Episode 12: Becca Silver and Instructional Coach Relationships

Show Notes, Episode X: Title About this show:Today I’m joined by Becca Silver the founder and lead consultant at The Whole Educator. Becca has been posting some great stuff on LinkedIn, which is where we met. Becca is here to help us explore the AP – Instructional coach relationship.  Notable Quotes  Becca Silvers“Teachers are diverse learners, just like their students, we should not be giving out blanket coaching strategies” “Don’t treat people the way you would want to be treated, treat people the way they want to be treated. And that takes skill! It takes skill to understand how people want to be treated, right, listening skills, an ability to read people, emotional intelligence” “Some coaches don’t see themselves as leaders” “[instructional coaches] are not formal observers and evaluators, they are the champions of teachers, standing for teachers to be at their highest potential” “we need coaches to be able to work with people that aren’t necessarily like them” “during the pandemic and especially this year, you are seeing instructional coaches being pulled all over the place, they are covering classes, any catch all jobs that need get done… and it’s a total misuse of talent in the building.” “Brown’s definition of leadership: ‘A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes and who has the courage to develop that potential.’ And I see the coaches’ role being that.” “I think that coaches job is to help[ teachers reflect, be a partner in reflection, and there can be vulnerability in that… be the safe space for teachers to be vulnerable, to make mistakes, its safe to take risks here, and there is no formal evaluation at all” “how wonderful would it be for an AP to say “hey look, I am your thought partner here and when we are helping to grow teachers, we do this together, and I am here to support you and you are here to support me right? We are different parts of the body that surrounds and supports teachers” “Adults also operate on a growth and fixed mindset. A lot of the times when we have a teacher that is stuck. many times it is because they are operating under a fixed mindset” “Part of building trust is being transparent about our intentions, motive, and agendas”“Underlying all human behaviors are peoples’ mindsets and motivations, and we want to be sure that we are being trained ourselves to address people’s underlying mindsets and motivations when we want teachers’ behaviors to change” Frederick“One of the things that I am trying to help administrators come to the place on is that their role is to support teachers. As a principal or assistant principal, you have two jobs: keep everyone safe and improve student learning” “This is the problem right? That we can’t easily access models. We can talk about coaching models, teaching models, but when it comes to what should this relationship look like, it gets harder because there isn’t that stuff out there.” “Teach your teachers that you are there to support them” “people were promoted and put in these roles (instructional coaches) and not only did we not do a great job at telling the coaches what their job is, but we didn’t tell the administrators how to use them either, so there is this big disconnect” “the essential problem is that we don’t take a systems approach to growing teachers” “Traditional coaching is about doing, transformational coaching is about seeing” Links:Becca Silver at The Whole Educator: https://www.thewholeeducator.com/My email: [email protected] The Assistant Principal Podcast website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/appodcast.html Sign up for the daily leadership email: https://mailchi.mp/c15c68e6df32/specialedition Website: www.frederickbuskey.comBlog: www.frederickbuskey.com/blog (reposts of the daily email)