[00:01] SPEAKER_01:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_02:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Peter DeWitt. Peter is an education consultant who works around the U.S. and around the world, focusing on collaborative leadership and fostering inclusive school climates. Within North America, his work has been adopted at the university and state level, and he works with numerous districts, school boards, regional and state organizations, where he trains leadership teams and coaches building leaders.
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Peter is the author of five books, including his new book, Coach It Further, using the art of coaching to improve school leadership.
[00:48] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:50] SPEAKER_02:
Peter, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.
[00:52] SPEAKER_01:
Hey, Justin. Thanks for having me.
[00:54] SPEAKER_02:
Great to be with you again today and talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and that is supporting leaders and helping leaders support each other through coaching. And in the new book, you get into some great models and some great frameworks for that, but I wonder if we could start by just talking about the need that you saw in our profession. This is a job that you and I have both held as principals, and you saw a role for coaching, a need for coaching, at that kind of leadership level. Talk to me about that as we kick things off.
[01:24] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, you know, over the past few years, I've actually, I'm on the road quite a bit. I'm running workshops on collaborative leadership. And what I noticed is that leaders are eager to do the work, but they go back to a school community that they're trying to move forward as well. And I also found along the way that there are just so many complications that leaders have to deal with. Whether it's, you know, academic learning, there's definitely the pressure there. as far as making sure their students are succeeding.
[01:51]
But it also became the case of social emotional learning and things like trauma. And what I started to see is that leaders are handed the keys to a building and then they're kind of left to their own devices. And that's not always healthy. And there's this intense pressure, as you and I both know, that when you are a leader, it's sort of like we need to know it all, right? People are going to come to us and we need to have the answers and this intense pressure that happens. And the reality is you can't possibly know everything Over the years, my focus has changed because of research around self-efficacy.
[02:23]
So the confidence that we have in our own abilities, Bandura looked at that back in the 70s, and many have expanded on it. And what Megan Shannon Moran out of the College of William & Mary found is that self-efficacy is very context specific. That means that we have confidence in our abilities in some areas, but not in others. And what that means for leaders is that they're going to double down their efforts in one area, and they're going to slacken their efforts in another area if they don't feel confident. And actually, Bandura, sort of the godfather of all this, really looked at school leadership efficacy. So my feeling was, as I'm going through and I, you know, I work with John Hattie, and I'm talking about visible learning, or I'm looking at these six influences as a matter for collaborative leadership, or even going in to talk about school climate, and I, you know, my doctoral work was in safeguarding LGBT students, and I look at minoritized populations or marginalized populations, and these are areas where leaders just don't always feel comfortable.
[03:20]
So my philosophy was what is going to be next? We've got the six influences, we've got school climate, and coaching was something that I had done with Jim Knight for about three, three and a half years. I trained instructional coaches and I kept thinking, why aren't we using this model? Why aren't we looking at leadership coaching more and more because there almost seems to be a stigma to it. So I wrote a couple of blogs for education week for my finding common ground blog on if, if coaching is so powerful, why aren't more leaders doing it? And they just, they went viral within days and started doing surveys and asking people, would you be coached?
[03:57]
And 95% of the people that answered the survey said they would be coached, but they just didn't know where to start. And, you know, I also heard from people on the other side who said, you know, we do leadership coaching. And one actually emailed me and said, how do you not know about me? And I was thinking, wow, that's a pretty brave email right there. But my philosophy was, how is it that leaders don't know what coaching opportunities are there for them? So it became this book that I started writing on just really about leaders and leadership coaching and That's where I saw the need, but honestly, it also broke off into when I was doing school district training or working with department chairs at the high school level.
[04:43]
These are people that are put in leadership positions, but they have no leadership background. Not even, I mean, they don't have a degree in leadership. They don't have a leadership background. Sometimes they're put in department chair position because they're a rock star. So the, their principles, like we need you to be a department chair. Other times it's the path of least resistance.
[05:02]
We need a department chair and you're the person who's going to not give me as much fuss. So how about you take the position? You know what I mean? Like we know that happens. And I started seeing people put in teacher leader positions and I was thinking, wow, they don't have a leadership background and they do need coaching. And, um, It sort of branched out into that.
