Transformational Coaching
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Before you read this post, ground yourself in student voice by listening to Ethan talk about passion in learning.
The work of educators has always been to prepare students for their future. Right now, we are at a point in time when the future students are preparing for has shifted dramatically from the one for which schools were originally designed. We are also at a point where learning science has expanded and deepened our understanding of how cognition works. Many educators, schools, districts, and states have come to recognize these shifts and explore them. Many educators have also come to recognize the inherent racism and bias in our existing system. As they work to transform school, we coach them towards a reality we must build together. One that lives up to Ethan’s need to “reinsert that passion” into learning for all students.
As a coach for 2Revolutions, I support educators as they transform their educational models. Our team of coaches bring years of experience in implementing and coaching educators in competency-based, personalized learning, deeper learning, assessment for learning, and student agency.
Our work as coaches is to tune educator practice by modeling best practice, so that they might yearn to create similar experiences for students. We aspire to walk the walk of agency, deeper, personalized, and competency-based learning in all that we do.
We believe that this work—which we call transformational coaching—is about three things:
becoming curious about the current system- interrogating the systems that perpetuate racism, bias, and inequity and articulating necessary changes
building capacity in instructional and assessment practices to support transformation
developing mindsets to support and sustain transformation
Transformational Coaching Focus Areas
Our coaching model supports the development of educator instructional practice, while integrating the core skills and dispositions that are needed for innovation and change. It’s part equity work, part capacity building, part change management. The specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions we focus on therefore vary based on the local context and need of each partner district. For example, in some places, transformation is focused on personalized strategies; in others, the focus is culturally relevant pedagogies to examine and shift bias in assessment and instruction. We’ve partnered with experts across the field to build learning progressions, playlists, courses, and even graduate programs in the areas illustrated below, which you can learn more about at Learn Next.
Learn Next content and partners
All of these resources are aimed at building educator capacity. Growth in educator capacity in these domains is measurable through presentations of learning that are embedded into our coaching process, which we call the Action Research Design Cycle.
Action Research Design Cycle
Our transformational coaching process uses an Action Research Design Cycle which consists of four phases: Define, Discover, Design, and Share. This approach is based on an understanding that change is polycentric and a belief that personal identity, relationships, and agency are paramount to enabling change in complex systems. Liberatory Design prompts, which have shown promise in designing experiences for greater equity, are embedded throughout each phase of this process with specific emphasis on noticing and reflection at the beginning and end of each cycle.
Each phase is detailed below with descriptions of what educators and coaches may do and examples of what that work can look like.
Action Research Design Cycle
Phase 1: Define
In this phase, a focus area or problem of practice is defined through articulating a “How Might We” (HMW) statement. The HMW is created through noticing the systemic factors at play impacting equity, reviewing self-assessment information, and aligning to school/district vision.
Coaches meet with educators to begin this process and support the creation of HMW statements in person. Coaches provide feedback about equity, alignment to the vision, and feasibility of the HMW statement.
Examples:
How might we develop a vision for our school to support success for all students?
How might we design assessments that are culturally relevant and provide measures of expanded outcomes for success?
How might I use a learner profile with students to provide opportunities for agency through goal setting, sharing their passions and interests, and monitoring their progress?
How might I use vertical maps of standards to support flexible pacing for students?
Phase 2: Discover
In this phase, educators learn about a focus area or problem of practice through empathy, research, and immersion in order to prepare them to create their own prototype.
Coaches provide resources for research, empathy, and immersion, including courses available for free through Learn Next, which can be customized for particular learning needs. They review reflections generated during this phase to offer their feedback and insights. Coaches will often visit to observe during this phase to provide specific training, support empathy work, observe in schools, accompany teams on site visits, etc.
Examples:
Carry out empathy interviews with all stakeholders
Do a “shadow a student” experience
Research learner profiles
Go on a site visit to a school that is currently using vertical standards maps for flexible pacing
Phase 3: Design
This phase begins with articulating insights from the Discover phase and using those to drive brainstorming and creation of a prototype. Coaches hold design sessions to support the creation of prototypes. Prototypes are pitched to coaches, who offer feedback on alignment, feasibility, and creativity.
Examples:
Design a student graduate profile
Design culturally relevant assessment tasks
Design a learner profile
Create an experience map for flexible pacing
Phase 4: Share
During the Share phase, educators implement their prototype and document their observations and stakeholder observations. They share their documentation, evidence, and insights and use those to make decisions about what’s next. Based on the evidence they’ve collected, they choose which aspects of their prototype to scale, scrap, or shift.
