From the Small Schools Listserve…

Mary Beth Blegen’s honest and reflective post on the small schools listserve (see below) on her experience with Small Learning Communities in St Paul unfortunately does not represent an outlier in the national school reform experience over the past decade or two (or three).  People with the best of intentions, who are committed to improving learning for their students and the quality of professional lives of teachers, and who manage to get the funds to enact a reform plan (SLC’s being just one of the efforts funded over the past several decades) still face immense obstacles to their success.  A lack of knowledge of the complexities of the change process in large organizations like high schools (and the districts in which they are situated), an assumption that structural change is sufficient (or the opposite, an assumption that only improving instruction in the absence of structural and policy change is sufficient), a failure to take into account the need for effective professional development in how to build professional learning communities or communities of practice with the time built into the regular schedule to look rigorously at student learning and teacher practice, understanding the needed changes in teacher practice and student assessment, all of this and more makes the challenge almost insurmountable.

 

What is often left out of the stories of success and failure across the nation is the role of outside service providers who either do or don’t have the knowledge of all of these dynamics and the skills to provide coaching and consulting advice and support for addressing these complexities on an ongoing, over-the-shoulder basis for folks like Mary Beth.  When high quality and knowledgeable coaching is provided on addressing not just classroom instruction or instructional leadership, but also these larger system change issues, the chances that the effort will make measurable progress is greatly enhanced.  But too often that story is left untold, and as a result, schools and communities are left thinking that the simplistic stories they read in the newspapers about successful SLC’s or small schools magically blooming in an educational desert after being given funds to restructure their high schools are true.  Or they find themselves spending a few painful years struggling and then the public gets tired of the whole project and they go back to the old system out of frustration.  Or they hire one of the many packaged outside programs that promise results but do not address the complex contextualized realities of the local setting, only to find themselves several years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars down the line with little substantive change.

 

I have been wondering about this missing piece of the dialogue on change for awhile.  Of course on the small schools listserve, we hear from people like Mike Klonsky and Joe Nathan and Dan French and the folks at CCE in Boston, and occasionally the folks from the Small Schools Project, or at BayCES or CES about the programs that they have in place to support small schools and school change.  The recent report Joe posted there about the successes in Cincinnati hint at the role of the outside consultants (and one assumes lots of coaching) in that effort.  Yet the dialogue does not seem to me to go deep enough or broadly enough for us to be able to offer guidance to someone like Mary Beth about what sort of coaching would have gotten her effort off to a good start and sustained it over the long haul.  Really, I do think we know how to do this work.  But the knowledge is hidden in little enclaves, small networks of practitioners, an organization here and there.  I am hoping we can bring it all out into the light of day and really spend some time rigorously digging into what makes for successful coaching and consulting in these efforts, and what are the pitfalls to avoid.  What does a highly qualified coach do who is able to address all of the issues that plagued Mary Beth’s effort?

 

That was the reason I started this blog.  Already some of you have visited it, but I would like to see a dialogue begin here that addresses the implicit questions that Mary Beth asks, which are, What could we have done differently?  and, Why did we not know that then?  These are embedded in the questions I posed in my first post, and which I would like to see us all contribute to discussing now.  Those are:

• What is whole system coaching?
• What do whole system coaches do?
• What do high quality coaches need to know and be able to do to be effective?
• What sorts of professional learning systems do coaches need to be effective?
• What results in schools and districts constitute “being effective?”
• What kinds of communities of practice, or professional learning communities, or coach collaborations currently exist and how do they support coaches to be effective?
• What sorts of communities of practice and networks can you imagine creating that would enhance existing ones and enable greater shared learning and innovation in coaching?
• What sorts of organizational arrangements best support effective coaching, both in schools and districts and in outside providers?
• What kinds of knowledge management systems best support effective coaching?

