Hello and thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You rock. This post, too, comes to you from Northern Europe. This trip has included, so far, several flights, a 6 hour ferry plus some smaller boat trips, and two long train rides plus another one on Thursday. Most Coaching Letters sit on my computer in draft form for several weeks; all this travel has given me the time to finish up a few and get them out. I don’t want you to think I’ve spent my whole vacation writing. I do actually know how to have a good time.
Can I also just thank all the very kind people who’ve written lovely messages about the new book. One email that came today had the word “Love” as the subject. It’s been particularly gratifying how many people are doing a book study using the book, and I just want to tell you that if there is anything we can do to make that easier for you—for example, by Zooming in to a book group discussion, or helping with guiding questions for a chapter—you should let me know.
This Coaching Letter is about the complicated social interaction we call Making the Ask. If you don’t already know about Recipe Testing, you should read Coaching Letter #190 first—I promise you, it’s worth it. Our theory of improvement relies very heavily on teachers being asked to test recipes, so given that it’s a mission-critical feature, it merits a great deal of attention. What follows is the ChatGPT-generated TL;DR version, and then a fairly long and detailed disquisition that is likely the first draft of a chapter in the next book!
I used to think “making the ask” was a communication skill. Bourdieu convinced me it’s a social practice. Whether someone says yes depends less on the wording than on the social meaning of the request—who is asking, who is being asked, how much it costs to comply, how risky it feels (to ask as well as to say yes), and whether saying yes has become a normal part of the culture. That realization has changed how we design recipe testing. If you want teachers to test new instructional practices, don’t focus on crafting the perfect pitch. Focus on designing asks that are easy to say yes to. Keep them small, make them low risk, ask teams rather than individuals, minimize status differences, support people after they say yes, and make experimentation a normal part of professional practice.
I first told this story in Coaching Letter #216, “On monkeys and pedestals” and, to be clear, it’s not my story. I used it to make a strategy point: don’t spend your effort on the parts of the work that are visible and easy when there is a mission-critical problem that’s going to pose enormous difficulty.
Here’s the story, retold from this blog post by Astro Teller:
Imagine you have been given a strange assignment: teach a monkey to recite Shakespeare while standing on a pedestal. You have two things you could work on. You could build the pedestal, or you could teach the monkey Shakespeare. The pedestal is straightforward and, from a planning point of view, is the obvious thing to tackle first. You can design it, build it, paint it, decorate it, and show progress. If someone asks how the project is going, you can point to the pedestal and say, “Look, we’re making real progress.”
But the pedestal is not the hard part. The hard part is the monkey. If the monkey cannot learn to recite Shakespeare, the quality of the pedestal is irrelevant. You can have the most beautiful pedestal in the world, but the project still fails because the mission-critical element was never solved. So what you should be doing is putting the majority of your efforts towards solving for the monkey, not because the pedestal is useless, but because the pedestal only matters if the monkey can, in fact, recite Shakespeare.
In CL #216, I was using the metaphor to promote a way of asking a strategic question: Are we working on the hard part that determines whether the strategy can succeed, or are we working on the easier part that lets us look productive? I also make an important distinction: the “monkey” is not always the main mechanism itself. Sometimes the monkey is an enabling condition, a chokepoint, a gatekeeper, or a threshold condition without which the mechanism cannot work. So the usefulness of the metaphor is that it gives people a less abstract way to ask: What is the thing that, if we cannot do it, makes everything else beside the point?
The answer to that question is going to vary from place to place. But I have found a very common monkey that I was not expecting, (which I mentioned in CL #216) and that is the ability to ask someone to do something. I called it a plot-twist monkey, because I failed to see it coming.
But I should have seen it coming. Because one of the things we do is train coaches, and I know from experience that there is a dominant mental model that coaches can’t do anything that might possibly be construed as directive. So they use soft language like “I’m wondering if you’ve thought of…” or “What do you think about…” or “Would you consider…” These framings are, from my point of view, a waste of time. Rather than play this coach version of “guess what I’m thinking”, you can a) be direct without being directive (big a-ha for a lot of people), or you can b) suggest that someone try something. So anyway, big overlap here between this aspect of working with coaches and the work we do on instructional improvement.
This is straight out of #216:
A lot of what we’re encouraging districts to work on right now is to enable teams of teachers to test “recipes” for core instructional practices (there’s a particular rationale for use of the recipe metaphor; you can read more about that in CL #190), because testing recipes is the lion’s share of the mechanism for instructional improvement. But the monkey is leaders (or coaches or department chairs, or…) actually asking teachers to try something and report back next week. No monkey, no mechanism; no mechanism, no change.
