An Abundance of Data

This stage of coaching will be marked by moments in which you may feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the picture that's developing—that's a good sign! It means you're gathering a lot of data. Your exploration should reveal the equity issues that your client is facing as well as those that are systemic in the site and/or district. You'll also uncover the site's and client's assets and have enough information to create a work plan (see Chapter Seven). You'll also expand your awareness about who you need to be and what you need to be mindful of in order to be an effective coach with this client.

At this stage, work on gathering information to respond to the questions in Exhibit 6.3 (the data-gathering tool at the end of the chapter). This might take a month or two. At the end of the stage of exploration, I offer a Coach Reflection: Stage of Exploration (also in Exhibit 6.3) to process the data you've gathered and the information you've learned.

1. Gather Relevant Documents

Create a binder for all the relevant documents you'll gather about a classroom, school, and district. You'll want the type of things a teacher or principal might use to guide decision making: calendars, schedules, organizational maps, descriptors of roles and responsibilities, professional development plans and calendars, curriculum maps, pacing guides, power standards, assessment tools, report cards, site plans, vision and mission statements, strategic district plans, and so on. You want to note what exists and what doesn't exist, what parameters for decision making are in place and, if possible, who determined those.

It is also important that you explore your client's understandings and feelings about these documents. Does the new teacher you are coaching know that curriculum maps exist at her site? Does the principal agree with the district's strategic plan? Did he have any input into it, or is he being asked to implement something that's not aligned to his site's needs? Does the site have a vision and/or mission statement that directs the work of the staff? Are there pacing guides for the math and English departments, but nothing to guide the instruction of history and science teachers? Does the principal expect that all teachers fully adopt the new curriculum, or is there flexibility? You'll need to explore what these documents mean to various stakeholders, how they feel about them, and how they're actually implemented.

What all of these documents should yield is insight into systems, structures, and decision making. You'll need this big picture. Knowing it will increase your credibility, ability to support and guide your client, and alignment with larger site and district goals and initiatives.

2. Gather and Analyze Formal Data

Coaches should not necessarily be “driven by data,” but coaches need to be aware of data. Gather as much data as possible: data on graduation rates, the percentage of students promoted to the following grade, attendance data, suspension and expulsion reports, standardized test score data, internal district assessment data, English language competency data, reports on special education populations, data on socioeconomic status of students, neighborhood and city demographics, and so on. Search national, state, and county databases, ask for access to a site's printed reports (probably in those dusty binders in the principal's office),and ask teachers for access to grading systems, behavior tracking systems, and so on. You want to be inundated with multiple forms of data.

Once the data is piled on your desk (or computer desktop), do some analysis. Read through the data looking for patterns, outliers, and surprises. Compile the questions that arise. Follow the leads that surface. Data analysis is a puzzle to organize—keep sorting and sifting and thinking as the picture comes together.

You also need to explore how your clients think and feel about the data, and how they use it. Is your coachee driven by data? Does she display it on her classroom door? What kinds of data does she gather? How does she communicate data to her students and their parents? How does she explain and interpret the data? How does it inform her teaching? How often does she gather data?

Given that data is at the crux of the battle over how to reform, fix, or transform schools, and given that some think of a data as a four-letter word while others hold it as a Bible, coaches need to be very attuned to their client's data-related beliefs and behaviors. Without this understanding, you won't be clear on how to use data—not what you've gathered and analyzed or the data you will continue to gather. You'll need to make some agreements with your client about what kinds of data to gather and how often, and how these data will be used. This topic is addressed in Chapter 7.

3. Initiate Informal Conversations

You'll want to become familiar with the school grounds where you'll coach, and as you wander around you can initiate conversations with parents, staff members, and students. Ask general, open-ended questions such as: How are things going for you this year? How's that new reading program working for your students? How have you dealt with the latest budget cuts? How's your child doing in third grade? You want to hear from a variety of stakeholders.

Whether you coach a teacher or principal, you'll want to hear from students. Ultimately, your efforts are going to affect them. Let your client know you'll be doing this, and then ask students what they appreciate most about their school, teachers, and principal, what they are learning, what concerns they have about their school, and so on. Get really curious about the experience for children, and ask as many questions as you can.

The purpose for doing this is to build relationships and expand your understanding of the site. Furthermore, because you are perceived as an “outsider,” sometimes people will share information that they won't share elsewhere. As long as you use these data to help you better understand your client's context, it's okay. Just be careful not to engage in gossip or share what you heard elsewhere.

