The IC Toolkit

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Dr. Jim Knight. Jim is founder and senior partner of Instructional Coaching Group and a research associate at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. He spent more than two decades studying professional learning and instructional coaching, and indeed, the name Jim Knight is today synonymous with instructional coaching. Jim earned his PhD in education from the University of Kansas and is the author of numerous books, including Instructional Coaching, Unmistakable Impact, and The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching. His latest book with Jessica Wise, Michelle Harris, and Amy Mosante is The IC Toolkit.

[00:52] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:54] SPEAKER_00:

Jim, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. It's good to be here. It's nice to see you again, Justin. So I'm looking forward to the conversation.

[01:00] SPEAKER_01:

So nice to see you. I think last time I saw you, it was actually in person, maybe at Learning Forward or some other conference where you were presenting as you often do and continuing to drive the state of the art forward on instructional coaching. And this new book is a toolkit. And I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about the work that this toolkit came out of and why you decided to kind of put this particular resource together.

[01:22] SPEAKER_00:

So it's kind of like three things I'd say, and you can stop me at any point if I'm carrying on too long with this, but One of the things I would say, and we can come back to this, but is that we have a kind of a rubric for understanding what good coaching would look like. And we organize it around like a Venn diagram. There's three circles. And one circle is who I am. That's the way I communicate, what my beliefs are, how I lead myself, how I lead others. You know, you probably, if you're a coach, you probably need to be able to ask good questions and you probably want to be able to listen effectively.

[01:56]

To me, listening and questioning or coaching are kind of like skating is to ice hockey. You want to play, you've got to be able to listen and ask questions. But there's other things too, the beliefs and the leadership. The second circle is what I do. And so you need some kind of coaching cycle. We have what's called the impact cycle.

[02:14]

And then to make that cycle work, you need to have data to see reality more clearly, to set goals, to monitor progress. And you need strategies that will help you hit those goals. And so that's what we call an instructional playbook. And then that has to take place in a context. So the third circle that surrounds the first two is where I work. And that means that principals understand what the coach does.

[02:35]

The coaches have time to do coaching. In fact, there's widespread understanding across the system. There's policies around things like what's confidential, what isn't confidential. And so this is one of three things. But the book is sort of an embodiment of that. We don't think those seven things are nice to haves.

[02:53]

We feel they're must haves. You're going to have a hard time setting a goal if you don't have data. You're going to have a hard time hitting the goal if you don't have strategies. You probably need a coaching cycle and all the other thing. You know, you're not going to be able to coach unless the system's supporting you and giving you a chance to do coaching. You're not going to have much impact.

[03:09]

So that's the first thing. The second thing is that I've had the privilege to work with people around the world in coaching. And I kept meeting people who really didn't know what to do with their time after professional development. We bring people together. We talk about things. But they didn't have resources to help them use that time productively.

[03:28]

So the IC Toolkit has got all these resources. So people who are... trying to get better as coaches, they're able to pull up cases or video clips or articles that have been written or other kind of activities for learning. And so it's packed with things kind of organized around a whole school year so that each week you could do something different.

[03:47]

If you brought together coaches as a professional learning team and they wanted to look at a case or an article or an activity, maybe the way they practice asking questions or the way they ask, listen to each other and so forth. So the first thing First thing is that rubric, seven success factors. Second thing is to give people tools to help them upskill themselves in those seven areas. And the third thing is I've been writing articles and blogs and columns and cases and things for like 20 years. And they were just out there like orphans. So I thought, I really like to put them all into one book.

[04:21]

And so our team, Michelle and Jessica and Amy, they really worked hard to edit it, put it all together and put all the pieces together. And it's really kind of a compendium of 20 years of thinking about coaching organized around the seven success factors.

[04:36] SPEAKER_01:

Jim, one of the challenges, I think, of having an effective instructional coaching program is just what you said, making sure that people can make good use of their time. And I think especially for teachers who may feel that coaching takes up their time, they really need to see the value of the work that the coaches are doing and experience that value. In terms of kind of a system message, if a school leader or a system leader is facing pushback on coaches and maybe looking at the budget and saying, do we really need coaches? What's the value of this? How do you explain to teachers what the coaches fundamentally are there for? Because I think it's a very different value proposition than an administrator.

[05:20]

It's a different value proposition than a therapist. We have a particular niche we're talking about here. How do you sell that to the teacher who stands to benefit?

[05:31] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think if you're okay with status quo, there's no need for coaching. So if you say, you know, our school's good enough, We don't have to change anything. You wouldn't need to have a coach. But if you say, you know, we have kids who are not succeeding and we're not where we want to be. And if teachers are not happy with what's happening, as they look at their outcomes in their class and what's happening day to day, and when they drive home, if you're like, you know, I really want to see some changes here. I'm not happy.