Might we start that dialogue now?  I am going to post something on the first two questions soon…

 

Thanks,

John    

 

Mary Beth Blegen’s post to the small schools listserve:

 

As our work in Small Learning Communities now recedes, we have learned much. I am hoping what we have learned can provide good questions for those who are now engaged in the work.Six years ago, when we began the work, we assumed too much about high schools and change. We assumed that the opportunities presented by SLC grants (both Federal and Gates) would be received in a much different way. We assumed that scrutiny in the high schools would be welcome.I almost giggle now when I think of my naivete, considering I taught in a high school for 30 years.We focused far too much on structure and far too little on instruction. I believe that if we have 15 teachers in an SLC located in a hallway, but that they don’t know how to talk to each to each about student achievement, little can happen. I believe that without focused conversations in buildings for which time and support are provided, little will change.Little will even change with the conversations without expectations and goals, monitoring and evaluation.Ah, yes, we have learned. If we were entitled to a second go round, the focus would be on student learning, measured, discussed and adjusted.I have hopes for the professional conversations, but we have a very long way to go there, too. 

Ever the optimist, I think we can still get this right. 

Announcing Whole School/ Whole System Coaching Blog

Question:  We discuss school reform strategies all the time on various lists, blogs, etc., with an aim to share our work, agree and disagree, and learn from one another.  Why is there no substantive discussion of coaching, one of the major strategies we all use to support it?

 

Across the nation, schools, school districts, and support organizations employ many strategies to support urban school improvement.  Among the most often used in more successful efforts, and least often used in less successful efforts, is coaching, and in particular, coaching that focuses not just on instruction or leadership, but on the whole school or district as a system.  Organizations such as BayCES, CCE, the Small Schools Project, the Small Schools Workshop, NSRF, CES National, and many more continually discuss their methods internally, and increasingly these organizations are developing research and evaluation approaches to study the efficacy of their particular approach to coaching.  Yet little or no national dialogue exists across these organizations and the organizations that employ their services, and no meta-analysis, that I am aware of, of coaching effectiveness.  I am creating this blog to stimulate that discussion and analysis.

 

Assertion:  We need a national dialogue and we need a national professional coach network and community of practice.   We might even find ourselves developing an emerging consensus, while valuing the diversity of our differing approaches, about effective high quality coaching, and what coaches need to know and be able to do to be effective.  That could lead to a dialogue about an emerging set of professional standards of practice for coaching.  All of this could make coaching better and of more value to those doing it and seeking its benefits to their reform work.

 

This blog hopes to start an ongoing national examination of whole school/ whole system coaching.  Such a national dialogue could result in a larger learning community of practice and network among coaches, one that might enable coaches to share and learn from each other, one that might result in some national consensus about what high quality whole systems coaching is, and what such coaches do.  While valuing the diversity of experience and opinion about the topic among coaches and those employing them as part of a reform strategy, some increasing clarity about these questions could help to develop innovative understanding about what coaches need to know and be able to do to be effective at supporting whole school/ whole system change.  Networks of diverse practitioners working on similar problems innovate at a much higher rate than individual organizations; larger networks innovate at an exponentially higher rate.  This blog herein begins such a dialogue that will continue beyond this space into the creation of a web-based coaching network and community of practice, where we will engage together in “critical friendship,” dialogue, collaboration, innovation, and knowledge management.

 

Some Questions for Discussion on this Blog:

• What is whole system coaching?
• What do whole system coaches do?
• What do high quality coaches need to know and be able to do to be effective?
• What sorts of professional learning systems do coaches need to be effective?
• What results in schools and districts constitute “being effective?”
• What kinds of communities of practice, or professional learning communities, or coach collaborations currently exist and how do they support coaches to be effective?
• What sorts of communities of practice and networks can you imagine creating that would enhance existing ones and enable greater shared learning and innovation in coaching?
• What sorts of organizational arrangements best support effective coaching, both in schools and districts and in outside providers?
• What kinds of knowledge management systems best support effective coaching?

 

Stay Tuned:  Your contributions to discussing these questions, and generating others, will fuel future topics, and help build the network…

I hope to see you all here.

 John