doesn’t need to be connected to your firm. It could be totally separate from it, based on the evidence that you collect, but a firm Impact Challenge. Does

Chrissy Beltran 10:22
the challenge work better if it’s a statement, or is it a question? Does the question work just as well? Like, what do you think would happen if you tried

Dr. Jo Lein 10:29
this? Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think it really depends on who you’re talking to, so I use a framework called situational leadership. Many coaches are quite familiar, skill whale matrix, right? So skill whale matrix. So for people who are new, asking a question, it just makes them feel stupid, like just if they just

Chrissy Beltran 10:55
Yeah, it’s yeah they don’t have. And

Dr. Jo Lein 10:59
people that are more experienced, who have the schema to pull from you can absolutely ask a question and get to the same outcome the question that that is always happens from there is how accountability works, right? If you ask a question and you weren’t clear about what you expect from someone, it is really hard to really close the loop accountability wise, but you can do that with really strong relationships, right? Like, there’s lots of ways to hold people accountable, besides just, I told you something, I expect you to do it right. Like that can show up with, like, Hey, I asked you about that. How’d that go? You know?

Chrissy Beltran 11:38
Yeah, I’m thinking about a teacher that is, like, especially efficacious, that we’ll look at something and think, Oh, yeah. Like, I remember once I asked a question. I said, What do you think would happen, or what, how? How do you feel about putting these in notebooks? What do you think would happen if you put this into their notebook and use it, you know, as a reference? And I remember I left that note on the teacher’s desk, and I was walking by, like, two hours later, and the teacher sitting there reading her get her note, and she shouts at me down the hallway. I never thought of doing that. That’s such a good idea. Why did I never think of that? And, and it was like, Oh, wow, you read my note like you were, you know, I just left you a little note with everything was, you know, like I did lots of affirming, like, you know, youth actually a very similar structure. And then I asked that question, and that was, like, the challenge, like, what? How could you use your notebook that would support this and and it was just such a funny, I don’t know, it really stuck with me, because some teachers are going to take those things and they’re going to say, Oh, I could do that. That’s true. Because we just, sometimes, some of us just need to think about something in a different way, yeah, but a lot of people, yeah, exactly. And a lot of lot of teachers, I have found don’t they need more than that, like you’re saying, especially our new teachers. But not only our new teachers, they need more specific, direct, you know, well, this would be a good opportunity to do this. Or, you know, I mean something like, really specific, instead of just like, well, what could happen? Or, you know, I feel like sometimes we rely on the questions, because it feels less pointed and it feels less like you’re being an aggressor. You know that I feel like we have this idea sometimes of the feedback that we provide, but then then it can be very easy to say, Well, I’m just not going to do that, and I don’t have no interest in I don’t care what would happen if I knocked out. Yeah, exactly right, right. So I think that’s a really good point, and I was curious about

Dr. Jo Lein 13:25
that. And we’re putting a lot of resources into into coaching structures, right? Like we spend a lot of money on coaching, yes, in systems, and I consistently question whether that investment is worth it. I’m a coach, right? And I consistently ask the question whether that investment is worth it and and I believe there are kind of a couple of reasons why coaching often fails. Is we are we do shy away from being really direct and clear with folks. And being, being a person that can hold people accountable through influence and not authority, right? And that is, that is possible to do, yeah, um, and come from, we

Chrissy Beltran 14:16
have no, like technical power. The any kind of power that we have is derived from relationship and influence and sort of implied, you know, like, this is the way that we work together. But then you have to believe that to start with and carry yourself in that way.

Dr. Jo Lein 14:30
And the the challenge also, is that if we think about performance management broadly, like, like, just kind of zoom way out generally, we follow a cycle. Reset expectations first, then we give feedback, and then we close to close loops with coaching, right? So, like we’re all going to do turn and talks, let’s do some PD on turn and talks, and then we go to classrooms, and you’re like, Hey, bro, don’t forget about. Turn attacks, right? And you remember that thing about turn attacks? That’s when you can write it in an AIC format, right? Yeah, hey, I noticed that you made an attempt. Here’s, you know, quick push on how you make turn and talks better. You should assign them each a role, or how to try sentence stems or whatever, like, refine, refine, refine, the already stated expectations. And then this is where coaching, I think, is really important, because coaching is different than feedback, because we are closing gaps, and we’re interrogating gaps, right? Like, what is the barrier for why this is not working for you? And then we practice the crap out of it, right? So, like, what makes coaching different is the practice?

