1. Identify Areas for Coaching: What's the Big Picture?

First we identify a couple of broad areas of pedagogical or leadership practice that our client wants to work on. For example, for a teacher, these could be within one of the following domains: lesson or unit design, teaching the Common Core State Standards, classroom management, academic language, checking for understanding, data analysis, classroom culture, routines and procedures, or others. A principal might want to work on distributing leadership, communication, professional development, resource management, building teams, accountability, inspiring and motivating staff, or his own emotional intelligence.

Coaches also need to take into account schoolwide initiatives or expectations about what clients work on. If, for example, a school is focusing on cooperative learning structures and all teachers are expected to use these strategies, we'll raise this matter with our client as a possible area of focus. A coach can also help bridge an external mandate with a client's authentic area of need or interest. For example, if we're working with a first-year teacher who is concerned about her classroom management skills, but who has been told to focus on cooperative learning structures, we can coach the teacher on the management strategies that will allow her to effectively implement cooperative learning structures.

If coaching is connected to broader school- or district-level efforts, there is a greater possibility that coaching will be reinforced in professional development sessions, peer observations, and the like, and that we can better support our clients. This can also focus and narrow the scope of our work—and, in general, the narrower the better. However, if clients feel forced by their principal or district to implement practices or policies that they don't believe in, this can be challenging. In that case, a coach should probably start with a goal area that the client is authentically invested in.

When we're helping clients identify these areas, we also want to ensure that they are high-leverage areas to work in. A high-leverage area is one that has great potential for improving the experience and outcomes of students, particularly those who are struggling the most; it is also an area that, if addressed, would positively spill over into other areas—it would leverage other improvements. Improvements in many areas of teaching and leading can point to this end, and a coach needs to use her own knowledge to ensure this alignment and also make this explicit with a client. We always ask, “And what would that mean for students if your work improves in that area?”

2. Identify Standards and Criteria

In conjunction with the conversation about goal areas, we'll need to determine if there are external standards and criteria that we could, or should, use—standards or rubrics of effective teaching, evaluation tools, administrator's leadership standards, or externally mandated improvement plans. These tools can be useful if they are developmental and growth-oriented, if the criteria are clear and concrete, and if the client feels they are authentic. However, if the client does not feel that the tools are valid or feels that they could be used for punitive measures, then we should use them only to the extent that we must. This can be a tricky negotiation. Coaches will need to explore how to make something like an improvement plan that has been handed down from the central office as meaningful and relevant as possible.

If measurement tools for teaching or administration don't exist, then a coach can select a tool with the client or create a new tool. Measurement tools can be helpful for framing a goal around practice, but are not essential.

3. Determine a SMARTE Goal

SMART goals are gap-closing goals: We use them to attain a result that is different from what currently exists.

O'Neill and Conzemius (2006, p. 43)

Once we have identified one or two high-leverage areas the client would like to focus on—and whether we can use measurement tools such as standards or rubrics—then we'll work toward developing a goal. Unfortunately, teachers and principals may have had negative experiences with goal setting. For example, educators are often asked to create annual goals, which are submitted to a supervisor in the fall and are filed away and never discussed. Coaches need to know if the client has any distrust or cynicism about goals, and if he does, you need to address it. Creating goals with a coach should be invigorating. It's another step in supporting clients to envision and describe the improved-self they'll work toward. In the process of creating the goals, we also want to foreshadow how goals will be used and how often we'll reflect on them; this is important to get the client's buy-in.

In order for a goal to be an effective tool in a client's transformation, the goal needs to be a good goal—a “SMART” goal. Jan O'Neill's and Anne Conzemius's (2006) book, The Power of SMART Goals, is an essential resource at this stage of coaching. While the term SMART goal has been around for a long time, these authors define the acronym as strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results-based, and time-bound. Some organizations have added an E to represent equitable, thus the SMARTE goal.

