Coaching cut #48: Changing the subject

This pitfall shows up at the beginning of the conversation when the coach is telling the teacher what they thought was effective about the teaching they observed. This part of the conversation is full of learning opportunities for the coachee. But it’s also the part that’s easiest to cut short, especially when the teacher won’t accept the praise and starts changing the subject!

It’s an easy pitfall to fall into…

Praise can feel a bit uncomfortable for some people. They’d rather get stuck into what they could improve. This is perhaps even more natural in teaching because the impact of the work really matters. Teachers know that, and so they feel a responsibility to always be looking at what they can do better.

These two things mean that when a teacher wants to move the conversation away from what they did well and onto what they might work on, it can feel like the right thing to let them. For example:

“I thought the way you brought the students into the lesson at the beginning was really effective. They were sat down and working within 45 seconds of the first student entering the room. Talk to me about what you did to achieve that.”

“Yeah, they were down to work quite quickly but when I was ready to move on, three of them on the back row hadn’t got past the first question and I was a bit annoyed with myself for not spotting that earlier.”

It would be really easy for the coach here to reply with something like:

“OK, so let’s think about what might have led to you not spotting that earlier.”

And off the conversation goes into improvement territory. The praise is done. A box has been ticked and the coach and coachee have moved on.

But here’s the problem. A big part of getting better is understanding the most effective parts of your practice and doubling down on those. Letting the coachee change the subject before that depth of thinking has been done means surface level thinking gets to pass as good enough. The teacher knows they did something well but they don’t know why it worked, what specifically they did to cause it, or how they’d adapt it in a different context.

The coach’s job is to be responsive to the teacher but it’s also to guide where the teacher’s attention goes during different parts of the conversation. If the coach knows there are gains to be made by staying on the subject for longer, they need to keep the conversation focused and not let the subject change too early.

In the clip below, coach Sarah starts to dig into something that coachee Adam did well. Coachee Adam avoids talking about what went well and instead changes the subject to something he noticed that didn’t go so well. At this point, coach Sarah goes with Adam’s focus and they begin to talk about the problem Adam had brought up…

We bring the conversation back to the focus that we know holds a learning opportunity for the teacher. This isn’t about forcing the teacher to hear more praise even if it makes them uncomfortable. It’s about the coach using their preparation and what they saw in relation to learning to guide the teacher’s thinking about their actions and student learning. In short: we get our coachee to think hard about what made the success a success!

Let’s see it done better…

In the example below, you’ll see coach Sarah bring coachee Adam back to the positive and explain why…

If you like what you see, you’ll love our upcoming book ‘Coaching for Adaptive Expertise’, co-written with Dr Haili Hughes, available for pre-order now!