Chrissy Beltran 15:41
Right? I love telling somebody something to do. You are helping them figure out how to do it and trying it out and trying it out. Yes, and I think that some coaching practices kind of look like I just visit all the classrooms and leave feedback, which, whenever I started coaching, that was sort of the model. The school didn’t have anything in place at all. So it was like, create. You’re making it up. Yeah? It was like building this pLein while I was flying it, right? So, like, I did do a lot of that at first, because it was, I was trying to figure out how to support a school that had no history of coaching whenever I had not had any training. It was one of those situations. They pluck a strong teacher out of the classroom and stick them in a coaching role without any support, yeah? So that that was, I mean, way back when that’s

16:25
on brand. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran 16:27
it happens all the time, right? Probably a lot of people listening right now have had that same experience, but it’s you whenever you’re just trying to figure out what to do. That’s whenever we rely on just stuff that we just think might work. And then that’s whenever we don’t have a strong program, but actually meet these of teachers in different ways. I think

Dr. Jo Lein 16:44
there’s one other misconception that’s really important here, because, you know, you can probably figure out from the way that I’m talking that I do not shy away from being direct, right about both the expectations in the school, about what we expect instructionally, that is literally our job as school leaders, is to reduce variability across classrooms, right? That is our job and and so I do not shy away from setting really clear instructional expectations. And I think there is a misunderstanding that when we are direct, that it it squashes people’s autonomy or squashes people’s like innovation and actually research says otherwise, that that feedback actually generates 20% more creative solutions, like we even In high fidelity, a high fidelity culture, right? A high fidelity culture, you could still provide feedback that that played back to feedback to that outcome, right? What if that’s a tier one curriculum that you’re executing? It actually makes people more adaptable to their learners, even in high fidelity cultures. So I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about being direct and it in it actually making it people feel bad. It actually is the opposite, right, like it, it makes people feel safe, because they know where you stand and what to do and and then we kind of wrestle around with, like, how does this make sense for you as a person and as a educator? You know, right? But here’s how to

Chrissy Beltran 18:29
do it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think that that is part of the issue, is that we feel like where people, people often feel like that they are. They’re kind of like watering things down or making things more palatable, but then the things become unclear. And whenever we have a lack of clarity, that’s whenever we have lots of issues. That’s whenever you have huge moral issues, in my experience, whenever there is not clarity from every level, like from admin and from coaches. And then you get into classrooms and you hear, I mean, all the little things people talk about of, oh, well, they they’re not, we’re not, I’m not going to do that. They’re making you do that. And why are they, you know, and whenever the expectation has been set for everybody, everybody knows what the expectation is. Mm, hmm, whenever it is different or unclear, or one person can go and say, I don’t really want to do that, and the principal says, that’s fine. You don’t have to, which happens a lot. It does, yeah, then I feel like

Dr. Jo Lein 19:23
that is one of coaches do it too. Like, coaches do it too. Like, I, I go, snitch on you, right? I said, I said that this week. Like, it’s, it’s easy to if you don’t align with the directives, right, to create a subversive learning culture, right? Like, especially as you as people are, have more and more access to educational research, and we have people in power making decisions that don’t always align to that research, right? Um, yeah, we create a lot of uh. I won’t tell you if you don’t tell right? Yeah, because we we have to do what’s right for our children first and foremost, and and sometimes our systems don’t aren’t caught up

Chrissy Beltran 20:15
absolutely to

Dr. Jo Lein 20:17
the expertise of educators who are in there with children every day, right? Like coaches are, are just there to support, like the experts are the teachers period, and need to be treated as such. Mm, hmm,

Chrissy Beltran 20:35
yeah, it is difficult when decisions are not being made at Campus levels as well. Whenever it’s people that are

Dr. Jo Lein 20:41
and I work for a system, like I am, the system

Chrissy Beltran 20:45
are humans. It’s just a collection of humans. So all the problems that humans have a school will have, like all the problems humans have any level of a system will have. So yeah, it can be very difficult. So you mentioned that you’re working on a book about seven different coaching personas. So if you could share a little bit about those different personas, I think that would be that would be really interesting