1. Strategic and Specific: A strategic goal is aligned, when possible, to larger efforts—to a school or district's goals. A strategic goal is also one that, if reached, will make a significant difference to students. In order to help a teacher or leader determine a strategic goal, a coach needs to apply his knowledge of content and instructional practice or of leadership practice.
2. A specific goal is focused, narrow, and targeted. It is the difference between “I will teach reading comprehension” and “I will teach students how to summarize nonfiction text.”
3. It's essential that the goal be articulated as a change in teacher or administrator practice—not as improvement in student learning. We want to create goals that are fully within the sphere of influence where our own learning and growth are found. We want to articulate the connection between how our growth in practice will affect students' growth—and it's fine to include goals about our hopes for students' results when we meet our goals—but our client's goal always needs to be about her own practice as a teacher or leader.
4. Measurable: A measurable goal is critical. When our goals are not measurable, they can feel frustrating and unreachable. Many people have made goals to “get healthier,” but without any specific, measurable ends, we often fail. In schools, it can be equally hard for teachers and leaders to recognize their growth and success because this element of a goal has not been articulated. When writing a measurable goal, be sure not to use any adjectives or adverbs as descriptors—those words create judgment- and opinion-based goals, and fact-based goals will be much more helpful here.
5. Attainable: Goals need to motivate and make us stretch, but they also need to be attainable. In order to support clients to create an attainable goal, a coach needs to have a good sense of where a client is in terms of skill development—we need to have ascertained his zone of proximal development, and we need to help him see what's just a few leaps out of reach. A coach must understand the dimensions of the gap between where our client is in a strategic area of practice and where he wants to get to. It's our responsibility to determine what it'll take to close this gap and to identify how much focus, time, energy, and resources we can put into helping our client close the gap. This is a tricky balance: we don't want to aim too low—we must have high expectations and believe that our client can make remarkable accomplishments, but we also don't want to set someone up for failure. This is why creating a SMARTE goal is much easier if there's a rubric and criteria to use; then a teacher can self-assess and identify an attainable stage that she'd like to reach.
6. Results-Based: A results-based goal compels us to explore the impact the goal could have. We can ask our client, “Imagine you've met the goal. What is the result?” This can help us distinguish between a process goal—“I will teach a unit on persuasive writing,” and a goal that has a clear result—“I will give feedback to my students on a weekly basis that results in 95 percent of my students producing a persuasive essay that scores at least a 4 out of 5 on our rubric.” A results-based goal means something to children, it can't be accomplished without teacher learning, and it is motivating.
7. Time-Bound: A time-bound goal is framed within a specific time period. A teacher, for example, may decide to improve relationships with families by having parent-teacher conferences. The difference between a time-bound goal is clear when we compare these two goals: “I will have parent-teacher conferences with all of my students,” and “I will have one parent-teacher conference with the parent(s) of each of my students within the next two months.” A time frame builds accountability and commitment. It helps us determine exactly what we need to do in order to be successful.
8. Equitable: An equitable goal is one that addresses the needs of students who are not succeeding, whose needs are not being met, or who traditionally have been outside the sphere of success. The entire goal itself might be aimed at supporting a population of students who are struggling—for example, English language learners or students who have learning disabilities or African American males—or there can be an element of the goal that specifically focuses on a segment of the population. The purpose of including this element in the goal is to bring focus and awareness to students who need additional support. A transformational coach is intentional about interrupting patterns of inequity and supporting the students whom our system has failed. This is another moment when a coach might apply her own knowledge about the experience of children at a site or in a district to guide a client through this process.

The most effective goals are those that focus on a clear change in practice. Some clients may want to focus, for example, on increasing their emotional intelligence, developing better relationships with colleagues, or managing stress. While these are worthy aspirations, when establishing a goal it is more effective to settle on an instructional or leadership practice that can be measured precisely. Emotional intelligence, stress, and relationships will arise in conversations about goals—most likely these will be key areas of growth to address in order to meet goals—but they should not be identified as the end goal.

A client can also create subgoals under the main goal. For example, a principal may decide that his end goal is a highly functioning leadership team. In order to meet this goal, the principal may need to set a subgoal about communication. He may recognize that he needs to communicate in a way that invites others to take leadership and expresses his receptivity to other ideas. This principal may know that he won't achieve his larger goal without working on these areas, and in that case he should formulate a subgoal. This kind of subgoal, however, is hard to measure—it is very subjective, but it is worth naming because this can be the zone in which transformational change happens. Subgoals about emotional intelligence and relationships are also hard to measure. Naming these areas as subgoals gives us an entry point into these conversations while also saving us from gathering hard evidence to prove that the goal was met.

4. Identify High-Leverage Activities

The next step is to identify the activities that will guide a client toward his goal. This happens in two parts—first, in a brainstorming conversation with the client, and then you can reflect on the work thus far and add other activities that might be helpful.

This conversation continues until coach and client have exhausted their ideas about what actions might lead to meeting the goal—this is a first start at exploring the gaps in the client's skills, knowledge, and capacity. This list can be added to or modified as coaching plays out. It provides immediate ideas of what happens within coaching; it should be instructive, inspiring, and exciting.

5. Break Down the Learning

At this point, after eliciting the client's perception of the actions that will lead her to accomplish her goals, the coach retreats to think and plan alone. It is essential that coaches determine where a client is in her learning; we can only coach within the ZPD, and the parameters of this zone can be murky. It takes a while to know our clients as learners and we can roughly identify a ZPD by listening, observing, and asking questions. Coaching challenges often stem from the coach's inaccurate assessment of the client's ZPD. As we get to know them, we also anticipate the scaffolding we need to construct in order to help the client build her skills.

For example, let's say the teacher we're coaching wants to use literature circles in her classroom and has never done so. She has identified some actions that she thinks will help her reach a goal around developing this structure, but she can't gauge how much she doesn't know. Using knowledge of this instructional practice, a coach can identify the skills, knowledge, ability, and capacities that the teacher needs to have in order to successfully implement literature circles. The coach knows that the teacher will need to understand the students' reading levels and interests, identify appropriate texts, order or gather materials, group students, communicate expectations and procedures, delineate roles for discussions, and so on.