[05:59]

The kids don't seem they want to learn or whatever it might be. then coaching becomes important. But I would say poorly designed, poorly implemented coaching is a really bad use of resources. What you want is effectively implemented coaching. And effectively implemented coaching helps teachers hit the powerful goals they want to hit. It makes a dramatic change and the quality of what happens in the classroom, because the coach doesn't show up and tell the teacher what to do.

[06:24]

They're a learning partner with the coach, but the coach has expertise. So if I'm, like for example, I'm gonna give an institute next week, we mentioned with Brian Goodwin. You know, if I'm presenting and I wanna improve something, it'd be really helpful to have an expert who could say, well, here's some ideas, do you wanna try this? What do you wanna do? And I think you're absolutely right. I have a theory that people don't resist change.

[06:43]

What they resist is change they don't wanna make. And there's a book called The Influencer by Patterson and Grenny and a bunch of other authors. And in the book, they say for change to take place, it has to be worth it. And I have to be able to do it. And what the coach does is the coach helps the teacher identify what they most want to focus on. The thing they think about when they wake up in the middle of the night, the thing they think about when they drive home.

[07:06]

And then the coach, if they have a playbook, if they have an understanding of effective instruction, they help the person hit the goal. And done well, Coaching should improve the quality of the teacher's life. But more importantly, the way we do coaching is driven by changes in students. So we look at a change either in engagement or achievement. And we can document the impact of coaching by saying what happened for the kids. And so one other thing, too, is the traditional model of professional development, as I see it, is research is done.

[07:38]

A consultant learns about that research, maybe working with the researchers. They come to a school. They teach teachers what to do with the expectation that research has been done. If they implement these practices, it's going to have an impact on kids' lives. And then the teachers kind of try to implement. They may not be that motivated.

[07:53]

They may not see its relevance. But when they implement without any kind of support, usually it's not very strong. First time you try something is the worst. It is easiest thing to do is to drift back to the way you used to teach. And we haven't seen that's how I started, too. When I started as a professional developer, I go into schools.

[08:10]

I talk about effective teaching practices developed at the University of Kansas and zero people implemented. We had zero implementation. And so we flipped it and we say, let's start with kids. What's the change we want to see in kids, whether it's engagement or achievement? And then the teacher sets a goal. And then working with a coach, they identify a strategy based on research.

[08:32]

Research is just as important in what we do, but it starts with kids. It doesn't start with the research. And we bring the research into play when it's relevant to the needs of the kids and not relevant to the teacher. So like I said, I think the big argument would be If status quo is okay, there's no need to change. But I don't know that I want to work in an organization that says we don't need to change. I think I want to work in a learning organization where people are continually getting better.

[08:57]

That's half the fun of work is continuous improvement. So that's how I see it.

[09:03] SPEAKER_01:

I really appreciate the honesty and the built-in accountability of working backwards from students. What is the actual impact on students? What is the change from students? And how do we hold ourselves accountable to that? Because that, I think, is the ultimate answer to, is this really a good use of funds? Is this really accomplishing anything?

[09:22]

And that should always be our bottom line, right? Is what we're doing making a difference for students?

[09:27] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we have a book called Evaluating Instructional Coaching, but we would say there needs to be a direct line between what the coach does and what happens with kids. It has to be crystal clear because the scores could go up because the Chiefs won the Super Bowl and everybody's happy in Kansas City, or they could go down because the Chiefs won the Super Bowl and nobody's happy in Buffalo. We don't know. You know, what the causes are, if the scores go up, there's any number of variables. But if you document the goals that have been set, you can say, I work with this teacher. Engagement was 65%.

[09:57]

We shifted. All data is imperfect. But at any rate, you can still say, this is where we were. This is where we are now. This is what we documented. Here are all the people we work with.

[10:06]

Here are the results. And there's a very clear connection between what the coach did. And if there's no impact on kids, the coaching isn't working. It's not successful.

[10:15] SPEAKER_01:

That's a great point about the many contributors to a broad outcome like test scores. So you're saying there's a theory of action that has a chain of reasoning and evidence that can allow us to evaluate it and say, yes, this is working. Yes, this is having the impact we want it to have.

[10:31] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I think if you want test scores, the problem is that too often people will set a goal and they say, I want our reading scores to go, vocab scores to go up by 15% on such and such an assessment, or I want our writing scores to improve using the the six plus one traits or whatever. And then they just leave it. And then they see if the scores went up, but the trouble is that's like a GPS. It doesn't tell you if you're on track or off track, you need to gather the data weekly. That's why we wrote the book data rules is to say, you need to get a clear picture of where you are, but then monitor because usually the first thing is you try don't work.