Dr. Jo Lein 21:04
for us to hear. Yeah, so coaching can look lots of different ways. I think we’ve already talked about that, right? And, you know, I’m a disciple of all of the coaching people, right? And from fabrics and Toya to Jim Knight to Elena Aguilar, and all the, all the things and, and I found myself in the field, um, having to do a lot of pivoting because, oh, this situation came up or, or, oh, like, I really need to talk about this and and, you know, when you’re really trained, it’s, it’s difficult to feel like you can pivot with people, and so, like, we end up prescribing to these, like, like, Okay, I didn’t check that box yet. So hold on, hold on, hold on, I want to talk about that, but hold on, I haven’t hit that box yet, right? And it it becomes robotic and inhuman and and if we are as coaches, are getting outcomes through influence, then we better be freaking good at influence, right? And and responding to people. And it hit me one day when one of my school leaders that I was working with recently had a like, pretty significant setback. She had worked her her career through the system, got into a school leader position and then got demoted. And I sat across from her, and I said, Who do you need me to be right now? And like, she kind of sat back in her chair, and she was like, I don’t know, but it was one of those moments where I was like, This is what coaching is. Like it. Coaching is is a totality of needs, like we are coaching humans. We are not coaching instruction only. That’s right, these are humans, and I recognize that a huge, huge gap in our system, is the way that we think we feel really disempowered by things that happen to us, like, you know, it just kind of washes over us like we’re supposed to accept the system right and, and don’t feel like we know how to navigate things well and, and that takes complex work. And so the personas were kind of born out of out of some of those experiences of of just needing to just be present for people, instead of driving towards outcomes all the time. And but we gotta drive with outcomes, like our kids can’t read, but like, how, how you do that, right? So, so I, so I’ve designed these seven personas. One persona kind of sits on its own, and that is the first responder, first responder that happens in states of emergency. Our goal is safety, but then we have the rest of them are divided into two different categories. Category One is the fixed category, which is like, kind of what you consider your traditional coaching, like, you identify a problem, you build some knowledge about that problem, and you build some skill about that problem, right? So that’s our consultant, our professor and our coach. Okay? Those are our fixed ones. I think we can all connect to that, identify with those, right? Have an idea of what those could be like, yeah, yeah. But then we got this relief side of the house. That’s how the the rest of them are kind of relief things. So, and I say that, like, what does the teacher need? Does the teacher need a fix? Or does a teacher need a. Relief. And I say teacher, it could be client, right for me, it’s school theaters, so yeah, thinking in the same so relief would be, you know, like a buddy, like, like, I just need you to, like, sit and joke with me for a second being a parent, like, I’m going to give you some tough love and tell you how it is and provide some wisdom. Or I can be a therapist and I can unpack some thinking patterns that are that might be holding you back, right?

Chrissy Beltran 25:30
So

Dr. Jo Lein 25:31
I This allows for coaches to have a lot more fluidity. But again, it leads to the question, like, how are we going to continue to drive towards outcomes? Like, we can’t just be in our feelings all the time, like,

Chrissy Beltran 25:50
being like, if we’re a buddy, you know, we I mean, it would be real easy just to be like, oh, you know. And buddy, buddy. And then that’s it. And then you didn’t let it go, right? And then, yeah, that necessarily.

Dr. Jo Lein 26:01
Like, we love those front office conversations that, like, you know, are cute and interesting, you know, but me talking about your coffee is not going to mean crap for children, right,

Chrissy Beltran 26:15
right, um, but they’re also a part of, like, interacting with a human with a

Dr. Jo Lein 26:20
human right who wants to feel connected and loved and supported as a whole human not just part of a part of a system that will eat them up and chew them out. And I mean, I’ve coached almost 300 novice educators like I’ve seen what our system does to them and and we’re handling a lot of stuff. We are like public schools are the symptom of a sick society, and that is hard to reckon with, especially if you are a person that believes that are that our public schools are designed for all children, right? Like that’s hard to reckon with. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. 90 some percent of my graduating class went to a four year university, wow, like, I I didn’t know, right? Like, I didn’t know, right,

Chrissy Beltran 27:31
what the issues with schools were,

Dr. Jo Lein 27:34
and then when they got in, I needed someone to help me. Like, I didn’t know. And I think a lot of educators who hear like the call to teach and God, thank God for all of them, every one of them who walks through our doors who says, Yeah, I’ll do it like we need to care with them, for them, just like we care for every student that walks through our doors because they’re dealing with a lot of stuff and trying to reckon with their personal identity in a system that makes no sense and that that takes support that coaches can provide, that often feels outside of instruction. Mm hmm, right?