For each of these teacher actions, the coach must assess her client's capacity to implement them. The coach may know, for example, that the teacher has a database for tracking student's reading levels, but that she struggles to communicate procedures. Literature circles are procedure-heavy; the coach recognizes this as an area for focused coaching.

At this stage the coach works alone to plot a course of coaching actions. When we show up to a coaching session, we navigate between letting the client direct the conversation where he needs to go and steering the conversation toward the ends the client has determined. But in order to steer effectively (as we often need to do), we must have thought through the learning chunks. When we haven't done this planning, we are likely to forget components of knowledge and skill that the client needs in order to be successful.

After reflecting on the chunks of learning that a client must engage in, we add to the list of high-leverage activities. When we review the plan with the client, we'll point out the activities that we added and explain our reasoning.

6. Determine Indicators of Progress

In the next step, we return to a conversation with the client to agree on the data and evidence we'll gather along the way to demonstrate progress toward goals. This conversation is another opportunity to identify the changes the client is hoping to make and how those changes will be evident.

For a goal like Teresa's (the teacher), the evidence will be easy to collect: documents that track student performance, feedback forms and copies of feedback to students, and the coach's direct observations of the conferences with students are all relevant data that will show that the teacher met her goals. However, when the goals are more subjective, then data are a little trickier to gather.

7. Develop Coaching Theories of Action

A theory of action is an articulated rationale behind a strategy that's meant to improve student learning. It's expressed in a simple if-then statement, but it also needs to be specific and explicit in its reasoning. This helps us to be clear on what each element of our plan is intended to result in. Although it may need to be revised once it's in play, your theory of action is your best thinking made explicit.

This stage of planning is done alone by the coach and doesn't need to be shared with the client—it's the equivalent of a teacher's lesson plans. This is when the coach thinks through what she needs to do in order for the client to meet his goals. We consider the coaching strategies we'll try and anticipate how our client's practice will shift. We also take time to consider and articulate the strategies that could result in systems change.

Here are theories of actions that I developed to help Teresa meet her goals:

1. If I scaffold Teresa's learning and apply a gradual release of responsibility model
2. And if I coach Teresa on time management
3. And if I help her explore her beliefs about giving students feedback consistently and systematically
4. And if I engage Teresa in a range of facilitative and directive coaching activities
5. Then she will stay committed to these goals all year and receive the support she needs in order to meet her goals
6. And then there is a greater likelihood that student performance in her class will improve.

And these were my strategies to work toward systems change at Teresa's school:

1. If I coach Teresa to develop effective systems for assessment in her classroom
2. And if we can document these and gather data on their impact
3. Then we can present these systems and findings to her ELA department and propose their usage schoolwide
4. And then there is a greater likelihood that student performance across the school will improve.

8. Determine Coach's Goals

This step is also done alone by the coach or with coach-colleagues. Ideally, the coach has a set of standards by which to guide and assess her coaching. The transformational coaching rubric (in Appendix C) is such a tool. In light of the client's goals and her theories of action, the coach determines which coaching practices she needs to focus on and hone in order to reach these ends. For example, a coach might reflect on the development of her coaching skills and then look at her emerging plan and decide that with this client, she'll need to refine her observation and feedback skills. Or the coach may recognize that she's inconsistent in her application of adult learning theories and determine that her client would benefit if she were more systematic and intentional in this area.

What's essential is that the coach look at her own practice and consider where she'll need to grow and develop in order to meet the needs of her client.

9. Compile Resources

At this stage, the coach identifies key texts or resources she might use, such as books, articles, curriculum guides, other teachers or specialists, trainings, workshops, and online resources. These are primarily for the coach to access and draw from, but they can also be shared with the client. There are inevitably some areas of teaching and leading that coaches aren't deeply knowledgeable about; we can't be experts on everything. To me this aspect of the work is very appealing, because I can continue to learn. Furthermore, we want to make sure that the strategies we offer educators or the suggestions we make about whole-school change are grounded in best practices and reflect recent thinking about education.

10. Present and Celebrate the Plan

The final step in this stage of coaching is for the coach to write up the plan and present a copy to the client. A teacher might want to select sections of the plan such as her goals to share with the principal, or she might be expected to share them. It can be useful for principals or supervisors to know what kind of work is happening with a coach—it can build their support for coaching and demystify the process. Supportive principals can also be a resource for a teacher and can reinforce, encourage, and help deepen the coaching work. The client, however, always has the final say about whether anyone other than the coach's supervisor sees the work plan—as long as that person is not also the client's supervisor.

When presenting the plan, the coach's attitude and energy need to be infectiously positive. Clients can feel overwhelmed, apprehensive, and intimidated by a challenging work plan—they are taking a big risk in trusting you to guide them through a long series of activities that will hopefully help them meet their goals. This moment—when you lay that printed copy of the work plan on a teacher's desk—is an opportunity for you to express confidence in the teacher's ability to learn and grow, to communicate excitement about the journey you are both embarking on, and to recall the connection between the client's goal and how children will be affected.