[05:24] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, and I think to your point about instructional coaching, we've long recognized the value of instructional coaching and appreciated the need for teachers to get support in getting better and better at what they're doing. But for leaders, yeah, I think there is that kind of – First of all, unfamiliarity, this idea that it's just not done in a lot of places or it's not something that was a part of the experience of a lot of current administrators. So it's not something that we naturally think, oh, OK, I hired a new principal. Now I need to provide coaching support for that principal. I need to find someone to play that role, to be that coach, to provide that support. And it shouldn't be that way.
[06:04]
You know, the opportunity here is so great. The cost of turnover, the cost of stress, the cost of bad decisions is so great that, yeah, to me, as a principal who received coaching just as a normal part of being a principal in Seattle Public Schools, it is strange to me that that's not the norm across our profession. So very excited to get into this with you today. And in the book, you talk about an educational leader named Gavin. Is Gavin a real person, a pseudonym, or kind of a composite?
[06:30] SPEAKER_00:
It's a little bit of a composite. What I try to do is when I was looking at writing this book, I had in my school climate book that came out at the beginning of each chapter, I had a little vignette, a story between characters. And when I had sent this out or when Corwin, my editor, Arnis had sent this out to reviewers, One of the things that came back was we really loved DeWitt's little vignettes at the beginning of the school climate book. Too bad he couldn't do this for a larger book. And I thought, wow, do I really want to be able to take this on? So I created a narrative story with characters and that's what the book is.
[07:02]
It's all of that drama that takes place in schools and it centers around a new leader named Gavin who came with, you know, he had been a principal or an assistant principal for a couple of years. And he took on this principal role and he was going to do all those things that, you know, he learned about doing in leadership school. And what he wasn't allowed to do when he was an assistant principal, because his principal that he worked with for a couple of years certainly didn't do any sort of coaching. It was more of a rite of passage. You have to do discipline or do these tasks. So Gavin went into this principal position thinking, you know, I'm going to be the leader that I've always wanted to be.
[07:35]
And he instantly got hit with roadblocks when he started. And, you know, there's a mixture of truth in there from when I was a teacher or some of the issues I dealt with when I was a principal, but there's also, I took poetic license, let's put it that way with the characters, because I think when I first blushed with the book, what I did was I made it too easy. It's like this leader comes in and all of a sudden everybody loves him. And all of a sudden he can build collective efficacy. And, and that's just not true. That's just not what happens for most leaders.
[08:07]
So I created some drama, you know, Gavin has two assistant principals and one of his assistant principals had actually applied for Gavin's job and thought they were a shoe in to get it and they didn't. So you're instantly starting off with an administrative team where one of the people doesn't like you very much because they think you got their job. How do you build collective efficacy during that situation? How do you actually hone in on your own leadership skills or become this leader? when your very own close-knit team that's around you doesn't necessarily want to see you succeed because they want the position too. And that happens in a lot of schools.
[08:41]
So Gavin is definitely somebody who's hit really immediately with some of these issues. And yeah, his superintendent, who is a female, came and said, you know, I want you to think about leadership coaching. And Gavin thought this is more of a voluntold situation, right? If my superintendent comes to tell me that I need to think about doing coaching, it really means she wants me to do coaching. So In comes this leadership coach named Michelle. And even that, when I was creating the story, even that was very purposeful because, you know, you and I are guys and we came from leadership backgrounds.
[09:15]
But what I started to notice or what people pointed out to me too, sometimes on Twitter, is that when we're talking about leadership, we typically talk about men. And when you look at the covers of books, including my own on collaborative leadership or school climate, there are men. on the cover, so I was very keen to make sure, because I work around some very strong women, Jenny Donahue, who does a lot of work in collective efficacy and collaborative inquiry, and she's part of the team that does collaborative leadership with me. She's a very strong woman, and I look to her for a lot of guidance, so when I was thinking about how this book was going to go, I was very purposeful in having a female superintendent and a female leadership coach, and even on the cover, having men and women on the cover, because I think that's a piece of leadership that we also have to bring into play. And it definitely comes into play during the book as well.