Chrissy Beltran 28:24
But it’s just navigating, it’s dealing with the job and whatever, and it shows

Dr. Jo Lein 28:29
up. It shows up in instruction, right? Even some, something like the teacher that snaps at child, a child, right, right? That’s a manifest manifestation of a disempowered mindset. Mm hmm, it is not, it is not anything else, but that. And if we we have, we cannot judge our educators for those moments. We have to help them through those moments and and we have to believe in our people first, like that’s baseline. But anyways, those are, those are the seven personas and and I, and I believe that the book is meant to allow people to be nimble while still focusing on their outcomes and feel confident in those pivots. So

Chrissy Beltran 29:20
then if we have an understanding of these personas, then we’re kind of identifying, okay, in this moment, this is who I need to be for this person. And that gives us a guide on what kinds of things we are responding with, like what we are doing in that role, what we’re saying, what we’re listening for, I’m guessing. So then, how can we use an understanding of these different personas to help us provide feedback to teachers, like, like you said, sometimes, sometimes they’re in the in the place where they are saying, I need some help with this. I want to figure this out. Sometimes they’re saying, No, I just want to vent, which I am not. It just that, that I’m not that person who just complained. I if I’m complaining, I want a solution. So it’s been a real. Adjustment to me to understand that some people do sincerely just want to complain for no to get anywhere. I did not get any. I don’t know that’s a very strange thing.

Dr. Jo Lein 30:07
I know it’s confusing to me too. I’m like, and what’s the next step? Right? Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran 30:11
I know. So then are we just going to do this again tomorrow? Because nothing’s going to change.

Dr. Jo Lein 30:15
Guys, you can admire the problem if you want, but yeah, it confuses

Chrissy Beltran 30:19
me. But I know people like that. So then some do. So then what, how do, how does this help us respond in those situations? How do we help this, like you said, how do we get to the change and growth part and not just get stuck in the commiserating part? Yeah,

Dr. Jo Lein 30:35
well, one, I think it really does take careful planning on the coach’s part. Just like planning is necessary for traditional coaching conversation in which you’re practicing an action step, planning is also equally as important for planning relief conversations, meaning that you have to do the pre work of identifying what are the gaps? And I have a framework around this idea around empowered mindsets and disempowered mindsets, and how to spot them and and really how to get to the root cause. And there’s, there’s three kind of variables, and that’s how people think about their their identity, their skills and their value, value meaning like the superiority, inferiority, how they how they show up in that in that space, organizationally and and so it you have to do the pre work of Identifying, is the reason why this person is struggling or stuck or behaving in this way connected to one of those three things, and it that analysis allows you to be much more nimble in moments where they Say, Hey, I need this help with something. You can reinforce some of these patterns of thinking that ultimately change behavior over time. Now you you cannot expect to like, turn a light switch on in a single conversation, like you can’t. You cannot like, although it is possible. Like I was mindset coach when I was a beginning teacher and my roommate, I was complaining about my my sixth graders, and my roommate just said, Joe, they’re 11.

32:37
That was it. It’s all I needed. Yes, yeah, I like, you’re right, I’m getting eaten by 11 year olds,

Chrissy Beltran 32:44
correct? But there’s a lot of them. Okay, there’s a lot of them. And have you met them? No, I don’t think they are 11. Something’s up.

Dr. Jo Lein 32:55
But sometimes it’s like, we all get stuff in our teeth, like, I love a good everything bagel. Love a good everything bagel. You know how many pop seeds I get stuck in my teeth almost got to be like, Hey, listen, you’re thinking about this wrong. Mm, hmm, yeah. Give

Chrissy Beltran 33:08
a different perspective, yeah, yeah. Like,

Dr. Jo Lein 33:12
even, even, like, I’m a, I’m a trained coach. I know when I my brain starts to do weird things, right and and sometimes someone just has to say it to you, you know, yeah,