#216 is only a year old, but it feels like much longer, and we have thought about this a lot. I mean, what’s the big deal? Because we ask people to do stuff all the time, right? I must ask my husband to put the kettle on at least once or twice a day. Why is asking so hard? Then I had a bit of an a-ha while I was reading Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, in which he employs Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writing on gift-giving to make the point that every social practice is governed by a practical logic that participants know without necessarily being able to articulate it. Gift exchange is just his example. But it’s a good one, and funny, too, because some of the norms he points out do indeed matter to us, but they seem so outlandish that they would never occur to us. I had never really thought about any of these rules but I recognize them to be true. Here are some examples:
Gift-giving imparts a social obligation to reciprocate, but you can’t fulfill that obligation by just giving someone back what they gave you.
Timing matters. If you give someone a gift as soon as they give one to you, it looks like you’re just in a hurry to discharge your social obligation to reciprocate, which looks like you value the obligation over the relationship.
The gift cannot be too expensive for the situation—you can’t give a Rolls-Royce to someone you’ve just met—nor can it be too cheap. You have to match the size of the gift to the moment—you can’t give a button as a wedding gift—but you can’t look like you’re matching the gift to pay for your share of the cost of the wedding reception.
Cash means different things in different contexts. You might give $50 to a colleague’s child who’s graduating, but you wouldn’t give $50 to your spouse for their birthday—one seems perfectly normal but the other seems deeply weird.
Declining a gift in some circumstances—your sister wants to give you a pair of shoes that you just don’t think you’re going to wear—is fine, but in others is highly offensive.
Sometimes it is absolutely crucial to get the gift right, and sometimes not, depending on the relationship—I made granola for Rydell to give to him when I saw him at the BTC conference, and then completely forgot about it, and when I told him later, he texted me: “When it comes to you, it really is the thought that counts. Cause whether or not it made the trip, you were thinking about me when you made it.” That text made my day.
And indeed, thoughtfulness matters. Spending $20 on something random that you saw on sale at Kohl’s to give your friend means something entirely different from spending the same amount on something that would mean something significant to them. Andrew and I have a whole gift-giving ritual around dandelions. I just gave Tosh a pop-up book of exercises, and I don’t think I have ever seen anyone so delighted—if it had been about cats he would have been bemused.
So it occurred to me that there is an analogy to making the ask, which I had previously thought of as a skill, but Boudrieu made me see it as existing in a very complex mesh of social norms and expectations. Just as the gift can neither be too big or too small, the ask also carries socially constructed meaning. So what I had thought of as a straightforward thing—asking someone to try something—is actually complex.
First, asking covers all sorts of speech acts. Here are the ones that I came up with on the train—I love the train, I get so much done:
Information (”Do you know the way to the station?”)
Invitation (”Would you like to join us?”)
Permission (”Would it be OK if I sat here?”)
Favor (”Would you water my plants?”)
Request (”Would you test this recipe?”)
Leading question (”Have you considered…?”)
Demand (”Will you please stop doing that?!”)
Proposal (”What if we tried…?”)
Commitment (”Will you own this?”)
Challenge (”Do you think you could manage to…”)
Consultation (”What do you think we should do?”)
Delegation (”Would you take responsibility for...?”)
And then, as Rydell pointed out, sometimes an ask framed in one way is actually something else, as in, “Son, can you take out the trash?” Which leads to the second dimension, which is the difference in rank between asker and askee. Obviously, a parent asking a child to take out the trash is a very different thing from a child asking a parent to take out the trash. When I was a Chief Academic Officer for a district in Colorado, we had a school in a lot of trouble, and I pulled a couple of our C&I specialists into my office and asked them to figure out what it would take for them to spend more time at the school. I was, in my mind, just asking for information, but they heard a directive. Next thing I knew, their supervisor, Kelly, was in my office demanding to know why I was issuing instructions to people who worked for him. So when rank and power are in play the meaning of the ask is altered. Sometimes that’s intentional—I could have asked that question with the assumption that those specialists would indeed take my question as a directive—and sometimes it’s a function of the meaning that people make of the social situation they are in.
Indubitably, rank complicates things. It may be hard to convince a teacher that they are actually being asked when the person doing the asking is the principal. They may think that they are actually being told, or they may think that they could say no but there would be a cost attached—that they would be seen as difficult or resistant, for example—this is the opposite of psychological safety. And they could be right, so it is hard to fault them for being skeptical about the actual neutrality of the ask.
Third, there is the scale of the ask, measured in terms of how easy it is to comply. That ease can be measured in terms of:
Time
Effort
Risk (in education, this is usually around reputation, social standing, and judgment of competence)
Financial cost
Enjoyment
Relationship
For example, if you want me to walk your dog while you’re on vacation, and you live a long way away, so it’s going to take me a long time to get to your house, and will cost me a lot in gas, and I’m going to have to do a lot of walking which may exacerbate my plantar fasciitis, it still may be worth it to me if I love you and/or your dog.