[10:07] SPEAKER_02:
One of the themes that you mentioned there that I wanted to kind of circle back to, Peter, is this idea of coaching being something that maybe there's a little bit of a stigma around in our profession that because it's not an institutionalized norm everywhere, it's also available as a remediation or an intervention when something is not going well. And because everybody kind of has that sense that that's out there, it can make people a little bit hesitant sometimes. So what are some of the kind of early steps that need to take place for a principal or an assistant principal to realize and become open to the idea that coaching is not just for people who are struggling, but coaching is something that basically we all need and can all benefit from. And why would we not? You know what I mean?
[10:48] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, I think that's such a great question. And it's something that I've struggled with even when I was training instructional coaches for gym. Because I grew up, I was a long distance runner. And my coaches...
[10:58]
didn't help me because I struggled. They helped me because they wanted me to get better. And I actually, one of them wrote the foreword to the book and I dedicated the book to them. The reality for me was I've never looked at coaching as I struggle, therefore I need to be coached. I actually looked at it as I want to get better, so therefore I need to be coached. And a coach is this sort of outside perspective that doesn't necessarily have the myopic view.
[11:23]
And I think from a leadership position, to answer your question, sometimes it's about letting ourselves off the hook. It's about if we honestly believe that teachers should be allowed to ask for help, then why is it that we as leaders can't ask for help? And not only that, it models something very healthy for a school climate. But it also makes us better at the same time. I think that's why when I'm doing trainings, I also bring in this research around Bandura's work on self-efficacy and leadership self-efficacy. Because I think leaders need to understand that not only do they have to let themselves off the hook, they also have to understand that they can't possibly do everything well.
[12:01]
And coaching is a way to be able to do that. Coaching is a way to have eyes on or a different perspective on the same thing. And that is a very healthy way to be able to look at things. You know, there have been lots of, you know, quotations out there. Many hands make light work. Those are the things that we have to keep in mind because leadership is not about doing it alone.
[12:23]
And that's why I guess I look at it always through the lens of collaborative leadership. Leadership means doing it with others and making everybody around us better. But it also means that we have to focus on making ourselves better too. And that doesn't mean we struggle. It means we just wanna have that growth mindset everybody seems to talk about so much.
[12:45] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, well, I love that you keep bringing it back to collective self-efficacy because I think that really helps us refine our mental model of what coaching is. And I think that the metaphors that we use to decide what kind of thing coaching is and whether we want it, whether we see it as valuable, really shape a lot of our decisions. And I think for a lot of us in K-12 administration, especially at the secondary level, Coaching to a lot of educators is, you know, we think about the football coach, the basketball coach, the baseball coach, the softball coach, the volleyball coach. And if you're the principal, having a coach, if that's your metaphor, if you're thinking about like the head football coach, having a coach might kind of feel like asking for another boss. But I'm glad that you mentioned that you are a distance runner, because whenever you talk about those more individual sports where elite athletes do have coaches, and especially going to the very top of those professions or those competitive arenas, it's a different kind of coaching because...
[13:45]
the coach is not just the one who calls the shots. The coach, as you said, is about building that efficacy, figuring out in a targeted way where the opportunities for improvement are. What do you think about those kind of metaphors that we use for coaching, and do those steer us in the right direction, or where do we have to be careful?
[14:02] SPEAKER_00:
No, I think they do. You know, and there's so much going through my mind. Like, I remember I met up with a group of teachers one time, especially because they had read collaborative leadership. And the very last question they asked me was pretty empowering. They said, we have one last question. I was like, sure.
[14:15]
And they asked, what do we do because our new leader doesn't want to collaborate with us? And I never looked at it through that way, because when I was a principal, like, I really felt like my faculty wanted me to be better. I mean, I went directly from teaching the high poverty city school to being a principal in a rural suburban school. And I interviewed in front of a panel of 17 people and they chose me, but I think they chose me because I had potential and I had an understanding of their world. So I was very fortunate that way. So when I get asked a question about, you know, my principal doesn't want to collaborate with me, how do we work on that?