[11:01]

You've got to make adaptations and modifications to make it work because, um, just taking it off the shelf and expecting it to work, um, It doesn't necessarily speak to my strengths. It doesn't necessarily speak to the individual needs of the students. So we've just found that you have to change the strategy. You have to have an adaptive notion of what change looks like and modify as you work your way through. And then you can be more confident. But if you wanted to say assessment scores going up is what we want, then you have to figure out what are weekly assessments we could use to see if the strategy is working or not.

[11:32]

I think that's a great thing to do. But you need to be able to document each week where are we now so let's say it was the six plus one traits or whatever it is you know we would have a rubric that we're assessing the kids writing and every week we're looking at where they are and seeing what's working what's not working because most of the time in our experience the first things you try don't work you have to change them and if you don't know they're not working You're just going to keep doing the things that don't work. So that's why you need to iteratively gather data almost every week. And then you can feel confident if your coaches are implementing those seven success factors I mentioned, then you can feel confident you're going to see results.

[12:05] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I think the importance of the timeframes there is really critical that you're highlighting that often the data sources that we're looking at are very far downstream. If we set a broad technical goal, it's so far downstream. We need to know much sooner is what we're doing working. So very much appreciate that. I wonder if we could talk next about some of the partnership principles for the relationship between the teacher and the coach.

[12:29]

Because I've definitely seen what happens when we don't clarify that, when we don't do any kind of expectation setting around that. And there's certainly the perception among some teachers that you will encounter online that a coach is just someone who wastes their time or that tries to interfere with them or there's not a good relationship there. What are some of those key partnership principles that make that relationship really work?

[12:53] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I might answer that. I wrote an article with John Campbell and Christian Van Nuerburg about learning conversations. And so if you think of two variables, choice and the sharing of information, And you sort of visualize a little table with one thing is sharing and one thing is choice. Choice and sharing. There are kind of three different types of learning conversations. Nothing's ever quite that simple.

[13:14]

But just for the sake of clarity, we'll narrow it into three things. So there's facilitative conversations. And many coaching conversations are facilitative. So the facilitative conversation is you have choice in what you do. But I don't share and I don't share ideas. And the argument would be that if I was to share ideas, it would get in the way of your thinking.

[13:37]

And so the whole body of what we call life coaching, executive coaching, all different kinds of coaching, things described by the International Coaching Federation or the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, it's generally facilitative coaching. The second thing is a dialogical coaching, which is more of what we do. Now, we believe you start by saying to the teacher, well, you probably thought a lot about this. What are you thinking you might do? You want to find out what they're thinking before you jump in and tell them what to do. They've probably got lots of great ideas.

[14:04]

They might say the very thing you want to share. They might have a better idea than you. So we start in the facilitator. But then often we shift into the dialogical approach is where the teacher has choice and But we share ideas. And so we say, do you mind if I share some thoughts about what this goal could be? Or would it be OK with you if I tell you some things I've seen other teachers do?

[14:27]

But what we don't do is we say, I've looked at what's happening. I've had a 30-minute visit to your class. Here's what you need to do. We work it out together. I just talked to Maggie Jackson, who wrote a book called Uncertain just a few minutes ago. And we recognize that thinking it through, And exploring things is more powerful than just showing up with a fixed answer.

[14:47]

And expecting people to embrace something, we just tell them what to do is not like, people are really good at nodding their head yes and doing nothing. So that's the second thing. And the third thing is there are times you have to tell the person what to do. That's where you share things and there is no choice. So if a teacher wasn't showing up until just a couple of minutes before the bell every day, and the principal goes to the teacher and she says, hey, I've been watching you coming in. You need to come to class earlier.

[15:12]

You got to be there. The principal probably wouldn't be okay if the teacher says, no, I don't want to do that. It's a sharing, but there's no choice. And so the partnership approach is really about how you do those first two things. So I don't see myself as better than the teacher. That's what we call equality.

[15:28]

I recognize not everything's a choice, but when it comes to professional practice, autonomy is a critically important part of people embracing things. It means when I interact with a person, I want to hear what they have to say. We call that the principle of voice. And we engage in a back and forth conversation where both people are equally important. When I'm engaging in a coaching conversation, I'm not trying to talk them into something. Every parent knows trying to talk somebody into something, someone probably reduces the likelihood they're going to do it.

