Coaching is most effective when it builds problem-solving skills and self-efficacy in coachees. To achieve this, effective coaches structure their coaching conversations in intentional ways to promote and support a client’s thinking rather than simply offering advice or suggestions to address the immediate problem. These coaching decisions not only promote professional growth but foster ownership and accountability for implementation and ownership of outcomes.
Even as the coach and client likely have positive regard for one another, effective coaching must be purpose driven and grounded in skills with proven effectiveness for professional growth and impact on student outcomes. It is not social; it is not advice; nor is it supervisory. What we call “coaching language” is a unique set of skills that requires intentional application of acquired expertise.
Underlying this intentional use of coaching language is an understanding that a coach works best when they “read” the level of support needed by their coachee-client and uses this understanding to offer the level of support that best promotes the self-efficacy on the part of their coachee.
“Reading” the client’s needs is a continual and evolving judgement based on the sum-total of what the coach knows about the client as an educator, including observations of their current classroom practice, their experience in dealing with the current curriculum, and their understanding of legal, district, and campus non negotiables.
Navigating the coaching continuum
At Learning Forward, this adaptable level of coaching support is expressed as a continuum that includes coaching, collaborating, and consulting, giving coaches a range of ways of partnering with teachers within each and every conversation. Successfully navigating this continuum requires specific professional expertise on the part of the coach. They must understand:
- The full range of the conversational continuum
- Where their personal default mode of communication falls along the continuum
- How and when to intentionally use each of the conversational modalities to support learning and problem-solving
- The benefits and potential pitfalls of each stance
- How to smoothly navigate along the continuum within each conversation to meet the immediate need of the coachee
Although a coach’s intentional default mode should be the coaching language modality, they must be competent in navigating the continuum because providing the right support at the right time matters to the effectiveness of the coaching and can affect the trust that’s built through a coaching relationship.
The coaching continuum explained
The Consulting stance: When supporting someone in this way, a leader or coach is relying on their own experience and expertise to give advice, make suggestions, or offer an opinion of what to do. The coach is the one who’s supplying answers, doing the thinking, the processing, and the problem-solving. This is typically the fastest way to move through a conversation and through a list of people who want or need our support, but often leads to increased dependence, as those people keep coming back for advice or to double-check their thinking. Additionally, the coach may observe that actual implementation does not look like what the coach envisioned. This is often true because the coachee was given a solution rather than building it from their own experience and understanding of practice. Additionally, this level of support, when used too often, can undermine the coachee’s ownership of outcomes because, from their perspective, they have only been doing what they were told to do.
The Collaborating stance is about working together, for example, brainstorming and problem-solving together to make decisions. Collaboration is the hallmark of Professional Learning Communities and teacher teams and is valuable for tapping into the expertise of everyone in the group. To work in this modality, coaches must decide how they will handle the situation if the teacher ultimately decides on an approach different from the coach’s suggestions. Overriding the coachee’s decision and directing them to take a different approach could result in undermining the coachee’s confidence in their decision making. Manipulating the conversation to push for the coach’s preferred choice could undermine trust in the coaching process. A wise coach remembers that every teaching experience can support a teacher’s understanding of how their choices impact student outcomes. Collection and review of student observations and artifacts during a reflection conversation can support the development and refinement of a teacher’s understanding of how their choices shape outcomes.
The Coaching stance is a set of conversational skills that moves the cognitive work from the coach to the coachee-client. The coach’s role in this stance is to exclusively support the other person’s thinking, processing, and problem-solving skills. I sometimes think of this as being a “human post-it note” because the coachee’s role here is notice and note ideas, patterns, and insights as they emerge; to offer these back to the client at appropriate times, and to help the client clarify ideas by asking open-ended questions that invite the coachee to explore their thinking deeply and creatively. Serving a teacher from this stance builds the coachee’s efficacy, strengthens their agency, and increases confidence in their own problem-solving skills. This, in turn, builds their capacity to be life-long, self-directed learners who continuously improve their professional practice.
Effective coaching is more than good listening—it’s the way of relating to another person that creates safety for innovative thinking that moves beyond the obvious or most frequently used solutions. Coaches foster this safety and intellectual freedom by how they show up, how they ask questions, paraphrase, pause, and offer positive presuppositions. The continuum is one tool coaches use to create this safety and freedom, but it’s equally important to remember that although we describe the coaches’ actions with common conversational terms, these words actually describe a unique set of skills that require targeted professional learning for coaches and ongoing practice and refinement.
In my next coaching blog, I will focus on how those who support coaches—campus leaders, coordinators of coaching programs, coach advocates, and coaches themselves—can assess their coaches’ effective use of the continuum while maintaining the coach-coachee confidentiality necessary to sustain the trust and the vulnerability that many adults feel when in the role of learner.
Learn more
More coaching insights from Sharron Helmke:
Three reasons to turn to coaching when things feel most challenging
Partner with Learning Forward for coaching expertise
Learning Forward has the coaching expertise and the experience developing coaching programs to support district and campus leaders who are striving to maximize the impact of coaching at every level. Bring expertise to the intentional development of your own and your team’s coaching skills. Contact Sharron Helmke, [email protected], to find out how we partner with you to develop the skills coaches need to move from support to learning leadership.