Chrissy Beltran 33:24
yeah. I think we get stuck in our bubble. I think that is very common. It’s normal. It’s very human. And I think we really get stuck in our bubble when we’re a teacher in the classroom, because you’re literally in a bubble with a bunch of kids all day, and you don’t hardly come out at all, and then you don’t see other people teach, and you don’t go to other classrooms unless schools have systems for that which they should, but many do not. You know, that’s the issue. I think that’s the biggest disservice we do for teachers. Is stick them in a room. Say, Good luck with that. We’ll tell you what you need to do, but we won’t really show you how to do it, and then, you know, we’ll let you know if you did it at the end of the year. Yeah, and they don’t communicate, they don’t collaborate, they don’t see other people teach. People don’t see them teach. We don’t see the thing in action. Such a weird way for somebody to learn how to do something, somebody who’s new at something, you just say, Okay, hopefully you learned it all in college. And I that is just such that’s just such a mistake, and that is why we keep having the same problems over and over again. We’re like, like, an octopus is super smart, but it can’t pass the learning on to another octopus, because, I mean, they can only do it like one generation. Like one generation, because they can’t write it down. So their grandchildren can’t learn from grandpa, right? Because they can’t write we can’t like we can help people see each other do these things, and we can share information, you know, from the teacher who’s been teaching in 30 years. We can, we have access to these things, but we don’t take advantage of them exactly

Dr. Jo Lein 34:41
this. I’m, I’m so glad you said this. Like, we we know the answer. Like, at this point, we have a science of reading. We have the data. We know what it’s going to take. Like, I. I don’t believe we’ve always, we’ve always had that, like, we haven’t even had the answer before Yeah. People just figure stuff out. We just, like, kind of guessed it stuff. And like, oh, let’s put some books in front of them. And like, yeah. And we had, we had communication research that was kind of like helping us click along in our understanding of what is it going to have all kids learn and and I think we’ve gotten to a place where we at least know the what we we have that part, but we what we’re missing is several underlying beliefs, right? Like one all of our children can learn, like, Let’s go baseline there, right? Not all people believe that, yeah, yeah. Like, can you believe that? Not all people believe in all kids. That’s very true and and so if we don’t tackle patterns of thinking, if we don’t interrogate how people’s identities are interacting with an organization like we, we are, we are letting those beliefs continue to fuel a system that was designed for only certain groups of children and and so belief has to be part of our discussion, and we do need to build technical skills, though we have, you know, in my system, 56% of our teachers are novice like we have to build technical skills, but if we don’t tackle beliefs and patterns of thinking, we’ll just continue to fuel a system that is not working.

Chrissy Beltran 36:42
So the feedback that you provide around belief, do you ever like thinking about, providing another perspective or another way of thinking about something? Do you ever in the moment go I, I don’t even know what to say if it’s, are you ever like stuck with because I know certain, certainly even just in friendship relationships, you know, but certainly coaching. You’re like, I know that this is not the way to be approaching this right now, but I do not have the words to tell you the thing. Like, I cannot figure out this one thing that you need to hear right now, yeah, which

Dr. Jo Lein 37:15
is why the pre planning is so important, right? Like, you it, which can feel weird, especially when we’re talking about guessing almost about ways that someone else is thinking, like it’s hard to synthesize evidence, which is why having an understanding of behavioral cues can help coaches To identify like, Oh, this is a mindset thing, like, so I have three different sort of profiles of behavior that help people identify, Okay, I gotta go mindset here. Like, I gotta go. I gotta go thinking patterns. And that’s over compensation, man. I’m an open overcompensator. Oh, I’m an overcompensator, but overcompensating so that could look like snapping at a kid. That could look like spending a lot of time on your football coaching, but not on your instruction. It could look like those really incredible bulletin boards, okay? With no lesson plans, right? Like, yeah, so overcompensation, there’s detaching, which is just like, they’re there, they’re going through the motions, but they’re not necessarily, like in it invested. And then there’s surrendering, so that could be like, you know, the teacher that straight out ignores the behavior, or the teacher that gave up on lesson plans four months ago and hoping that no one notices right those types of behaviors. And so when you see overcompensating, detaching or surrendering, that’s the cue ping to the coach. I got a mindset here, so because it’s easy to get into really technical work, only because that’s the most immediate thing, that’s the thing that’s right in front of us, that’s the thing that’s impacting kids right now, right? But we won’t change systems if we’re just technical problem, like technical problem after technical problem, yeah, will not change our system, right? If they have to get adaptive.

