“So now you want me to be a coach!?”
This was a common thread woven throughout the feedback following Elena Aguilar’s The Art of Coaching Institute hosted in Wisconsin, August 2017.
It was my first month as the Wisconsin Coaching Coordinator, a position new to the state, and I was feeling both overwhelmed and ecstatic that coaching was being embraced and shared by the state to such a large group of educational leaders.
A month later (when I momentarily came up for air from all the new learning) I started sorting through the feedback and realized that we had failed to do the very thing I will suggest in this blog post; be clear about how we hoped to define roles.
When you are in a position where you wear many hats; especially with the same client, there are three simple, but key guidelines to follow. The first is to have a working definition for each of the hats you wear. It is important that you have a working job description for each role you are required to perform. This will make you feel more confident in your work and clarify the work for the client. Equally important if you are working for an organization or educational service center, is that you have agreed on a common definition of roles. A few years ago I was working for an educational service center as an instructional coach and a medium sized district hired me to work with PLCs (Professional Learning Community) in all content areas to incorporate more writing into their curriculum. This district had a long history of working with the service center and they had also contracted with an EL (English Learner) coach and several content specialists. I began working with PLCs as they planned and started asking them questions about writing and their content area in general. After a few weeks I asked if they felt comfortable bringing in some student writing samples. One PLC member said, “How can we, you haven’t given us any strategies yet.” After inquiring on this statement a little more, I found that the EL coach has been providing the PLCs with specific strategies to engage EL students. The instructional coach team at the service center had defined their role and likely the EL coach department had as well, but we had failed to communicate across departments. This lead to both confusion for our clients and some embarrassment on our end. Had we some shared understanding of our roles, we could have defined them for the teachers we were working with.
Which leads into guideline two-- Transparency is key. It is better to be direct and explicit with clients regarding the role you find yourself in. I had been providing some professional development for an English department over the course of the summer and then was asked to return and coach the English department PLCs. When I returned to the PLCs I explained that I would be switching to a coaching role and gave them a document called, “What a coach is….What a coach isn’t” to ensure that we both knew exactly what my role was.
The final guideline is to be flexible, yet firm. You want to provide the client what they need, but you don’t want them to expect that it will always be done for them. When I showed up to coach another PLC they asked me what PD I had ready for them that day. I had to re-explain my role and told them that if there were some topics they needed to build capacity around, we could put them on the calendar. This way I was still providing them with what they needed without confirming the expectation that I would be in charge of PLC learning and meetings.
Now let’s take a moment to talk specifically about the two terms facilitator and coach since much of the feedback following The Art of Coaching Institute was directly connected to how these two terms are different. There isn’t a simple answer for this one. Depending on who you turn to in the coaching world, you may get a different response. Joellen Killion lists facilitator as one of several roles an instructional coach might use. Elena Aguilar has used the two terms interchangeably. Some models of coaching consider facilitation part of a continuum.
I would argue that the most important thing is that you stick to the three aforementioned rules-have a definition that works for you and be transparent with your clients.
If I could go back to the institute I would have been clear with participants that we were not asking them to become coaches, but rather learn some coaching strategies to infuse into their work. I would have reminded them that their clients would still be depending on them to act in the capacity of consultant or trainer, but their might be moments when it would be appropriate to switch hats and take on the role of coaching---just be sure everyone knows which hat you are wearing!
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