On the popular TV drama The Pitt, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch presides over an intensely busy urban emergency room, where life and death decisions are made every hour. The Pitt is a teaching hospital, and Dr. Robby is charged with supervising a swarm of young interns and residents. He is their role model, teacher, evaluator, and coach. At various times he advises his charges, works with them side by side, provides feedback, intervenes, and assigns them responsibilities and then stands back and observes. Always, he is both supporting and evaluating his charges. We would call Dr. Robby a practitioner of coaching-based supervision. A similar approach is possible in schools but has been rare to date.

Coaching is an essential element in professional learning in education. Over the past 20 or so years coaches have proliferated in the K-12 universe, focusing on induction, instruction, specific content areas, leadership, and more. Somewhere on the periphery of this movement lie administrators who focus on formal supervision processes. Unlike Dr. Robby, these leaders tend to be focused on evaluation more than support.

There has been a deep current of resistance in the K-12 community to the notion that supervisors can serve as coaches. Cognitive coaching was the pioneering approach to coaching in K-12 education, and many people trained in cognitive coaching were convinced that coaching and supervision were like oil and water, incapable of mixing (Costa & Garmston, 1985; Garmston et al., 1993). Others in the field reinforced this notion, suggesting the responsibility of administrators is the completion of formal summative evaluation processes and that there must be a brick wall between coaching and supervision. When some schools flirted with peer assistance and review 20 years ago the concept met with heavy resistance, largely from professional unions (Bloom & Goldstein, 2000). The argument was that supervisors evaluate, coaches coach, and never the twain shall meet (Tschannen-Moran & Tschannen-Moran, 2011).

The resistance to viewing supervisors as coaches is understandable given the fear that a trusting and safe coaching relationship might be hard to establish and maintain between a boss and subordinate. Yet this hesitation seems ironic in the context of K-12, where most of those who work directly with students — teachers and athletic coaches — serve both coaching and evaluative functions.

This is not to say there is no place for coaches who are nonevaluative; coaches and mentors who maintain a veil of confidentiality outside of supervision often provide unique opportunities for learning and development. But there can be little doubt that supervisors who work from a coaching stance can also play a significant role in nurturing educators’ professional growth

Blended coaching

We have been working in school districts across the U.S. to help leaders rethink the role of supervisors as they seek to support the professional growth of their staff members. Our work is built on a handful of evidence-based premises:

• Teacher and principal quality are the most important school-based variables in improving student outcomes (Grissom et al., 2021).
• Traditional summative evaluation processes have not contributed significantly to improving teacher and principal quality (Kraft & Gilmour, 2017).
• When supervisors ground their practice in coaching rather than an evaluative, directive approach, performance improves (Tschannen-Moran & Tschannen-Moran, 2011).

The districts we work with are reimagining the supervision process as one that is centered around improving performance and outcomes rather than producing annual summative evaluations that are filed away, never to be seen again. They are working to build cultures that prioritize the role of leadership in improving practice through ongoing interaction with their team members and through disciplined coaching conversations.

Our challenge was to develop an approach to coaching that is compatible with the supervisory role. Some coaching models, like cognitive coaching and evocative coaching, are focused inward on a coachee’s ways of thinking and reflection, and on the development of habits of mind. Instructional coaching takes a more pedagogical approach, supporting the development of knowledge and skills. Blended coaching combines and allows these approaches to flex in response to needs and context (Knight, 2009).

Blended coaching makes a distinction between two fundamental objects of coaching: ways of being and ways of doing. Ways of doing are the professional knowledge and skills that are essential to getting the job done. To this end, supervisors may serve as consultants and collaborators, providing guidance, feedback, and resources. Ways of being are the internal and interpersonal characteristics that are critical to our success as teachers and leaders. Supervisors must be prepared to support the development of dispositions and emotional intelligence that are essential to our effectiveness as educators, and they do so through feedback, experience, practice, and reflection.