4. Uncover Knowledge, Skills, and Passions

In addition to getting to know your client as a professional and understanding his personality and psychological profile, you also want to know who your client is outside of school. What are his additional interests, passions, areas of expertise, skills, and abilities? Some of these may have surfaced if you asked the suggested questions in Exhibit 6.1.

This information allows you to do several things. Hopefully, you'll find some connections to your client, which can be really helpful to have on tap when coaching gets tough. They remind us that our clients have many sides to them—they are also parents, world travelers, musicians—people with a variety of dreams and aspirations and passions. As coaches, we will need these reminders if we become frustrated with our clients.

This information also opens another set of coaching tools. One principal I coached felt very uncomfortable having hard conversations with her staff, though in high school and college she had been an actress. Because I knew this about her, when she expressed anxiety about delivering difficult news to her staff, I reminded her of the skills she already had. I asked how she'd prepared for performances, how she'd managed nervousness, what specific actions she took before and during shows to manage her discomfort. Had I not taken the time and been intentional about figuring out who this principal was outside of school, I would not have been able to build this bridge to her prior knowledge.

As a coach, you can help people see the parallels between what they already know how to do and what they are trying to do better. You can help them transfer knowledge, understanding, skills, and beliefs. If you're working with a teacher who runs marathons, then in November, when that teacher is exhausted, overwhelmed, and doesn't know how she'll make it through the year, you can remind her that she already knows a lot about perseverance. You can instantly shift her thinking because of what you know about her. Everyone we work with knows a lot more and can do a lot more than we think. It's our job as coaches to find out what it is that they know, care about, can do, and are committed to, and then to use that information to help them move their practice.

One way to elicit your client's history, skills, and passions is to ask for stories. Simply framing a question as “Tell me a story about …” is very inviting.

5. Explore Beliefs about Change

In an early conversation with a new client, I ask many of the following questions. I need to know as soon as possible how my client thinks and feels about change. As you read these questions over, you might reflect on your own experiences—as coaches, we also need to be aware of our own beliefs about change.

• Tell me about a positive change you've made in your life as an adult, something that you felt good about, such as a change in how you eat, manage time, or exercise. How did this change come about? What prompted it? What were the bumps and obstacles along the way? How did you negotiate them? At what point did you realize: “I've changed!”? How does it feel to have accomplished this change? What did you learn about yourself in the process?
• Tell me about a new skill you learned as an adult—maybe it was how to bake bread, surf, or create PowerPoint presentations? What the process was like for you? What feelings came up? What was challenging? What did you learn about yourself as a learner?

The ways clients tell these stories expose beliefs and feelings that help me be an effective coach. Do the stories reveal that change was painful, relentless, and difficult to attain? Was it something they charged right into, eager and enthusiastic, or where they dragged off, perhaps pressured to change when their blood pressure skyrocketed? Were there key people in the client's life who supported her and encouraged her? Is she driven by goals, and does she approach change analytically?

I also listen carefully for how a client goes about learning. Did he seek specific, precise instructions on a new skill? Did he learn to bake bread by attending a class, reading a book, watching a friend, or did he just start mixing up ingredients and throw them in the oven? And how did he feel about the challenges? How does he communicate and celebrate his success?

After inviting personal stories of change and learning, I ask a few questions to explore my client's intellectual and theoretical beliefs about how social change happens. Underneath our daily activities are deeply held beliefs about justice and power. As a coach, one of my primary tasks is to surface those beliefs, because sometimes they are beneficial, but other times they hinder our efforts. I begin to excavate these beliefs with these questions:

• What are your thoughts about how social change happens?
• How do you think transformation happens?
• Name a historical leader whom you admire and would follow.
• Can you share an example of a historical social change that you find inspiring?

I listen for how a client perceives a power structure, how he understands the role or agency of an individual, and how he feels about the rate of change (“Change is so slow!” or “Change can happen overnight”). I listen for beliefs about relationships among groups of people working together and those who hold power.

A primary goal in coaching is to bring belief systems to the surface of our consciousness. Beliefs are powerful things—at their worst, they hold us back when they live in the shadows; at their best, they can propel us forward. In coaching we look at how beliefs are working, examine the results we're getting from holding them, consider tweaking one or two, giving up a few, or we think about how to use them as fuel to keep on going. We look at our actions and consider how our beliefs align with what we actually do, and we consider whether there are areas of misalignment. Beliefs about change are instrumental to draw out as you begin engaging with a client on a change effort.

