by Sara Gawura, Kristin Damberger, and Tom Ferrebee
For sustainable coaching to occur in classrooms, coaches learn to live in the middle. The middle is a space between the roles and responsibilities of a curriculum leader and those of a coach - one of extraordinary possibilities to design learning and study it in action through coaching cycles. As coaches, we naturally want to devote ourselves to student learning, pedagogical growth and trust building in classrooms through instructional partnership. Schools, however, often hire coaches to lead out as systems thinkers and change agents in support of ongoing curriculum challenges or ask them to make explicit that professional learning is solely about instructional improvement. Occupying the middle ground is inherently uneasy. Thriving in it is even harder. This article offers coaches and administrators suggestions for how best to navigate identity, examine school rhythms, uncover tensions and embrace processes to find joy coaching in the middle.
Navigating Identity
Our coaching team was careful in how it chose to title the role. Were we instructional or learning coaches? Curriculum designers or coordinators? As a team we built out on the foundations of Diane Sweeney’s Student-Centered Coaching model; it felt important that the job title focus on student learning despite the many opportunities our partnerships provide for instructional growth. The title of Learning Coach was meant to signal a belief that focusing first on student learning goals roots partnership safely in inquiry - encouraging risk-taking and vulnerability - instead of predicating coaching on whether a teacher is performing against a set of pedagogical expectations. Teacher trust can be more difficult to build in cultures of instructional accountability or in models where instructional moves take precedence over learning. Our identity seizes on what we believe to be the most enduring aspects of schooling: curiosity around where we are headed in learning and how that learning progresses towards a school vision. Clear identity binds coaches and teachers in partnership; the coaching cycle process is the glue. At our school, cycle sign-ups are often a mix of new participants and teachers whose trust in this style of professional learning has earned them the title of “frequent flyers.” Trust lives in the capacity to clearly articulate one’s role in a school, and we filter the myriad challenges of the school day through a shared belief that student-centeredness rests on having a vision, and ours is to connect, explore and act through partnerships with administrators and teachers; responsiveness across the school year; and refinement of systems and processes in in service of partners taking informed actions around their goals.
Professional Learning Pacing and Process
In addition to identity formation, coaching in the middle is the uncovering of tensions inherent in pacing and process. The rhythm of a school calendar has a direct impact on school culture and dictates when there is space for whole faculty professional learning, curriculum design within teams, and invitations for options within a coaching menu that at Nido includes - in addition to coaching cycles - learning walks, lesson studies and learning labs. Administrators and coaches must partner to “read the room” of pacing and how it influences school culture. Timing efforts to coach into or lead out on professional learning necessitates a standing meeting between coaches and administrators and a spirit of risk-taking that factors in the flow of adult learning experiences within a school calendar. Learning processes are another area for coaches and school leaders to name moments of tension. Administrators often have valid concerns around several scenarios in job-embedded professional learning. The first is one of resource allocation. How is this an effective use of our coach? the thinking goes when a coach and teacher enter into a multi-week, co-teaching partnership across a unit and that often involves at least one co-planned and taught lesson a week. The other relates to the opt-in nature of professional learning: Why can’t I demand that a teacher engage in this kind of learning? It is efficient and equitable to mandate that teachers co-teach alongside coaches around perceived areas of growth, but the cycle process is a purpose-built process for trust building in the study of learners around a teacher’s aspirations for a group of learners. It is the naming of tensions inherent in pacing and process purpose that provide an opportunity for coaches and leaders to find the kinds of adult learning experiences that allow school cultures to thrive.
We use a standing weekly meeting to design adult learning. Occasionally, the hardest conversations live in this weekly meeting. When questions such as What is the value of having coaches if they aren’t being employed to support struggling teachers or gaps in our instructional plan? If coaches aren’t working towards a fix, who will? These questions tend to arise when there is a lack of understanding of the coaching in the middle structure and the distortions that occur when the communication towards classroom professional learning becomes one of supervisory intervention. In these spaces, we have found that the middle ground can honor adult learners' desire for autonomy and the necessity of supervision. In providing a menu of support possibilities for teachers under supervisory attention, coaching remains one of many options from which a teacher might choose in addition to other possibilities in the broader ecosystem of adult learning offerings, and in framing mandated support in the space of curriculum design challenge, the coach can communicate clearly about which hat they are wearing into a conversation. Using coaches as a tool of supervision is to ignore the coaching role in relation to administration, and it is incumbent upon coach and administrator to engage in open dialogue within this space. The middle ground between administrator as supervisor and coach as supporter is an ongoing negotiated space with each new dilemma an opportunity to navigate challenges with the goal of role clarity.