[15:57]

But in a dialogical conversation, I also don't silence myself. I say, well, what about this? What I want is when I'm talking to the teacher, I don't want them to go away and not tell me what they're thinking. So I want to have a conversation where they feel comfortable saying to me, actually, that would take too much time for me to do the grading. I don't, what about this? Could we try it?

[16:16]

I want us to think it through together. And too often in a telling conversation where there's no choice, what you get is the person nods their head, yes, and they go back and do something. And then that conversation is a grounded in real life application, what we call praxis, and it involves reciprocity. that we're learning together, and it's a reflective conversation where we're thinking together. So those are the seven partnership principles, but a simple way to put it is sometimes we're facilitative, sometimes we're dialogical, sometimes we're direct. I'll just say one more quick thing, which is we default to directive way more than we should.

[16:53]

We have an impulse for certainty. We don't like cognitive dissonance, where we want it to be a certain way. We love to give advice. Human beings love to give advice. But as Michael Bungay-Stanier says, our advice isn't as good as we think, and people don't want it as much as we think they do. And if we can just engage in a dialogical approach, I think we'll have much greater likelihood of input.

[17:16]

When I studied the partnership approach for my dissertation, people were four and a half times more likely to plan when they took the partnership approach than when we took a telling approach with what the person did. So in a nutshell, that's the partnership. It's really about having discourse with teachers And treating them like professionals, not like people stocking shelves at Walmart or something. We're really engaging them as a partner in the conversation. And if we want professionals teaching our kids, we have to start by listening to the teachers, involving them in the thinking, and so forth. At least that's how we see it.

[17:51]

Beautifully said.

[17:52] SPEAKER_01:

And Michael Bengay-Stanier has been on the podcast before. We'll try to link to his interview in the show notes. But yeah, absolutely. I think that that directive role that we tend to play, you know, sometimes we feel an urgency. And I think, you know, that urgency is a positive force that prompts us to take action. but often it's not our action to take or the direct action that we might be able to take now isn't going to get the long-term growth that we're looking for.

[18:18]

How do you help coaches think about that sense of urgency when there is a lot to work on? There are a lot of opportunities for improvement and yet teacher choice is really important here, right? We're not grabbing the steering wheel and saying, hey, here's where we're going. You're in the driver's seat, but I'm going to steer. How do you help coaches who really care about student learning manage that tension?

[18:42] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'll come at that from two directions. First thing is motivation. Elise Miller and Rolnick wrote a book called Motivational Interviewing, which I think is a really great book. Adam Grant has a chapter on that in his book. I think it's Think Again. He talks about motivational interviewing.

[18:57]

But they would say motivation comes from a gap between where we are and where we want to be. And so if we don't see where we are, we don't see the need to change. And there's a book called, I always forget the names of the authors, but it's called Useful Delusions. And it's about how we trick ourselves into not seeing reality clearly because it feels better. And so it might be defense mechanisms where we minimize the problem or externalize responsibility. It might be perceptual errors like confirmation bias or other kind of errors.

[19:28]

It could just be that impulse for certainty that we want to feel certain. So we come up with a plan. But most of us don't see reality clearly. And so the first thing is to help the teacher see reality. You might not have it perfectly, but to broaden their perspective. And I just talked to somebody a couple of weeks ago who studied this with her dissertation.

[19:46]

And she said that the teachers she worked with who watched video of their class and the ones who didn't watch video of their class, it was night and day how easy it was to coach them. Because the ones who saw reality more clearly, and there are many ways of getting to that. It doesn't have to be video, but video is free, super powerful. There's a reason why every football team in middle school in the U.S. is watching video.

[20:05]

It's powerful. So when the person gets a clear picture of reality, they often want to change. Now, they might say something like, see what I said about those kids, and they might still not want to be engaged, but we would argue usually when the teacher's in control, if they see reality, they're more... But let's say they don't.

[20:20]

Let's say they don't see it. They don't want to change. Those three kinds of conversations... Can all happen in the same conversation.

[20:27]

So although if I was an instructional coach, I probably wouldn't do that. But if I was a principal, I might say, look, I was in your class and engagement really low. And a lot of kids were off task. Here's how I measured it. That has to change. That's a telling conversation.

[20:43]

And then the principal can say, now you've probably thought a lot about this. What do you think are some things you could do to increase engagement? Because we have to get engagement. I'm going to work with you. I'm going to come back. I'm going to make sure it happens.

[20:53]

So then they can move into a facilitative conversation. And then the principal might say, I'm thinking the teacher doesn't have a very good plan here. I'm not really hearing something. I don't think they're that confident. Even though I try to dig it out of them, they might not know what to do. And education is a expertise-based practice or things that work.