6. Offer Personality and Psychological Self-Assessments

A number of valuable tools are available for free that can help us get a deeper insight into our client's personality and psychology.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a widely used personality assessment that helps us understand how we perceive the world, make sense of it, and make decisions. There are several free online questionnaires to identify your type, and many articles available to help interpret the results. When a client is willing to share his type, it can be very insightful for a coach. The more we know about a client's personality, the better we can coach.

Another quick personality inventory is the North, South, East, and West: Compass Points activity (which can be downloaded from the National School Reform Faculty website at www.nsrfharmony.org or found on my website.) This is an invaluable tool to use when working with a team and can also be used with individuals. Ask your client what direction she is most like when at work, at home, with friends, and so forth. Then you can ask the questions to prompt reflection on how your client's personality affects the way she works with others.

The field of positive psychology has influenced coaching and has much to offer our practice. It focuses on what is working in our emotional lives and how things ended up going well for us (as opposed to psychology's traditional approach of studying pathology and treating mental illness). One of the founders of this movement, Dr. Martin Seligman, offers over a dozen free well-being questionnaires on his website (www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu) that help people identify their strengths, what makes them happy, what gives them satisfaction, and so on. I often refer clients to these questionnaires and suggest specific ones such as the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire, the Grit Survey, and the Work-Life Questionnaire. I let them know that they might gain new perspectives on who they are and that if they'd like to share the results or their reflections on what they learned, they're welcome to. I have never had a client who did not want to share his results and reflections; they have always experienced these surveys as extremely helpful, as yielding new insights, and as generating ideas for how to improve their lives.

7. Observe the Client

First, ask your client for permission and then observe him in a variety of contexts—greeting parents in the morning, escorting students to lunch, talking with colleagues in the staff room, and so on. As you observe your client, stay in the mind-set of an explorer. Look for strengths, try to get to know who he is and what his work is about, and be mindful of your own lapses in judgment about what you're uncovering.

If you're coaching a teacher, you want to observe her teaching, but this is a tricky to negotiate. You want to make sure you have permission—dropping by unannounced and uninvited can be damaging to an emerging coaching relationship. You also want to establish some agreements with your coachee about what you will observe for and when you will talk about the observation. For the majority of educators, regardless of how long they've been in this profession, being observed is scary. Our professional culture is not one in which we have been regularly observed, nor do we agree on what constitutes “good” teaching. Therefore, it's critical that your observations—especially the first ones—are planned, structured, and focused. (Chapter 12 discusses observations in greater detail.)

If you're coaching a principal, observe him interacting with as many different stakeholders as possible—with teachers, custodians, secretaries, parents, students, and so on. Pay attention to who he engages with, what he says to people, how he says it, how people relate to him, and how he moves through different spaces. It also helps to observe a principal with his supervisors and colleagues. You might ask a principal-client if you can shadow him for a day. Your empathy will increase tremendously, especially if you've never been in this role. If you have been a principal, it will be useful to get a deeper understanding of his unique context so that you don't use assumptions in your coaching from your own experiences.

Within every context that you observe your client, there are power dynamics at play. Looking through a lens of systemic oppression can help clarify these. As your understanding of the equity issues in the classroom or school become clearer, look for information about how your client manages those: Does she actively interrupt them? Does she seem to be oblivious to them? Does she unconsciously play into them and uphold them? Does she notice them but feel powerless?

Whether you're coaching one teacher at a site, multiple teachers, or a principal, you'll also want to get a sense of the staff culture. Meetings are a key to observe—whole staff, grade level, department, leadership team meetings, professional development sessions, and so on. You'll want an understanding of the social context in which your clients work and how they engage with their colleagues. As you get to know your client, you'll look for alignment between who they say they want to be and how they show up in various contexts. To coach for transformation, we need to coach our clients as they move through different spheres.