Chrissy Beltran 39:19
It was like a management issue, and we’re saying, try this, try that. But they have a fundamental belief that is creating the situations in their classroom, then we’re not addressing that fundamental belief by thing. Try this, try that,

Dr. Jo Lein 39:29
correct, correct. And actually, I’m glad you brought up that particular thing, because that’s often a big mistake that coaches make regarding modeling as well, that sometimes, if we step in as coaches to model instruction, we can actually be reinforcing really negative mindsets about kids. And so there’s, there’s, like, a little bit of nuance in when and how and in what context we would. Model, as opposed to co teaching, as opposed to live coaching, right? In cases of turnaround, I’m a trained turnaround coach. That’s the work that. That’s what got me into coaching, really, like, that was the the hook when the first time I turn around a classroom, oh, it was over for me. Like, this is, this is what I’m doing the rest of my life, like I have to coach the rest of my life, because there is nothing more exciting that when you can have a 2030, minute conversation with a teacher, and it absolutely changes things for 25 kids. Oh, it’s amazing. And I was like, I gotta keep chasing that. So I, I’ve been, I’ve been chasing that feeling for 15 years. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran 40:48
yeah, do. Can you share more about when you have found it effective to model when you affected? You know, when you choose the different kind of coaching strategy? Which one do you think is relevant in different situations? Yeah,

Dr. Jo Lein 41:02
two variables to consider here. Variable one is teacher, belief in self. So are is there confidence in the toilet? Is it or are they? Do they believe that they have the ability to actually like change things and teacher, belief in students? And those two variables, of course, I had to put it on a matrix, influence whether it’s like more hands on present, or whether you kind of take a step back and and empower the the teacher to take some risk with your support. I have found one of my favorites is, is to look, is to have teachers how to do their do their thing, hang in the back, adjust like, take kids out that might need to just like, be removed from that situation, to let the teacher, like, do some stuff with confidence, and then, you know, at times that are appropriate doing a little bit of like, whisper redirecting, like that. Stuff works magically, and you don’t have to have a ton of strong previous relationships to pull off stuff like that. Live coaching can be really awkward for folks, but it is actually way more effective than sitting down and doing a practice based conversation where it feels a little bit harder, like, I I’m a big proponent for life coaching, and some

Chrissy Beltran 42:35
people actually do prefer it. Yeah, some people upfront say, just, I want to know. Just tell me like I want to know right now what needs to change right this minute in the middle of my lesson, you know?

Dr. Jo Lein 42:45
And those are powerful debrief moments on the back end, right? If you say, Hey, I asked you to give a consequence to Jose and you didn’t like now we’ve got a place for us to have conversations about your beliefs, right? It’s, it’s a different source of evidence that allows you to expand on an action step and go to some thinking patterns as well. Yeah, that

Chrissy Beltran 43:13
makes sense. Um, alright. Well, thank you so much for everything that you shared today. How can people keep learning from you if they want to learn more? Yeah, so

Dr. Jo Lein 43:21
couple of places. I The edu coach by Dr Joe Lein. Sub stack is jolaine dot. Sub stack.com it’s spelled l, e, i n. I’m also on Instagram. Edu coach by Joe. I’m also on tickety talk. I guess I don’t know that’s new to me and pretty active on LinkedIn, because I have the privilege and honor to recruit for my school district. So I’m just going to, you know, always be recruiting. So listen, if anyone wants to be a school leader, come talk to me, because I got some places people I’m looking for, some people I’m looking for, I think we’re all looking for some people right to to come in, come and join the fight, right? Like, yeah, that’s

Chrissy Beltran 44:05
great, yeah. Nothing more disheartening than going through a round of interviews and being like, Well, yeah, I guess we have to, either we’re going out for more interviews or we’re not what’s happening, you know? Yeah? So that’s good. That’s pretty cool. Alright. Well, thank you so much for everything you shared today. I’m sure people are going to look you

44:24
up. All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate the time.

Chrissy Beltran 44:30
So I love learning from Dr Lein. I feel like she has, like, a bunch of information. She has so much research to support everything that she says. And I really enjoy her Instagram account, so you should probably check that out. There’s all kinds of really great little bites of information that could then lead you to dig into her sub stack and learn even more about what she’s written about. So next week, we’re going to continue our series on better conversations. We’re going to talk about reflective questioning for teachers to have reflective conversations. And I’m. Until then, Happy coaching. Now that you’ve got so much to think about, head over to buzzing with Miss b.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIBee and check out the podcast show notes. Happy coaching!