[21:12]

So then the principal could say, do you mind if I share some ideas and let's talk through some of them and see if any of these sound like... But the principal has to make it, if it's going to be dialogical, I want you to choose the one that gives you the most confidence. I'm going to share these things. Because if they go right to, well, here's what you need to do and I'm going to tell you, it's probably going to engender resistance and you might get compliance, but you won't get commitment.

[21:34]

And you'll be the one who owns the solution. But if the teacher makes the choice, they can own it. So you can have a telling conversation and a facilitative conversation and a dialogical conversation all in the same conversation and you shift back and forth. But hopefully you won't have to have the telling conversation because the clear picture of reality should motivate most people to want to change.

[21:55] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and often people are right there with us as soon as we bring it up. Oh, yes, I know what you're talking about. I agree. I need to work on that. People are often farther ahead than we think they are. And I'm glad you mentioned video.

[22:07]

And you and I have spoken previously about your earlier book, Focus on Teaching, which is all about how to use video. So I'll refer people to that if they are interested in some specific guidance on that. And boy, in this book, you cover so much ground that we don't have time to get into today. So many resources, so many tools. I want to close, if I could, by asking about the role of the school leader in particular in setting up the coach and the teacher to be successful in working together? If you had just kind of one piece of advice for setting things up for success, you talk about system support, you talk about the partnership principles, and so much goes into making this work between the teacher and the coach.

[22:49]

What can principals do to really set them up for success?

[22:53] SPEAKER_00:

I wrote a column a while back on nominal change and how people make change in name only. So they have PLCs, but really what happens is they just put people together. They don't learn to have proper conversations or whatever it might be. Or they'll say we're doing Hattie, but they're not really going deep into or whatever it might be there. They say they're doing it, but the change isn't happening. And I think whatever it is we're doing, whatever the initiative is, we need a depth of knowledge.

[23:17]

And I know principals are super busy. They're the busiest people in America, probably. Um, it's such a, it's such a time intense and time poor. You don't have that much time to do all the things. And just when you get going, you've got a parent who wants to talk about the food in the cafeteria for two hours. It's super challenging, but I think to participate in professional development or read books or whatever it takes to understand, because the coach is, you know, if you have a stereo system and it has a turntable, the coach is like the stylus on the needle.

[23:49]

If the stylus is new and good, the sound's going to be good. If the stylus isn't that new, the sound's not going to be good. When it comes to system change, the coach is like, they are the leverage point for change. And so for the principal to understand what the coach does, how the coach uses their time to make sure their time is focused on, but this is a life issue just to focus on the top priorities. And we're all seduced into doing things that seem trivial when it would have been better to, but when it comes to coaching, to understand what the coach does, to support them, to make it clear, the coach is important to have policies around things about what will and won't get shared. But most importantly, for the coach to have time to actually coach.

[24:28]

So they don't get sucked into all kinds of other activities that keep them from it. And if the principal really understands why we do things the way we do and what coaching looks like, they can be a super dynamic partnership to make big things happen. But if the coach is doing all kinds of other things, sometimes because The principal's not sure what the coach is supposed to do. That's not going to be as successful. We need leaders who understand the coaches, how the coach can help them and make sure the coach has the support they need to succeed. Part of that is that the coach is learning all the time too, continuously understanding those seven success factors.

[25:02] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is The IC Toolkit. Jim, if people want to learn more about your organization and the work you do, where's the best place for them to go online?

[25:10] SPEAKER_00:

Yes, we've got a website, instructionalcoaching.com. And I think if you just type in instructional coaching, it'll probably take you there. I think it's all kinds of other versions too. And there are hundreds of literally something like seven or 800 free resources on that website. If they just click on the resources section, and that'll take you them to the podcast the podcast we interview people all the time so lots of tools there and you know there are a lot of things we do that are everything from free to fairly expensive we do one-to-one coaching with leaders and coaches but that's going to be at the higher scale of what we want to do and i just say one last thing is that as an organization icg may be the only one in education where what's called a b corp and a b corp is a benefit corporation which means you go through a really rigorous process of certification to show that the reason for your company is to benefit the world to do good and you start looking for that little emblem of the bee with a circle around it you're going to see it all over the place it's on like

[26:08]

What did I look at yesterday? My yogurt had a little B circle on it. Oh, they're a B Corp. But we're a business. Our goal is always the same things. Excellent instruction every day in every class for every student everywhere.

[26:19]

And so we want people to have access. We want to promote good coaching. We want to promote whatever it is to help, just like you, to help have the best positive impact on the lives of kids. That's what we're striving for. Jim Knight, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. My pleasure.

[26:33]

It's great. It's great to see you.

[26:35] Announcer:

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