8. Conduct Formal Interviews and Surveys

If you are coaching a principal and you get permission, it can be very helpful to conduct a few interviews with key stakeholders. Frame it as something like: “It can really be helpful for me to get some additional perspectives on your site. Are there a couple of staff members who you feel would be useful for me to speak with in order to understand this school's history, assets, or challenges? Or someone on-site who you feel knows you well and supports you?” This is essential if you do whole-school coaching and work with teachers, administrators, and teams. Establish explicit agreements about confidentiality, and be very clear with the person you interview and your client about whether the data will be shared with anyone else.

As you engage in interviews, remember that what you hear is one person's perspective, one person's story of events and characters. Their story is their reality, and it might be a reality shared by many, but as you are gathering data you need to remember that it's only one story. It can be hard if you hear a teacher say, “The principal is a dictator. We all want him removed. He is destroying our community,” and you are coaching that principal. Chapter 8, on listening, addresses these challenges.

Surveys can be a powerful way for a coach and teacher or principal to gather data and feedback. If given in the beginning of coaching work, they can be used as baseline data and can be repeated three or six months later to compare results.

The purpose for doing surveys is two-fold: the coach gets more data about the site (classroom or school) and about relationships between people (teachers and students or teachers and staff). Second, the relationship between coach and client deepens as they process the data together and use it to make decisions about a work plan. One reason surveys can be useful is that if done though an online tool, the responses can be anonymous. This can allow data to surface that might not arise in conversations or interviews. Surveys also enable everyone's voice and perspective on an issue to be heard.

Exhibit 6.2 offers a short list of general, simple questions that can be given to a school's staff if you are coaching a principal. Chapter 11 offers other sample surveys and discusses their use in more depth.

9. Look for the Fires

As you talk to stakeholders, gather data and documents, and get to know a site, look and listen for the “fires” that teachers and administrators are frantically trying to put out. Fires are clues about systems that are breaking down. We'll hear them expressed by administrators in comments like these:

1. “My teachers gossip so much!”
2. “Parents don't come for report card conferences.”
3. “I never eat lunch because I'm always on yard supervision.”
4. “Teachers are supposed to turn in lesson plans, and only about 20 percent do so.”
5. “We bought thousands of books for guided reading, and no one is using them.”

In a classroom, common fires might include the following:

1. The teacher who looks like she's playing whack-a-mole, managing student behavior as it pops up and disrupts class, bouncing around the room.
2. The teacher is looking for materials, rifling through piles on his desk, in his bag, in the boxes on the counters, mumbling “I know your tests are here somewhere,” as students get restless.
3. The new teacher who is informed that “grades are due next Monday.” She confesses to her coach that she'd completely forgotten she'd need to do grades and she hasn't really given her students any tests and is behind on grading homework and isn't sure she's seen the report card anyway.
4. The teacher who is frantically cutting out construction paper triangles as students come in after recess.

Underneath these fires and complaints are systems that are breaking down, failing, or don't exist. In the stage of exploration we take notice of them and document them, we listen for those that are recurring and expressed by many, and we might start asking a few questions to start exploring root causes.

The first step in coaching for systemic change is to identify the current reality at a site. It helps to have an understanding of the common systems in use in schools, such as resource allocation, professional development, onboarding of new students and staff, communication and information, discipline and school culture, assessment, and data.

The authors of Blended Coaching write, “The coach's job is to help the client get out of the habit of putting out fires and instead to invest time and energy into installing automatic sprinkler systems and removing fuel and sources of ignition” (Bloom, Castagna, Warren, and Moir, 2005, p. 106). To coach for system change, we must start by cataloguing the fires.

10. Engage in Self-Awareness Exercises for Coaches

This last step will have the greatest impact if taken up simultaneously with data gathering and also if used as a reflection tool at the end.

First, I highly recommend that coaches explore the self-awareness tools, survey, and questionnaires referenced in step 8, earlier in this chapter. They're exceptionally helpful to increase our self-awareness, and if we're going to suggest that clients use them, we need to try them first.

I also encourage coaches to keep a reflective journal. While I'm aware that writing is my preferred way of processing my experiences, I also believe it's a key element of a reflective practice. If you keep a coaching journal, then as you gather the data described in this chapter, record your thoughts, feelings, questions, wonderings, fears, hopes, anxieties, and excitement as you gather data. Just notice—and name—your responses.

Once you've reached a level of saturation in what you've gathered—perhaps you recognize that you have enough to be able to move on to the work plan (Chapter Seven)—then you might respond to the questions in Coach Reflection: Stage of Exploration in Exhibit 6.3 at the end of this chapter.