Blended coaching conversations

Blended coaching, like all effective coaching, requires a bit of formality and structure. A powerful coaching conversation, named and acknowledged as such, begins with a review of the conversation’s goals and any follow up to prior meetings. The conversation is bookended with a summarization of what was discussed and learned, and the commitments by both the supervisor and supervisee to future actions.

In the course of a blended coaching interaction, the supervisor often kicks things off through facilitative questioning intended to clarify both the supervisor and supervisee’s understanding of a problem of practice. Supervisors may ask clarifying questions, they may paraphrase, and they may test interpretations through what we call probing paraphrases. They may provoke the supervisee’s imagination and reflection through mediational questions. If a supervisor determines that a supervisee will benefit from information, advice, or resources, they may take an instructional approach, focusing upon ways of doing.

But many if not most of the struggles that we have as educators fall into the area we call ways of being. And while virtually all K-12 professional standards include categories such as professionalism, they typically do not explicitly address domains of emotional intelligence and dispositions. If supervisors are to support subordinates who struggle with issues such as interpersonal relationships, resiliency, or inherent bias, they must have the skills and courage to take them on. In implementing the blended coaching model, we address and practice these difficult supervision challenges.

Coaching-based supervision conversations incorporate feedback and, when necessary, direction, and it is essential that both are followed by coaching. Effective supervisors provide timely and actionable feedback to their subordinates, with the understanding that feedback from a supervisor carries a lot of weight compared to feedback from pure coaches and others. In blended coaching feedback is derived from a variety of data, including multiple observations in multiple contexts, student achievement data, and other appropriate sources, and whether the feedback is positive or negative it is followed by coaching. Similarly, supervisory direction — a prerogative and power that leaders have but pure coaches do not— is sometimes necessary and always followed by coaching.

Consider the following two approaches to supervision and the differences in how the supervisor frames their comments and questions. Examples of blended coaching from around the U.S. 

As we work with school districts and other jurisdictions around the country, we are seeing a shift toward coaching-based supervision and away from the traditional supervisory model. For example, in a program called Powerful Partnerships across the state of Hawaii, principals and vice principals come together to negotiate their relationships. Principals understand it is their responsibility to coach their vice principals and leadership interns in order to prepare them for the principalship. They build and commit to regular coaching as well as to a goal-centered plan that exposes vice principals to a spectrum of responsibilities. This is a shift in the way administrators typically think about the roles of principals and assistants, and a tremendous investment in the development of the next generation of school leaders in Hawaii.

San Antonio Independent School District in Texas has trained most of its managers, including operational leaders, in coaching-based supervision. The district is pioneering a model in which supervisors are certified in coaching after they have participated in training, engaged in a professional learning community, and submitted artifacts including video of coaching conversations.

Greenville County School District in South Carolina has created an Executive Leadership Institute and trained all executive leaders who serve on the superintendent’s cabinet to use a model of coaching-based supervision. The superintendent is focused on the development, support, and retention of key staff including principal supervisors. Grounded in research demonstrating that well-delivered feedback (from teachers to leaders, from leaders to teachers, or from students to teachers) is one of the top five factors influencing student achievement (Hattie, 1999), Greenville is embedding coaching-based supervision in the district’s culture and systems. 

How to shift toward blended coaching      

A number of things need to happen if we are to truly shift supervision processes from a bureaucratic necessity to a powerful component of professional learning:

• Leaders must understand that growing staff through coaching-based supervision is a fundamental responsibility. This needs to be communicated loudly and clearly through job descriptions and the supervision of supervisors.
• In our time-challenged leadership jobs, ongoing observation and coaching need to become top priorities.
• Supervisors should participate in professional learning communities and other forms of professional learning that support coaching-based supervision.

In The Pitt, we watch Dr. Robby orchestrate a team of experienced and novice professionals, focusing the team on providing the best possible outcomes for every patient coming through the doors, while at the same time teaching and building his team’s capacity. Dr. Robby is at times a boss, a teacher, a counselor, and a coach. That balance of support, challenge, and reflection embodies the essence of coaching-based supervision. It is a model of supervision we might want to aspire to in K-12.