[14:49]
Sometimes it's about the fact that principals don't know that teachers actually want to collaborate with them. I know that sounds silly, but sometimes they feel like, okay, my domain is supposed to be the hallway or the office and my teachers don't want to see me come into their classrooms. When the reality is, it's the opposite. We shouldn't be looking at leadership as the dark side. And the more we keep certain parts of leadership a secret, the more it's going to seem like leadership is the dark side and teaching is in the trenches and all those kind of things that come out too. And I think from a coaching standpoint, I just always go back to the whole idea that Working with somebody, you know, it's not something that's going to last for a very long time, but it's about the idea that you're going in one-on-one or you're working with a very small group and it's all about what is the goal that that principal really cares about.
[15:41]
And, you know, I'm very fortunate. I coach some really great leaders in California. So I'm in California one week a month. And that whole week is spent coaching leaders in two different school districts. And I'll tell you that most of them, are middle school and high school. And what I love is that, yeah, at first, were they hesitant to work with me?
[16:02]
Yep, they were, because some of them are principals of very large schools. And there's a little bit of a, I think we all have that ego thing where it's, well, we're chosen as leaders, so therefore we should know how to do this. But it's up to me as the coach to build credibility with them and sort of hone in on what their needs are. And then start there and start growing. And with some of them, I've been working with them for a year and a half. And it's been a wonderful experience for both of us to be able to do that because I think they quickly find or, and I think it's incumbent on the coach to be able to do this.
[16:38]
They quickly find that what I'm going to help them with is something they can put into practice tomorrow. It's not going to be all about philosophy and research. It's going to be some practical advice they're going to take away from our conversation and be able to use it immediately. And when they see a difference in their practice that quickly and they see the sort of the fruits of their labor, then they're hooked in and they see the power of coaching. And I think that also is something that is really important for us to be able to talk about is that this isn't just about somebody coming in from an outside perspective and and being the one with all the credibility or the expertise. It's about that person who's coming in with the outside perspective to make sure that they're absolutely listening to the leader that they are supposed to be coaching and that they're hearing what the leader is saying and they're understanding where the best place to start is because we're working together on this.
[17:40]
It's not about me going in with these preconceived notions of what leaders need to be able to do. It's about me really going in and asking good questions to get to a place where I'm understanding where I have to hone in on where we can hone in together. And one of the things that's been a sort of a criticism of coaching is that sometimes I'll meet people because I have a lot of coaches that take part in my workshops or whatever, just because of being known as training instructional coaches. And one of the things that happens is I'll meet these coaches that say, you know, I do growth coaching or I do cognitive coaching. The problem is, and what I learned from the research and writing the coaching leaders book, and it comes from Locke Miller, who's done a lot of great work on leadership coaching, is that he found in his research that the best kind of coaching is when you can adapt all of those very different styles and use them
[18:35]
but it's all dependent on the person that you are coaching with. And I think that's an important piece too. When I'm meeting with a leader, I'm not sitting there saying I'm going to use one type of coaching. It's about making sure I'm having a conversation where I can bring in all of these different elements and help that person improve on that very thing they care about the most. It's not something the district is telling me I have to focus on. It's something that that leader wants to focus on and become better at.
[19:01]
And then you bring in all these different elements to help foster that.
[19:05] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Peter, since coaching can do so much and then coaching can be so many different things in different scenarios and our metaphors for thinking about coaching really matter. You know, I think there's a little bit of a sense that having a coach is kind of like having a therapist. And again, there's the potential for that to not be an appealing idea for a lot of people. And I know that in the book, you identify a couple of different priorities that a coach and a leader might pursue. What are some of the top areas that you see coaches really making a difference for leaders when they focus on those areas?
[19:39] SPEAKER_00:
That's a great question. I'm glad you honed in on that one, actually, because one of the things that happened was when I'm talking about instructional leadership, specifically out of the six influences of matter, bringing a lot of work by Vivian Robinson. And Vivian's at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and she's great. She's got five leadership dimensions that she talks about. that people can look up. She wrote a great book called Student-Centered Leadership and many other books too, and does a lot of research.
