Teacher Leadership Coaching and Team Development

It has been a little while sense my last post, re-committing to my commitments as Ken Blanchard says.  Anyway, I thought it would be a good time to share some of the successes we are experiencing through our work with teacher leaders and school leadership teams.  For whatever reason, other than budgetary, this has been a tough thing to get moving forward in schools.  I am not sure why professional coaching has not yet established itself as a viable PD option, but I'd love to know your thoughts on this.

That being said, we are having a great time working with a couple local districts here in the Rochester area.  The first district signed-on for teacher leadership training with one-to-one coaching follow-up as well as school leadership one-to-one coaching for their principals and assistants.  What makes this process even more powerful is that the whole instructional leadership team is participating together.  Combining team meetings and trainings with one-to-one coaching support to ensure implementation of action plans at the classroom level.  Team processes focused on connecting the team on an individual level - building trust and improving communication as well as a team level - dealing with conflict and resistance, have led to team-based instructional improvements and elevating the instructional leadership role of the teacher leader position.

The second district has created a new instructional coaching team, redefining the more traditional instructional specialist position.  Again, a combination of team building, team PD and coaching are making positive impacts.  A team mission, vision and values process combined with defining the new role has led to clarity around the instructional leadership expectations of the coaches.  The team has engaged administration as well as teachers to ensure consistency of their instructional practice across the district and pair-based coaching targets the instructional coaching teams at each school, allowing for coaching support to adapt to the unique needs of the individuals being coached, teachers, administrators and students that they are working with.  This is a new client district, so we will report back with some results mid 2010-11 school year.

So what?  The what is that we are realizing that coaching provides a unique complement to current educational PD, especially with instructional leaders (teacher leaders, admins, instructional coaches, etc.).  Coaching adapts to the unique needs of each individual being coached as well as to the needs of school, colleagues and students being impacted.  We also realized that purposely focusing on team building/development as part of your day-to-day activities pays powerful dividends to instructional leaders who more easily implement change and improve instruction.  Lastly, PD built around the needs of each instructional leader or leadership team improves results.  Coaches and team facilitators can partner and build customized solutions using practical and relevant situations from the teaching/learning environment.  The result, PD that improves performance.

There are plenty of PD tools and resources out there.  The key is what processes (coaching and team building) do you build around them to ensure results.  I'd love to hear your thoughts (success stories or challenges).