Coaching teachers to coach

By Janet Sanders

I’m sitting in my home office in Orillia, Ontario, having just finished a coaching call with an educational administrator in a Caribbean island. Aruba, 10 miles north of the Venezuelan coast, is 19 miles long and 4 miles wide, and has between 90,000 and 120,000 residents. My coaching partner is part of an innovative post-graduate certificate programme run by the University of Aruba, administered by Dr Juliet Chiew. The programme, Educational Leadership for Collaboration, aims to strengthen the education capacity on the island. The participants are school administrators, principals and vice principals. The programme, which involved four seminars over a year, has been extended for the next four years.

The curriculum is based on capacity development in four areas:

• Institutional Development: Expanding systems thinking, strategic planning, effective action and continuous learning;
  
  
• Interpersonal Development: Strengthening participatory approaches, multi-actor partnership building, and coaching;
  
  
• Personal Development: Enhancing personal will, courage, imagination, initiative and energy;
  
  
• Cultural Development: Gaining an appreciation for the larger personal and cultural story.

Each participant has designed an Action Research Project (ARP) to be implemented over nine months. My coaching call was focused on an ARP for expanding the teaching styles of faculty.

In one sense, I am new to coaching. But in another, I’m not – I have been coaching students for the last 40 years. When we added coaching to our curriculum, I reviewed books that I had gathered over several years, planning to read them some day. I made several calls to colleagues who had identified their work as life coaching so that I could be on the receiving end of a coaching call. A key resource was the book Coaching with Spirit by Teri-E Belf. It includes a chapter by Carol Fleischman of New Orleans. In it, she explores her international coaching experience with the ICA with which she has been associated for 35 years.

Coaching has appeared in business literature but has been slow to come into schools. In our programme, we coach participants on both their self-selected ARPs and their assigned coaching roles in their schools. To enable the coaching skills, we help them develop the practices of listening, asking openended questions and tapping their inner wisdom. We have introduced them to using the ICA's ToP Focused Conversation method as one way of leading a coaching session. We also encourage them to do their own research to find other ways of coaching. It has been heartening to witness their progress on coaching their colleagues instead of resorting to the “let me help you fix this” approach or ignoring cries of help.

Participants apply coaching skills to fellow teachers, administrators and even family members. This happens in both formal and informal ways. Each participant does two coaching sessions as their field work and then does a write-up on their experience with the coaching dynamics.

We emphasize coaching as a tool for collaboration. The participants use it to work with the faculty on their issues such as depression, retirement or problems with parents of students.

By being intentional about coaching, they are able to stay on track with conversations, develop solutions and recognize their ownership of those solutions. In their preparation, the participants indicate the need to:

• Put themselves in the shoes of someone else;
  
  
• Know the cultural profile of the person they are about to coach, given the multi-cultural nature of the Dutch Caribbean;
  
  
• Recognize that the mode is always to build, not destroy;


• Balance the coaching role with knowing when to intervene and offer help;


• Accept others’ opinions;


• See coaching as a natural way to provide some time and attention for faculty;


• And recognize the power of silence, open-ended questions and listening

They have discovered how inspired they are by their faculty and coworkers. After we introduced coaching through our seminars in the middle of the school year, they recognized the need to begin the year with coaching. The approach is building an environment of trust, empowerment and collaboration. Participants recognize that instead of providing answers to concerns and issues they are tapping the creative inner power of their colleagues.

An example of the response from a participant:

What went well? She inspired me. It was wonderful to see how many insights one can get out of people when you let them come with their own solutions. I was able to motivate her and she has been taking more initiatives lately. By using a different approach I could relate to her potential. I trusted her and she felt that. I was able to support her selfdiscovery mode. I feel she was able to believe more in herself.

What would you change? I would begin using coaching sessions at the start of each school year instead of later on.

What insights have you gained about coaching? It is amazing to experience great results when great minds come together for a common purpose.

Janet Sanders is the founder of PEOPLEnergy and teaches Social Artistry™ programs internationally.