School Leader

AERA reflections, Part III: Coaching and theories of practice

A consistent theme of my AERA 2012 experience was the challenge of building educator dispositions that can enhance teacher and leadership effectiveness.  These dispositions, like the ability to communicate, build positive relationships and collaborative processes, and reflect deeply on one's experience, have not traditionally been the focus of educator preparation programs and seem, at least on the surface, exceedingly difficult to teach.

In my first set of reflections, I suggested that such dispositions can only be fostered with structures of practice that encourage a deep level of self-awareness and self-reflection, and offered the Enneagram personality typing system, which Tom Stewart and I have often utilized in leadership development workshops, as an example.  Then on Saturday I heard Geoff Soloway share his research and experiences on using mindfulness practices for a similar purpose with pre-service teachers.

Yesterday I wrapped up my AERA experience with another set of great conversations centered on methods of fostering leadership dispositions, this time around two topics of great importance to my own scholarship: theories of practice and models of coaching. I shared results of my own work using theories of practice to investigate principal leadership in a roundtable session, and I was delighted to present alongside Deidre Le Fevre and Vivian Robinson of the University of Auckland. Dr. Robinson has made some foundational contributions to literature on instructional leadership, and to my happy surprise she is now using Argyris and Schon's theory of practice framework to study school principal communication.  

With Dr. Le Fevre, Dr. Robinson has developed a rubric and methodology for exploring the extent to which principals engage in reflective communication, especially in having "difficult" conversations that require both active listening and authentic, direct responses.  Unsurprisingly, they have found principals are relatively weak in these areas, but their rubric provides a powerful tool for illuminating principal strengths and weaknesses, and Robinson and Le Fevre are looking at various coaching models for utilizing this method for improving principal effectiveness.

This is, of course, also the next level of work for my own research, which revealed that even successful school principals struggle to be self-reflective about their practice.  In scholarship that has emerged from my dissertation, colleagues and I are now utilizing coaching protocols for actively assisting principals in articulating, and experimenting, with their own instructional leadership theories of practice.

My understanding of coaching processes was greatly enhanced in a symposium I attended later in the day, during which an array of researchers shared their own experiences using coaching for leadership development.  In particular, I am interested in exploring how Gary Bloom's blended coaching models support the approach we've tentatively mapped for our own work.  I was also happy to hear Megan Tschannen-Moran present her new work on "evocative coaching," which expands upon her ground-breaking research in trust and teacher self-efficacy.

This was my first AERA conference, and I was pleased with the sheer quantity of new information, ideas, and people I encountered.  In addition to new perspectives and resources for my own work, I came back with a host of ideas for potential dissertation ideas for doctoral studies.  I look forward to seeing where all these possible directions might take us.

AERA preview

Tomorrow I'll be traveling to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).  Twenty-thousand educational researchers from around the world will share their latest work on a wide variety of topics.  In addition to presenting my own research, I'm looking forward to attending sessions on instructional leadership, formative assessment, holistic education, charter schools, and more.

My own paper, which I will co-deliver with my mentor Dr. John Keedy of the University of Louisville, will highlight the results of my 2008 dissertation study exploring the instructional leadership of successful school principals.  Using a theory of practice framework first developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon in the 1970's, my study illuminated the core values, beliefs, and assumptions of successful principals, examined how those underlying beliefs influenced their action strategies with a host of positive effects on teachers (the main mechanism by which principals influence student achievement), and examined how and whether the principals actively reflected on and refined their basic assumptions and instructional leadership action strategies.

 This research has led to a series of on-going studies using the theory of practice framework to craft a coaching protocol designed to help principals improve their instructional leadership.  I shared initial results of this research at last year's Kentucky Association of School Administrators summer institute, and with the support of a WKU new faculty research support grant I'm continuing to advance this work with area school districts.

Watch for follow-up blog posts and tweets about my AERA experiences in coming days.

Coaching: Reaching for your "personal best" in teaching and leadership

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.

KASA Handouts Now Available

The KASA Summer Institute website has been updated and the PowerPoint and handouts are now available.  Click here and scroll down to my presentation (3:15 on Thursday, July 14), "Helping Principals Help Teachers: Improving Instructional Leadership Through Coaching and Self Reflection." 

Reflections on KASA, Part 2

In additional to our KASA presentation on our recent theories of practice research study, I also enjoyed spending time with administrators from the Franklin County and Monroe County Schools during their leadership retreats.

Franklin County invited Janet Hurt and me to present on instructional rounds. Franklin County has taken some important first steps in Ifocused introducing and embedding
instructional rounds in their schools, and they've wisely included teacher leaders in
the process. They've been at it long enough to encounter some common problems, and Janet and I focused our comments on various strategies for developing effective problems of practice.

We emphasized that there is no true right or wrong way to approach rounds. With the exception of staying faithful to the debrief protocol (which is fundamental to the validity of the rounds process), schools should feel comfortable experimenting with a variety strategies for developing and revising problems of practice. We shared some examples from schools, but mostly tried to facilitate thoughtful discussion among the Franklin County team about who to involve in problem of practice development, how to refine problems over time, and the critical link between problems of practice and the "next steps" phase of the rounds process. It was encouraging to hear school leaders engaging in deep reflection and dialogue about these processes, which is, ultimately, the goal of instructional rounds.

Later in the day I was privileged to sit in on the Monroe County leadership's retreat, where they were wrapping up their book study of Mike Schmoker's Focus. I've written elsewhere about this book and Schmoker's compelling challenge to school leaders to focus once again on the basic of sound curriculum design, sound lesson design, and literacy across the subjects. I loved hearing Monroe County's leaders wrestle with these complex issues as they questioned what they collectively wante want to focus on for the year head.

What's obvious from every conversation I have with Kentucky school leaders is that the Common Core rollout is center stage and greatly complicates any efforts or desires to narrow focus. I think Schmoker would argue that schools should cut the Common Core standards in half and teach only those standards that are absolutely essential for success at the next level of learning (and I would argue that this should be done only after the standards have been thoroughly deconstructed). Few districts will be able to emrace the risks inherent in such an approach, especially during this first year of Common Core implementation. But I so admire the thoughtful dialogue of leaders like those in Monroe County as they struggle with these issues, and honored to be part of their discussion.

Reflections on KASA, Part I

Thanks to everyone who turned out for our presentation at the Kentucky Association of School Administrators Summer Institute, "Helping Principals Help Teachers: Improving Instructional Leadership Through Coaching and Self Reflection."  I was told that ours was the second-highest attended educational session of the conference, second only to Associate Commissioner Ken Draut's talk on the new assessment system.

Handouts from the presentation should be available on the KASA website shortly (scroll down to my session to get pdf versions; I'll update on the blog when they are ready).  You may also email me for more information: gary.houchens@wku.edu.

Many thanks to my co-researcher Dr. Janet Hurt, associate superintendent for the Logan County Schools, who also spoke during the presentation, and to Christie Biggerstaff, principal of Gamaliel Elementary School (Monroe County), who shared her experiences as a participant in last year's research study.  Christie spoke passionately about how the theory of practice coaching model, described in a previous post, affected her as a first-year principal.  Several session participants indicated an interest in learning more and possibly bringing this approach to their own districts in the future.

As I shared in the presentation, we're expanding the study next year to include a co-hort component wherein principals will give each other mutual support and feedback and anonymous teacher feedback can be solicited in helping principals develop their theories of practice.  I look forward to this next phase of the work and will post more here as it becomes available.