Coaching, the Most Effective Way to Teach

I (Ashley) have been reflecting on my work with teachers and administrators over the past 40 years and have discovered that I have been and am, not so much a teacher, advisor or consultant, as a coach.  A recent article, Personal Best, in the New Yorker Magazine by Atul Gawande stimulated this "ahah" for me. It was useful to me to hear Gawande’s description of what a coach does and why so many of us need one...regularly.

Apparently coaching is indigenous to the U.S.  (Yale University is the first institution to use a coach for its football team.)  And, perhaps like many other things peculiar to the U.S., the concept of coach is “slippery.”  As Gawande writes:

Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.  They’re not your boss––in professional tennis, golf and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach––but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport [or profession]...Mainly, they observe and they guide.

I relate to this because of my early experience at the Green Mountain Valley School, where I wore many hats: English and Humanities teacher, Director of Academics, Headmaster, and, sometimes, ski coach.  I can see now that it was my experience on the hill with the racers and the other coaches led me to develope my skills as observer and guide.  I learned that I couldn’t tell a racer to perform faster any more than I could tell a student to understand iambic pentameter, or than I could tell a colleague how to conduct classes a certain way.  In each case, I could tell them, but the results would be marginal at best.

On the other hand, through careful observation of the racer, I could reflect for him or her what I saw, and guide the racer to wonder about a change in position, then encourage experimentation...a process when repeated over and over, with diligence, tenacity and whole-hearted engagement (and a liberal dose of light-hearted joy), can lead the individual being coached to reach a new level of achievement and pride that is unique for each person.

I have found that the same approach applies to working with teachers.  So has Jim Knight, the director of Kansas Coaching Project, at the University of Kansas.  Gawande reports that:

California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting.  Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time...But when coaching was introduced––when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions––adoption rates passed ninety per cent.

After writing his dissertation on measures to improve pedagogy, Knight received funding to train coaches for every school in Topeka.

I find our work at Cadwell Collaborative exciting and stimulating.  I know that my favorite work is in the classroom, in the school, with the teachers and administrators, when I am Coach Cadwell.

Steve Jobs Aesthetics, An Inspiration to Educators

Reading about Steve Jobs this past week has been strangely affirming for me, Ashley.  Strange, because I’ve always LOVED every Apple product I’ve owned (since 1984), and yet I’m a bit intimidated by someone so creative that he could actually produce things so useful AND elegant.  Affirming, because the articulated tenets of Job’s aesthetics and creations are provocative and inspiring to the core values of innovative education. Job’s was primarily concerned about culture and aesthetics.  Business was a by-product of creating dynamic culture and inspiring aesthetics.   His burning questions included: How would this “thing” improve our culture?  How would this “thing” actually create culture?  How can this “thing” be beautiful, to look at, to touch, to manipulate?

These are the same questions that are compelling to education.  In striving to answer these same questions we are inspired by Steve Jobs, Grant Wiggins, Reggio Children and Carlina Rinaldi and Vea Vecchi, Ron Berger, Christopher Alexander, Peter Senge, Fritjof Capra, and many others.

Below are excerpts from two different articles from the New York Times that highlight this point.  As I read them I found myself drawing direct parallels to our work in schools.  I found myself asking, could we create schools as highly functional and beautiful as an iMac, iPhone or iPad?

Mr. Jobs made no secret of his focus on design; in a Jan. 24, 2000, interview, Fortune magazine asked if it was an “obsession” and whether it was “an inborn instinct or what?”

“We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing,” Mr. Jobs replied. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service....”

For all his accolades, this aspect of Mr. Jobs was hard for many business people to understand, or to copy. Go into a computer store today, and there’s a bland array of mostly indistinguishable keyboards and monitors — and then there’s Apple. Ditto the cellphone stores.

[Substitute here, schools for computer stores.  Go into a school today, and there’s a bland array of mostly indistinguishable hallways and rooms -- and then there are the early childhood schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, and many others around the world inspired by Reggio Emilia.]

“Most people underestimate his grandeur and his greatness,” Gadi Amit, founder and principal designer of New Deal Design in San Francisco, told me. “They think it’s about design. It’s beyond design. It’s completely holistic, and it’s dogmatic. Things need to be high quality; they have to have poetry and culture in each step... Steve was a cultural leader, and he drove Apple from that perspective. He started with culture; then followed with technology and design. No one seems to get that.” Insert this same perspective into education.  Educators are cultural leaders and they drive schools from that perspective.  They start with culture, then follow with curriculum and school building design. James Stewart, NYT, 10.7.11

Jobs...played a decisive role in restoring a kind of defiant aestheticism to American life.

Like the glories of Art Deco and the allure of the “Mad Men” era, his products were a rebuke to the idea that the aesthetics of modern life needed to be utilitarian and blah....

If [tomorrow’s innovators] learn anything from Steve Jobs, it should be that their vocation isn’t just about uniting commerce and technology. It’s about making the modern world more beautiful as well. Ross Douthat, NYT, 10.8.11

In my opinion, educators must play the same role, “a decisive role in restoring a defiant aestheticism to American life.”  It won’t be with a Steve Jobs in the lead; however, drawing from his model of excellence, it could be, in time, that together, we can “make the modern world more beautiful as well.”

From Ligonchio, Italy

This week Louise is in Ligonchio, Italy attending an international conference for educators, The Hundred Languages in Dialogue with the Natural Environment.  Here is her report so far: We are high up in the Apennine Mountains, several hours south of Reggio Emilia.  The group is spread out because of the limited accommodations in this mountain area.  I am staying at 5000 feet on the border between the regions of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany in an inn called Carpe Diem.  Out of the 100 participants from 16 countries, there are ten of us at Carpe Diem from Singapore, Sydney and Perth, Australia, and the United States including Honolulu.  We have long, delicious dinners and discuss the day's work.  We are hosted by Vittorio and Serena, the nicest inn keepers any of us have ever met.  We live at the base of a gorgeous Apennine peak, Cavelbianco, which takes half an hour to climb for a spectacular 360 degree view.

This week we are focused on connections between the natural environment and what the Reggio Emilian educators call "the hundred languages," or all the ways that human beings discover, express and communicate ideas.  This is a very hands-on international experience!  It has been terrific to spend time at the Ozolo River studying flow and force and at the atelier for children called Wave to Wave at the Enel hydroelectric power plant, investigating magnets, electrical power and water power.  I was enchanted yesterday using graphic materials in the beech woods in Pradarena and in the meadows learning about sound.  Today in the meadows and woods we worked with a British choreographer in movement and dance.  Tomorrow, in another hamlet at an agriturismo center we will engage with herbs and cooking.

What a privilege to learn side by side our Italian friends who my family has known now for 20 years, Carlina Rinaldi, Vea Vecchi, Giovanni Piazza, Marina Mori and others during this brand new adventure for them and for all of the participants here.  What a marvel to share this experience with educators from all over the world.  What a hopeful way to spend a week of the summer, learning in such a stunning environment about ecoliteracy and aesthetics, renewable energy and creativity, multiple perspectives and poetics all through first hand experience.  To learn more about professional development experiences offered by Reggio Children visit their website.  To see a youtube video of the some of the week's experiences of the Reggio Children week in Ligonchio visit this site.

Best wishes to all from Ligonchio, Italy.