Curriculum Design and Coaching
When coaching menu processes do not provide the kind of agility needed in partnership between the coach and leader, a curriculum design process often does. Ours mirrors the spirit of opt-in coaching menu inquiry into the question: What are we noticing in our learners? This process, unlike the coaching menu, is not opt-in. The all-in spirit of administrative leadership in this space is one of guaranteeing and viable curriculum. Still, our coaches try to build trust in these spaces by honoring the input of teams as to what they might prioritize around design work that where facilitated design processes might make the most sense. After seeking input, coaches and leaders come together to examine the demands of curriculum at the full-faculty and team levels to prioritize goals and time allocations. Sweeney (2019) suggests a time allocation for coaches of 60% opt-in learning and 40% spent in other areas of school need. We seek to use as much of that 40% remaining within a curriculum design process and have found that larger-scale “all-in” efforts like curriculum design can encourage individualized “opt-in” professional learning when those design processes result in curriculum construction or adjustments that teachers are excited to take into the classroom. As a result, our allocations are less focused on a specific time and more about finding a balance where design and learning opportunities within implementation are symbiotic in service of ongoing professional learning.
Closing Thoughts on Agility, Trust Building and Excitement
As coaches, we bring process to professional learning and curriculum design challenges. We see partnership with administrators as an ongoing negotiation with shared interests in honoring 1) teachers’ professional learning aspirations in classrooms and 2) the institution’s curricular goals. This middle ground needs ongoing conversation between administration and coaches around identity and process, so that coaching is most responsive to the ambitions of teachers and schools across a range of learning experiences in a school year. At its best, our teaching and learning program entrusts in its coaches the belief that different trends in education can travel from the bookshelf of theories ranging from direct instruction to those of inquiry and design in agile ways with various paths to expand our beliefs around how planners plan and learners learn best.
The opt-in coaching cycle is the best representation of what we want to see in classrooms within professional learning experiences, and we lean most on the work of Sweeney because it mirrors those aspirations around responsive teaching - an act of co-planning and co-teaching mimicry that frames a responsive culture of learning. Evidence of impact is always one of a single inquiry leading to action. What are we noticing in our learners? For us, coaching and curriculum design practice lives in a simple but powerful ritual of: setting clear learning targets, planning for engaging learning experiences, collecting evidence around how students met those targets, and determining next steps in instruction to produce evidence of learning around greater challenges. This simple metric is fraught with agility tests for the coach and leader to navigate in support of student and adult learning.
About the Authors
Sara Gawura has worked across diverse educational settings, from outdoor education in South America to Denver’s public schools—including dual-immersion, innovation, and Expeditionary Learning charter schools—and international schools where she has both taught and coached. Currently a learning coach at the International School Nido de Aguilas in Santiago, Chile, she fosters responsive, student-centered professional learning and co-designs pathways that celebrate both teacher aspirations and school-wide goals. (sagawura@nido.cl)
Tom Ferrebee has worked in six of Nido's ten-year history of its coaching program and has aspirations to grow cultures of opt-in professional learning among other schools in the region. His education background began in North Carolina public schools - teaching high school English courses - before joining the Peace Corps as an education volunteer. Following his service, he worked as a teacher and literacy coach at Colegio Nueva Granada before taking on his current role at International School Nido de Aguilas where he continues to advocate for the role of professional learning through classroom experiences with adult learners. (tferrebee@nido.cl)
Kristin Damberger is a former learning coach at International School Nido de Aguilas who is currently living in the United States. She served at Nido throughout the pandemic and into the reintegration of classroom learning, supporting professional learning and curriculum design. She has a background in project-based learning, having worked at Avenues The World School Sao Paulo, and she is currently celebrating the birth of her first child.