Why You Might Be Struggling with the Traditional Coaching Cycle, ep. 294

Why You Might Be Struggling with the Traditional Coaching Cycle, ep. 294, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy (00:00.706)

Hey coach, and welcome to Instructional Coaching with Miss B. Today we are digging into why you might be struggling with the traditional coaching cycle. Now, I usually do coach Tober in October, but we’re gonna get started a little bit early because I have some big news that I want to share with you. And I think it’s appropriate to to start a little bit earlier this year. Expand your coaching toolbox is going to be available for order in November, but it’s already available for pre-order right now. So if you want the link, you can check the show notes and you can grab it there.

If you are interested in learning how to work with teachers in a variety of ways and being responsive to teacher needs because what you’ve tried before has not worked, it’s the book for you, and I think you’re gonna love it. So, Coach Tember is underway, and we’re digging in with an episode all about why the traditional coaching cycle model might be a challenge for you and why you might not feel like you’re doing a great job implementing it. If you have started the school year with this beautiful

planner, right? It’s all color-coded and it was full of all the beautiful dates and you thought, I have all this white space and all this opportunity. But then you end up covering classes and making copies and cleaning up, you know, a mess that kids left in the cafeteria, or, you know, covering lunch duty every day instead of coaching science. If you’ve wondered, have I ever actually coached anybody this, how long has it been since I did a formal coaching cycle, then this episode is going to help you with that.

Most coaches are taught that coaching cycles are the way to make change in the classroom and they are impactful, right? But they’re taught that they follow a more rigid approach, right? They are supposed to be really lengthy, several weeks, and you’re supposed to do a certain number of them at the same time, and it’s like you’re a little routine where you’re just cranking teachers out, right? But then reality hits and you have emergency meetings and

Testing and a sudden visit from the superintendent where everything apparently becomes a dog and pony show. You have a behavior crisis, you have a substitute shortage, a data meeting, well, lots of them. And, you know, random requests from your admin. And I also hear from many coaches, well, how many coaching cycles can I do at the same time? I have 45 teachers. How can I get all of them through two cycles this year? Okay. That doesn’t feel realistic to me.

Chrissy (02:24.034)

So think about whenever you’re working with a teacher and you’re trying to schedule a post-conference and the teacher’s like, well, maybe how about I have three Fridays from now open? How does that sound? Right? It reminds me of those memes when moms are trying to schedule a night out and they’re like, How about December of 2028? I think I have a free Saturday evening. wait, never mind. We have a baseball game that day. Never mind. That’s happened to me so many times. This is the reality of coaching in a school. Everybody has got

a very full calendar and your time doesn’t look like it it it should to support a six week coaching cycle whereing you’re in the classroom three times a week. It just doesn’t work work that way. Also six weeks, who chose like who chose a certain number of weeks? I don’t understand that that is the definitive amount of time that’s gonna make a positive change in the classroom. All of our teachers are different, just like all of our kids are different. And so it’s more important to be responsive to our teachers and meet the needs of our teachers

Than it is to put them all through the same approach. Whenever I first started coaching, I went through all this. I felt like such a failure because apparently my job description was a person who doesn’t have a class of their own, right? Instead of focusing on coaching cycles and getting into classrooms, I was doing a lot of collaborative planning and looking at data. We were building common assessments and I was spending a lot of time in hallway interactions with teachers, some of whom were trying to avoid me, right?

I had so much optimism and then I was faced with the reality of such a busy, busy day that I didn’t feel like I was making the difference that I wanted to make. And if this is you, you’re not failing. Your model is just not complete and practical for the school you’re working in. Traditional coaching says coaching is the coaching cycle, and that’s it. If you’re not doing a coaching cycle, you’re not coaching teachers. But coaching is actually

Every interaction with a teacher is an opportunity to build teacher capacity. So it’s a different way to look at coaching, and I think that we need to embrace it. Coaching cycles feel challenging because nobody has enough time, not you or the teachers, right? It’s I’m still haunted by the memory of a teacher who wanted me to come observe her classroom for 90 minutes and tell her what she was doing wrong. She wanted me to come in there for 90 minutes, and we could never get it scheduled. Now I know.

Chrissy (04:48.066)

That was probably not the best way to handle that situation, trying to schedule a 90-minute observation, right? I needed to pull out a different tool from my toolbox and use it to support that teacher in a way that actually worked for us in the complicated schedule and chaos that is a school. Also, not all teachers are ready. Some teachers are like, come and observe my class for 90 minutes. And some people are like, if you call and come into my room, I’m calling my union. Okay. Hopefully that’s not literal, but in some cases it is.

Not everybody is ready for you to get into that room and willing for you to do that really high impact work in the classroom at that time. Another reason is just schools are messy. They don’t operate in perfect four-week increments that you can put on a rotation, right? Reality interrupts. And so we deal with, you know, in December, we’ve basically got eight days of school, right? In in August, we have teachers who are getting used to their kids and getting to know them. And what does that look like?

Different times look different and that’s okay. So we have to make sure that we are responding to the reality around us. So if you’re carrying a lot of guilt because you haven’t been able to do the coaching cycle as it’s been taught to you, please let the guilt go. It is not your fault. Coaches have to fight to do their jobs, right?

How many times have you been like, I actually have a visit with this teacher tomorrow that I’m supposed to be in their classroom and I really don’t want to cancel on them? And they’re like, Well, really, we really need you to cover this. And you’re like, this is my job, dude. I am trying to do my job and you are actively pulling me from my job. It’s so difficult. It it it just shows us that we don’t have a clear definition of what coaching is, what the value is, and how we get there. So if you feel like

Like if you have a similar experience to me, this teacher who had wanted me to get into that room and I couldn’t do it and I still feel guilt about it, even though I just told you to let go of the guilt, I still carry it. I want you to know that you are not alone. Everybody has this situation and it is a result of the system. So we have to respond to the system we’re in. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about how we can make this look different.