[20:04]
But what's interesting is when she talks about the leadership dimensions, I was really keen to that. I know Vivian, I've gotten to know her over the past couple of years. And one of the things that happened was when I was doing the research around the leadership coaching book, I started asking about the priorities that leaders wanted to be able to work on. And what surprised me is that none of her dimensions came up. And it's not that her dimensions aren't important because they're vitally important to instructional leadership. But what I found happened is that the four priorities that came up were actually community engagement, political climate, communication, and collective efficacy.
[20:43]
And what I find to be interesting when I started to dig more deeply, because some people have had some criticism saying, is that really a leadership priority? Well, if you're in a leadership position like you and I both were, then yes, those are priorities because what I found is that you can't do the work that people like Vivian Robinson or John Hattie talk about if you haven't focused on them, meaning community engagement. It's very difficult to work on these leadership dimensions that other people talk about if you haven't engaged your community because you really have to see what does the community value within that school district. The political climate, and this isn't national, this is hardly even state, it's at the district level And we know that in many schools around the world, politics are something that are in our face constantly, whether it's how we're working with our school board or the politics of our staff that happen within the building or with parents.
[21:40]
Then there's collective efficacy, which is how do we bring people together? We know, and I said at the beginning of the interview, we have some real issues that we've got to deal with. Leaders can't do that alone. So building collective efficacy is something that I have been focusing on over the past couple of years. And I'm lucky to work with John and know the researchers behind it and work with Jenny Donahue on this as well. And then there's communication.
[22:00]
Communication is something I always prided myself on because people need to know the why. You know, Simon Sinek has talked about that. So the reason why I wrote about those four priorities in the coaching book is because when I was doing the surveys for these, these are the four things that came up as leaders and leaders said they needed help on before they could ever get to the place of instructional leadership. And, you know, just to extend that thinking a little bit, over the past few years, we've known that researchers like Carol Dweck or Howard Gardner or Carol Ann Tomlinson have had to clarify the work that they've done, their own research. And the reason why is because very often what that means is that we are not in school, we are not implementing those correctly. And even John Hattie talks about the growth mindset versus a fixed mindset has a 0.19 effect size, which is well under his 0.40 that equates to a year's worth growth for a year's input.
[22:54]
What that means is that sometimes we have a hard time implementing those kind of things with the fidelity, that word that we use all the time. Because these four priorities are the things that get in the way. This whole idea of building collective efficacy. We need to get a group together to really think these things out before we can start to implement them in a pilot kind of way, you know, in smaller settings around our school. We need community engagement so the community understands why we have taken on these initiatives. And does the community really know what the growth mindset is?
[23:30]
And I highly doubt it. And then we've got things like communication in the political climate. Those very things, political climate, when we think about teachers unions or something like that, those are the challenges we face to be able to get some of these big initiatives implemented correctly in our schools. So Those are the areas that I wrote about quite a bit in the coaching book, because I think those are the places we need to start before we can ever get to this grand idea of being instructional leaders.
[24:00] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, well, and those are such big areas that can just completely catch you off guard, right? They may not be in your principal evaluation standards. Some of them are. But as far as those kind of issues that come out of nowhere and hit you like a freight train, I think that's where coaching can really raise people's awareness, can really help people get ahead of a situation that might start to get out of control and really make all the difference in the world. And especially when it comes to things like politics, where You know, politics kind of explains, you know, all the dumb reasons that people get fired over silly things and have conflict over, you know, things that could have gone very differently. And of course, that connects to communication.
[24:37]
So such an important set of issues to get that expert help with from someone who has been there. So the book is Coach It Further, Using the Art of Coaching to Improve School Leadership. Peter, if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about your work or get in touch with you, talk about working with you directly, where's the best place for them to go online to find you?
[24:57] SPEAKER_00:
They can find me on Twitter, Peter M. DeWitt, or they can email me at pmdewitt518 at gmail.com.
[25:06] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio.
[25:08] SPEAKER_00:
Justin, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
[25:11] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
