The Coaching Role
Examine these pages and consider the differences between coaching and more traditional mentoring. Reflect on a metacognitive coaching paradigm and try the guidelines for getting started in coaching student teachers.
Coaching Through States of Mind
Coaching is conversation. The coach is first of all a listener. Through active listening and thoughtful questioning, the coach may help the beginning teachers recognize patterns of thinking and behavior that either promote or interfere with successful practice. Most coaching is also tied to a framework that breaks the complex act of teaching into manageable approaches to cognition. Costa and Garmston use five “States of Mind” as the framework: efficacy, flexibility, craftsmanship, collaboration and interdependence. The coach uses these to maintain her/his own perspective and to provide scaffolding for the person being coached. Abrams uses these five states of mind to frame common examples of problematic thinking that she’s observed in novice teachers.
Practice coaching with videos
The benefits of metacognition and reflective practice are assumed in the coaching paradigm. Still, when the coach observes a classroom, she/he has an obligation to call the teacher's attention to events that can inform reflection. Video can help. What would you say to the teachers in these videos if you were their coach?
Support needs vary
New teachers, like all learners, need different kinds of support at different times in their professional development. As professionals, coaches must recognize the novice's changing competence and adjust coaching strategies along a continuum of support. Gerald Grow created these cartoons to capture phases in the process of helping people become self-directed learners, and we have applied them to the coaches role with the student or novice teacher. For each cartoon, imagine what the main character (coach) might be thinking while carrying out the action toward the new teacher in the cartoon.
Then click to see what captions others have given