Chrissy (07:05.248)

Instead of trying to use the same approach with every teacher, we look at the teacher in front of us and we say, how can we further this relationship in this moment to work towards classroom work together? Some teachers, they don’t need the whole coaching cycle right now. They don’t even like you yet, and you have to start with relationship building.

Some teachers are ready to jump right in and you say, okay, I cannot commit to a 90-minute observation and neither can you. But what I can do is set you up to observe this teacher so you can see how things are working for them and then you can, I can help you apply it. We say, you know what, let’s take a look at your lesson planning. Maybe there’s just, you’re just putting too much in a day and it’s just not realistic. We need to make adjustments. We can say, I can co-teach a lesson for 30 minutes. What is the most important part of your lesson that you want to work on nailing down? And how can we take those findings and apply them to other parts of your day?

The relationship starts starts before the coaching cycle and it continues through the coaching cycle by being responsive to teachers’ needs. So there are three takeaways that I want you to walk away from this episode with today. Okay. The first shift is to stop asking, how many coaching cycles have I completed? They are important, but they are not the only way to serve your teachers. And instead, start asking, how many teachers did I help grow this week? And in what ways? What opportunities did I capitalize on?

to further the coaching relationship? Which classrooms have I gotten into that didn’t want me around before? Which classrooms have made a change because we planned it together or we looked at student work together and they are making adjustments to their teaching? All of those are coaching. All of those are valid ways to support teachers and they do impact the classroom to varying degrees. And if we don’t honor them, we feel like we are failing when we didn’t do three coaching cycles back to back for six weeks and then start another round in you know November. It’s not realistic.

Our second shift that I want you to make is you’re gonna build a toolbox and not just use one tool. No nobody who’s good at anything, no tech, you know, tech career, anybody who has any skill is gonna use the same tool for every single job. Your your cook is not gonna show up with a whisk and be like, if I can’t whisk it, I can’t do it, right? We have to figure out what do our teachers need. And if they need knowledge, we have to move back to that knowledge step and build the knowledge.

Chrissy (09:26.142)

If our teams need alignment, we have to be prepared to support the alignment through working with them on analyzing student work, planning together, looking at data, visiting each other’s classrooms. If we have a teacher who is ready to make change in the classroom, we have to be prepared to get in that classroom and teach alongside them and do some in-the-moment coaching and and and support them through video coaching. If we have teachers who are really resistant to our coaching charms, then maybe we need to take a step back and

Think about how we can use the small interactions we have to further our coaching relationship, build trust through building credibility and empathy, and get us into those classrooms to make the positive high impact change. Every teacher doesn’t need the same exact support and isn’t ready for the same support. So if we push in trying to do an observation in every room to start our game off, they’re not gonna want to play with us. We have got to start by building the relationship.

And include a knowledge and alignment building in the work we do with teachers through pulling from a different toolbox, a to a toolbox of differentiated strategies. Our third shift is we want to think about the coaching opportunities that we have that hide in everyday conversations. Sometimes we have interactions with teachers and we feel like, ugh, that was a bust. Somebody passes by us and they complain about, ugh, grades are due, and I have a huge stack of grading left, and I haven’t even touched it in three weeks. Well, maybe we can say, instead of saying,

my gosh, it’s the worst. I know what you mean. I used to hate grading. We could say, man, I I felt the same way about grading. I could not stand it. Maybe tomorrow I can come by and we can kind of figure out how we can support you in in making sure we stay on top of this. What we could set up, maybe there’s some adjustments we can make to our team, or what we can do to make sure that everybody is being prepared for this over time. Because if we’re waiting this long to grade, then we might not know when our kids need our help, right? Instead of making a joke.

Or passing the conversation by, we take that conversation and we forward it into future coaching work. So if somebody complains, somebody asks a question, somebody says, My kids just can’t do this, or somebody says, that will never work with my kids, those can feel like a threat to us, but we have to stop, have an always-be coaching mindset and change the way that we respond to it. Look at it as an open door. The door is opening to you so that you can provide support to that teacher.

Chrissy (11:53.122)

So this week, instead of trying to start another coaching cycle just randomly because you feel like change needs to happen in a classroom, instead say, what is a coaching opportunity I can say yes to today? What is an opportunity that I have and what does that teacher need from me? Where can we start instead of let’s jump right into a six-week coaching cycle, which honestly just stresses everybody out? Because coaching isn’t about using the perfect tool all the time.

That might not be the tool you need at the moment. It’s about choosing the right strategy for the teacher who is working with you, who is in front of you, who is complaining to you, who is showing you something she’s excited about. So if today’s episode, if these little tips resonated with you, you are gonna love expand your coaching toolbox. The entire book is built around one idea, which is that coaches need more than one strategy to respond to teacher needs. So inside the book, I shares I share 20 practical coaching strategies from quick relationship building conversations.

to knowledge and alignment building strategies to classroom skill building and how to leverage these strategies into future coaching work. So we are not just putting a period at the end of our conversation and letting go of that interaction with teachers. This way you can make to meet teachers where they are and make every interaction that you have with them count and move you forward in your coaching work. You can grab that at ASCD, I STE, or Amazon for pre-order and the link will be in the show notes.

Next week, we are going to talk about the real life of a coach. And I’m going to share some stories about how my coaching had to change and what adjustments I had to make because of my real life coaching at a real life school. So we will continue Coach Tober, Coach Tember by digging into very specific coaching work that we can do next week. And until then, happy coaching!