Best Practices for Effective Coaching

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Ashley, and today's lesson is titled Best Practices for Effective Coaching. In today's lesson, we will discuss the best practices for effective coaching. Robert Marzano, the co-founder of Marzano Research Laboratory, is a well-known leader of instruction and assessment, effective leadership, which includes coaching, and school intervention. According to Marzano, the best practices for effective coaching that we'll focus on in today's lesson is establishing trust, providing feedback, and promoting choice.

Trust must be established for an effective coaching relationship. One strategy for establishing this trust is by developing a peer coaching relationship with someone who has similar views on teaching philosophy and methods as yourself. Too many differences between the pair may cause disagreements and frustrations, which will lead to an ineffective coaching relationship.

The next strategy to establishing trust is by developing positive relationships with teachers. Most often, when there is a positive school climate, teachers value each other, which encourages trust. This also creates an environment that promotes open and honest discussion about teaching practices.

Another way to establish trust is to use active listening. Active listening is a strategy that is used when you paraphrase what your colleagues say and ask questions to help you clearly understand what he or she is saying. This strategy demonstrates that you are listening and you value what they have to say.

Let's look at several strategies on using active listening effectively. Pay attention. Make sure you are giving the teacher who is speaking your full attention. You can do this by giving the proper body language as far as eye contact and looking in their direction, and nodding to show you understand what they're saying. Offer feedback and a response to what is being said. Restate what's being said or ask questions to get a better understanding.

Next, do not interrupt the teacher. Interruptions can cause misunderstandings and frustration of the speaker. And lastly, respond appropriately and professionally. Be honest with the teacher, but also respectful, and that your response is helpful and not offensive.

Providing effective feedback is also involved with coaching. Marzano cited Kouzes and Posner who had this to say about feedback. "People need to know whether they're making progress or marking time. Goals help to serve that function, but goals are not enough. It's not enough to know that we want to make it to the summit. We also need to know whether we're still climbing, or whether we're sliding downhill."

And this quote is the perfect example of one of the coach's main jobs, which is to provide timely, yet constructive feedback so teachers know whether or not they are making progress. In order for feedback to be effective and to provide positive results, there are some steps to be taken. Feedback should be specific and to the point by providing specific examples of what occurred during observation.

Students should also be the focus. Discuss how things can be altered with students' best interests as the main focus. Feedback is also timely. Effective coaches provide this feedback almost immediately. The sooner the teacher receives the feedback, the sooner they are able to implement new strategies to their instruction.

It also makes reflection a lot easier. It's easier to recall something that happened yesterday or the day before instead of something that happened a month ago. You may even want to try using the Oreo technique when providing feedback.

Just like an Oreo has three layers, providing feedback will be in three layers. First, say something positive, then identify the challenge, lastly, end the conversation on a good note. And this is something that I try to do not just in coaching relationships, but when talking to parents and students. Think about it, people want to know what they're doing well, so despite the fact that they might be having challenges, they still need to know that there are some things that they are doing correctly.

Feedback should also be descriptive. Describe exactly what you see and nothing more. Your feedback is not evaluative. It's not providing the teacher with a score or rating. Use guiding questions that will help the teacher reflect on the feedback that was given.

Effective coaches should also promote choice. Teachers should be trusted to make proper decisions for themselves and their students. Coaches should allow teachers to have choice on the skills that they decide they would like to improve on and strategies for how they would like to go about improving them. This form of collaboration and professionalism supports the trusting relationship between coaches and teachers.

Let's look at all three of these components and see how they work together while promoting effective coaching. I'm a math coach, and I have a teacher who has approached me with a question they have concerning the curriculum. So we sit down and talk and I hear her out on her concerns. I actively listen to what she has to say by repeating things back to her.

So it sounds like what you're saying is you feel that there's too much content to have to cover in a certain time period. She agrees, and I let her continue talking. When she is finished, I offer her my feedback. It sounds like you do such an efficient job at planning lessons that sometimes you run out of time completing the task.

What we can begin doing is planning together and make the lessons a little bit more simpler, but then add in those other activities that you would like to do as supplementary activities for your higher achieving students, or you can decide to put those other activities in stations and allow students to rotate through those stations throughout the whole week, or even go on to the following week if those activities are still not complete.

In this scenario, the coach establishes trust with the teacher by actively listening to the teacher's concerns and showing that the teacher's concerns are of value. The coaches provide a feedback that has kept the student as the focus and uses the Oreo technique by saying something positive, like the teacher efficiently plans, and then addresses the challenge, which is the time management piece, and then ending on something positive by saying, we can work together to come up with the best solution for you and your students. Lastly, the coach offers choice by allowing the teacher to decide how to incorporate the extra activities as far as using them for the advanced students or for rotations.

Let's recap what we have discussed in today's lesson. We reviewed three best practices for effective coaching. First is establishing trust. This can be done by creating a positive relationships with teachers, and by actively listening to concerns of teachers.

Next is provide effective feedback. Some tips that we mentioned on providing effective feedback is be specific and timely. The best feedback is the feedback that is given almost immediately. And lastly, we talked about allowing teacher's choice for making decisions for themselves and their students. All of these components allow coaches to be the most effective.

Consider how you will use these tips and examples to provide effective coaching for teachers. Now, it's your turn to apply what you've learned in this video. The Additional Resources section will be super helpful. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so you can easily target the resources you want.