Working Too Hard on the Wrong Things

A new edition of one of the best books on instructional coaching is out. Here’s the foreword I contributed.

It’s hard to say whether instructional coaching is in its infancy or in crisis. Coaching isn’t new to schools, but it isn’t being done well in most of them either. We argue over definitions of what coaching even is, as if we can’t just come together and agree that coaching is helping teachers get better through observation and feedback. That’s it. That’s the job.

Compounding the problem, the field can’t agree on what coaching should actually look like. The favored approach tends to be a largely constructivist model in which teachers choose whether to be coached, choose what they’d like to be coached on, and the coach’s role is reduced to asking them how they’d like to grow. On the other side—usually straw-manned by the first camp—we have coaches telling teachers what to do, spying on their every move, and frightening them into compliance with whatever district initiative is on the menu this year. It’s as if the field refuses to acknowledge a third way, one based in evidence and common sense—where coaches with real expertise in effective instruction observe teachers attempting real lessons and offer the kind of specific, actionable feedback that helps them improve. Neither surveillance nor therapy, but professionalism rooted in the belief that we can all get better if we work together.

And then there’s the most common scenario of all: the coach who does everything except coaching. The coach monitors the bathrooms and the hallways. The coach runs the fundraiser. The coach is “admin-lite,” absorbing whatever duties spill over from the people whose job it actually is. Coaching is the thing they do when there’s time, which is never.

None of this is helped by the fact that in many schools there isn’t even an instructional focus to coach toward. Schools are perpetually agnostic about what effective instruction is. They operate in a smorgasbord of teaching techniques and tricks and tips that look nothing like what the evidence says works—effective modeling, guided practice, checking for understanding, a gradual release into independent practice anchored to an observable learning objective at a grain size that respects what we know about cognitive load, attention, and explicit instruction. Without having a clear model of what to coach on, the coach spends her time distributing resources and handling the bathroom line, and we adults absolve ourselves of addressing the teaching gaps that disproportionately affect the kids who need effective instruction most.

Here we are. This is the mess.

And here comes this book by Gene Tavernetti—a coach with over four decades of experience working with teachers, in some of the most challenging school contexts in the country, who has built successful coaching programs from the ground up. Finally, we have something in our hands that can help.

I say this as a coach who thought he had figured it out. I read the other coaching gurus’ ideas and found them wanting, so I designed my own half-baked system. Just when I thought I’d found my own way through the morass, I was sent an early edition of this book and discovered that Gene was saying many of the same things I had pieced together—but with more craft knowledge and precision than I had managed on my own. I felt at once validated and in a state of disequilibrium, because I didn’t have all the knowledge Gene had put into these pages. It is a gift that this new edition exists, and that it will now reach far more coaches and teachers than the first ever could.

We need to maximize the impact of coaching cycles, and we need to maximize the lever that is feedback, deliberate practice, and guidance from within the profession—grounded in context and the realities of the classroom. We need to maximize instructional coaching, and we need to save it from the bad ideas that are ruining its name and making it ineffective for the considerable investment we keep pouring into it.

I hope you enjoy this book. I imagine that much of what you’re doing is “working too hard,” as Gene would say, on things that aren’t moving the needle—and this is the book that will get you back to focusing on the things that make the difference. Because every child deserves a world-class teacher.

– Zach Groshell