And fourth, there is the difficulty of making the ask, measured in the cost to the asker. Usually a parent pays no price for making an ask, but at work you may feel like you’re making a withdrawal on your social capital, or laying your reputation on the line (“I promise it will work!”), or violating a norm that can’t distinguish between asking and telling, or implying that the other person needs help, or sounding like an administrator, or being bossy, or… any number of undesirable connotations that wrap the simple act of making a request in your mental model of your role, the other person’s role, social norms, and other factors I can’t think of.
Fifth, there is the question of who benefits. If I ask you to help move my couch, clearly I benefit. If I ask you to work with me on a project, then it’s likely that we’ll both benefit. Very occasionally, but don’t count on it, I’ll ask when it’s of no benefit to me—but only if the cost to me is minimal. The only examples I can come up with have to do with airline seats—asking a taller person if they want the aisle, or the younger person if they want the window—I don’t know what that says about me. Asking you to test this recipe—who benefits from that? Well, a lot of that depends on your assumptions and experience—and of course, a lot of your assumptions are based on your experience. The hope is that you quickly realize that these recipes are intended to make it easier for you to teach in a way that supports student thinking, and you see the benefits for your students, but also for you, and your success on both of these dimensions make it more likely that you will be willing to try the next recipe that you are asked to test, which brings you even more success, and increases your investment—Andrew named this the belief-practice flywheel.
OK, so where does this take us? Well, we have some suggestions about how to make the asking of teams to try a new instructional practice easier for all concerned. As with all complex phenomena, no set of instructions can cover all possible eventualities, so here are some simple rules:
Make the ask as small as possible. If the social meaning of an ask depends partly on what it costs to comply, then instructional improvement should begin with asks that are extraordinarily inexpensive. This is one reason we start with the Task Launch recipe. It takes about five minutes. Teachers don’t have to redesign a unit, adopt a new philosophy of teaching, or commit to permanent change. They simply try one small change.
Ask teams, not individuals. Why?
It normalizes experimentation.
It reduces the implication that one individual needs fixing.
It creates mutual support.
It makes participation normative.
It diffuses responsibility.
Normalize recipe testing itself. Gift giving, within your own culture (crucial point, should have made that earlier), works because everyone understands it, even if nobody talks about it. Recipe testing, because it’s new in most places, is subject to misunderstanding, misconstrual, and skepticism—the things that humans do in the presence of something unknown, to minimize risk to themselves. The first ask is hard, the tenth ask is ordinary. So the first ask carries a lot of weight. So make that easier by:
Start with proven recipes. It’s a lot easier to say “I’d like you to try something that I know hundreds of other teachers have tried and liked because…” than it is to say “I’d like you to try this but I’ve never tried it and I don’t know anyone who has.” Obviously the second is infinitely riskier than the first. “Help us see if it works here” is very different from “Yes, you will be the first person to eat an oyster”.
Minimize rank. Whenever possible, don’t have the principal make the ask. Let teacher leaders, facilitators, or colleagues invite other teachers into the work. The smaller the status differential, the easier it is for the request to remain a genuine request rather than being heard as a directive.
Make saying yes easy. That means minimizing cost (barriers to entry) and risk (loss after the fact). That includes, but is not limited to:
planning together
supplying materials
protecting time
collecting evidence
helping interpret results
making failure inexpensive—this is probably the most important, and it mostly comes down to eliminating to the greatest extent possible the possibility of judgment
Reward and support. Make it clear that you appreciate the help, but don’t make it sound like they did something brave or took a risk, because those concepts imply that loss is possible when what you actually want to communicate is that there is no risk. What they are doing is contributing their time and expertise to make everyone—you, them, the organization—smarter in supporting student learning. Don’t make it sound like base-jumping or investing in Bitcoin.
Make the choice reversible. One reason the recipe approach works is that the ask is not, “Will you teach this way forever?” It is, “Will you try this once and tell us what happened?” That dramatically lowers the stakes. You’re asking for an experiment, not a conversion.
So, obviously, making the ask is a great deal more complicated than I initially thought. Story of my life. But it turns out to be super important. The intent of this Coaching Letter is to give you ways of thinking about it to make it easier for you to propagate asking. I also refer you, then, to CL #225 on Practice Architectures, so that you can use this Coaching Letter to think about crafting the Practice Architectures you need to make recipe testing normal and successful in your setting. And if you need help with any of this, please let me know. Best, Isobel
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.