Many students know I put a big emphasis on teaching and leadership as professional practice, a concept I borrow from Richard Elmore, who stresses that education is a skill and craft closely akin to the work of medical professionals who apply a large body of (ever-changing) technical knowledge to make thousands of individualized judgments about treating individual patient needs. Thus, professionals like teachers and doctors must constantly be honing their craft.
You may also know that one of my key research interests focuses on using coaching models for helping principals improve their practice of instructional leadership. I'm currently conducting the second part of a multi-phase research agenda using theories of practice as the foundation for a principal coaching protocol.
Happily, a new article in the New Yorker links all these concepts together in a thoughtful and compelling way. In"Personal Best," writer and surgeon Atul Gawande describes how professional athletes and singers have long used coaches to improve their performance, even when they are at the top of their profession. Gawanda asks, why shouldn't other professionals, like doctors, use coaches as well?
In making his case, Gawande actually suggests that doctors could learn a bit from educators in this regard, and points to the work of Jim Knight, director of the Kansas Coaching Project at the University of Kansas. Knight, author of Instructional Coaching: A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction, trains teachers in a simple but powerful method of coaching designed to help teachers improve their practice.
For the New Yorker article, Gawande observed Knight and instructional coaches working to help a teacher improve her practice, and describes their collaborative problem-solving approach in vivid detail. Inspired by the example of these educators, Gawande decided to trying coaching for his own surgical practice, and found his complication rates improved long after he thought he'd plateaued professional. The author concludes that coaching should be considered by every professional, especially those who work in fields where technical knowledge must be applied to the unpredictable world of human problems:
The kind of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things: operating inside people's bodies, teaching eighth graders algebraic concepts that Euclid would have struggled with, building a highway through a mountain, constructing a wireless computer network across a state, running a factory, reducing a city's crime rate. In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require? With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury - you can guess what gets cuts first when school district budgets get slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.
Read Gawande's full article here. Listen to him discuss the same concepts on NPR's Talk of the Nation program here.
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