Fearless Coaching

INTRODUCTION This is the essence of Fearless Coaching: When the teacher, team or leader who is being coached is so psychologically safe that they can learn without fear. They can talk with their coach about challenges and mistakes they have made—and leave each coaching meeting with a profound sense of resilience and confidence. On days when these clients doubt whether they make a positive impact on students and colleagues, the Fearless Coach will provide evidence that their work matters. This book is divided into the following four parts. Part I reviews the evidence about why Fearless Coaching works. That is, effective coaching is not solely associated with achieving organizational goals, student achievement, parent engagement, and collaborative learning by faculty members and leaders. Effective coaching is also related to higher levels of emotional and physical well-being by the clients. Fearless Coaches know that the appearance of a school’s success can be a pyric victory, but the cost of that success can be burnout and turnover of staff. This challenge is particularly acute in high-poverty schools where one program is piled on top of another, and teachers and administrators strain under the weight of initiative fatigue. Chapter 1 considers what makes Fearless Coaches different. There are many coaches out there with little in the way of standard practice, leading the Harvard Business Review to refer to coaching as the “wild west.” In these pages, readers will see that Fearless Coaching is a rigorous and systematic approach to helping teachers, leaders, and teams. Chapter 2 reveals the 11 biggest coaching mistakes and how to avoid them. Chapter 3 considers the coach-client relationship. If you are beginning your coaching journey as a client or coach, then Chapters 4 and 5 are especially important. These chapters specify what the clients can expect from the coach and what the coach can expect from the client. Part II addresses the subject of passion. This is the energy that drives coaching success. Fearless Coaches are passionate not only about the mission of schools but also about the people in them. Both clients and coaches need deep reservoirs of emotional energy to sustain their work. Chapter 6 concentrates on contrasting visions of the future. The passion required for coaching stems from a powerful vision of the future success of students when teaching and leadership are successful, as well as from an equally vivid vision of the future of students when schools do not succeed. The latter vision lasts not only for a single school year but for decades to come. When students do not leave high school ready for success in the workplace, they face a lifetime of poverty, unemployment, excessive medical-care costs, and involvement in the criminal justice system. Fearless Coaches insist that student success is a public health issue, and we must now take our commitment to student success as seriously as our collective commitment to student health and safety. Chapter 7 outlines sources of emotional energy, and Chapter 8 details sources of emotional drag. Educators and administrators are frequently so hard on themselves that they fail to recognize the positive impact they have. The Fearless Coach does not flatter the client but is obligated to provide objective feedback on what is working from the classroom to the boardroom. Chapter 9 considers the power of focus, with striking evidence that there is an inverse relationship between the number of priorities a school and district have and gains in student achievement. Chapter 10 eviscerates the plague of initiative fatigue, a primary source of burnout for teachers and leaders. Part III is devoted to the special case of coaching teams, from teams of classroom teachers to cabinet officers at school districts, counties, and other jurisdictions. Chapter 11 details the complex challenges of district teams, including the superintendent’s cabinet. Those are probably the most expensive meetings in any district, and this chapter details ways in which this time and money can be invested more wisely. Chapter 12 considers the importance of coaching school-level teams, including collaborative teams of teachers and school leadership teams. Since cowriting “The futility of PLC Lite” with the late Rick DuFour, coaching collaborative teams of teachers has provided one of the best returns on investment we have observed. Within just a few months, these teams are proceeding from PLC Lite to effective teams focused on the essentials of Professional Learning Communities: learning, assessment, support, and enrichment. In addition, this team coaching saves time for teachers and administrators by replacing endless forms that divert time away from meaningful collaboration with streamlined four-line emails that correspond to the four questions of a successful Professional Learning Community. Part IV addresses the issue of results and measuring what matters most. This is far more than test scores but also includes leading indicators—the measurable actions of educators and school leaders and how they support the results that policymakers seek. Chapter 12 offers a fundamental restructuring of educational accountability from a focus only on effects—typically test scores, attendance, graduate rates, and discipline data—to a focus on causes. This would give schools and districts the liberty to establish more constructive accountability systems that would reveal to policymakers and the public the specific teaching and leadership practices that are most effective in the individual environment, culture, agenda, budget, and labor agreement of each system. Without this essential understanding of the causes of student success, schools are doomed to repeat past practices without insight as to the relationship of these practices to student results. Chapter 14 addresses specific leading indicators that educational systems can monitor, focusing on a few high-leverage practices that have a disproportionate impact on student achievement. Chapter 15 considers the results indicators and how teachers and leaders can draw a straight line from causes to effects. Chapter 16 discusses how coaching is evolving in the post-pandemic world, recognizing that as this book goes to press in the 2022–2023 school year, it is far from clear that the pandemic is over. Schools will be dealing with the lingering effects of quarantines, absences, learning loss, emotional isolation, and behavioral impacts of the pandemic for many years to come. Fearless Coaches must recognize that when teachers and administrators are facing the crisis of the day, it’s hard to reflect on a strategic plan. We therefore insist that the coaching cycle includes not only a long-term vision, but short-term wins that restore the confidence of faculty, leaders, families, and policymakers. The book concludes with Chapter 17, which provides practical ideas on how to transform theory into practice. While the reference section includes abundant citation sources, our experience is that the research that matters most to teachers and building leaders is a systematic analysis of local evidence of impact. The question is not: What works?—but rather: What works right here, right now? The Afterword addresses why Fearless Coaching matters for the greater good, not only for the students for whom we have direct responsibility but for society at large. The Appendices include reproducible forms that coaches and clients may wish to use to help them communicate effectively with one another and with their colleagues. There’s work to be done, so let’s get started.