Coaches visit or observe video of the prototype in action and provide feedback on the prototype, insights, and next steps. Coaches evaluate evidence and insights generated to monitor progress towards overall vision and provide their reflections back to educators. At this point, coaches also provide overall insights or recommendations back to partners highlighting areas of success and opportunities for continued growth. At the end of the cycle, educators carry out a Presentation of Learning that showcases their work, learning, growth, challenges, on-going questions, and next steps. These presentations of learning take place in person and provide opportunities for colleagues to socialize the work among a larger community of stakeholders.
Examples:
Hold a community feedback session to collect feedback on grad profile
Use performance assessments with groups of students and review student work, gather student feedback, and analyze student data
Use the learner profile with a small group of students, capture observations and evidence of agency
Carry out 1st phase of flexible pacing and document observations and evidence of how vertical standards maps supported that
Share insights at a staff meeting
Share a presentation of learning at an in-person meeting of key stakeholders
Examples from Practice
We’ve worked with many partners in this way, and each collaboration is unique.
In Spring Grove, MN, I partner with Gina Meinertz who is the Innovation Coach at Spring Grove School, a K-12 one school district. This partnership is made possible through the Bush Foundation, which provide grants to schools implement student centered learning. Spring Grove has made amazing progress in implementing their vision of student centered, authentic learning. This year they are implementing a student showcase of learning as a core driver of student centered learning. For the showcase, each student will select and present one project they have completed that they think showcases their growth. Gina meets with teachers directly to coach them in working through their problems of practice. Each teacher has identified a meaningful and actionable problem to work on which is aligned to the school vision for student centered and authentic learning. These range from making community connections to law and business classes to co-creating math units with students. Gina and I worked with her school leadership to articulate our coaching goals and vision for the year, and we meet weekly to share progress and collaborate on the problems of practice that emerge for her as she supports teachers. Teachers have all participated in “mini-showcases” where they share their own growth and prepare to carry out the student showcase in the spring of 2020.
“My experience with Brigid as a coach has been one of the most supportive models I have experienced for growth in both leadership and knowledge. When I explain this coaching experience to others, I tell them that I have the ability to not only talk to someone that is understanding our current conditions and questions but also have a national view of how education is transforming. Brigid provides ideas, tools, research, and feedback that is timely, relevant, and innovative. I have seen my leadership style change from shared to transformational in the fact that I better understand how to support change through other people’s ideas instead of trying to bring the ideas to the people. I have seen the district change in the way they have redefined success, celebrated and supported authentic learning, and driven innovative ideas forward. ”
— Gina Meinertz, Innovation Coach, Spring Grove School
In Washington D.C., we teamed with the DCPS Innovation Department to create a multi-year design process supporting schools in defining their new school models and coaching individual schools directly. Drew Elementary School decided to implement project-based learning across all grades. We designed an authentic learning experience for educators centered around the question of “How might we collaborate to create an engaging, rigorous, aligned, and high quality PBL project?” The partnership was strengthened by coaching the school leaders and their DCPS innovation coach through monthly meetings to best leverage local experience in directly coaching teachers. The outcome was highly engaged learners!
In Manchester, NH, we coached Parker Varney teachers as they implemented performance tasks. We co-created a vision together and carried out regular coaching with individual teachers as they designed the tasks. I will never forget receiving an envelope with copies of the student tasks and a hand written note from an educator thanking us for the support. The work was a part of the state-wide PACE initiative and elevated educator voice by empowering educators to carry out the process of task design, calibration, and analysis.
In Dallas, TX, we have worked over many years to support their implementation of personalized learning, beginning in 2014 with the creation of a school re-design experience for five school teams. From 2015-16 we worked with the entire Dan D. Rogers Elementary School staff to support them in implementing deeper learning as an extension of the personalized learning work they had already begun. Each grade level team met with 2Rev coaches monthly to design and implement deeper learning experiences in their context. We designed the entire experience to model a high quality project in order for educators to experience what they’d be implementing with students. Educators shared their own progress regularly through presentations of learning to their colleagues. Over time, they built extensive local capacity to implement the work themselves. Please read more detail about that coaching work below.
Changing the Paradigm of Adult Learning
In 2013, we teamed up as a design partner with the Personalized Learning Department at Dallas Independent School District (DISD) to help a cohort of eight school teams, over the course of six months, develop personalized learning models that would better meet the needs of students. Through this initiative, which was part of the Gates Foundations' Next Generation Systems Initiative (NGSI), five schools were chosen to implement their designs. Dan D. Rogers Elementary School was one—and we've been partners in this journey ever since—transitioning this year into helping them implement their vision and meet their goals. Here's a look inside what's happening.
Each of these partnerships have shifted practice and have built long lasting relationships with educators who are working every day to do the best they can for students in their districts.
We’d love to partner with you to support transformation! To connect, please reach out to coaching@2revolutions.net.