Friday, May 1, 2009

Call it a coach

Some food for thought and ideas to dive into!
  • Why the title, 'coach'
  • How is a coach persuasive versus empathetic or therapeutic
  • A coach is a new role, a new position with a new title
  • What about the authority issues of teachers, unions, districts, and coaches
  • How do coaches reinforce and/or violate the norms of teacher autonomy?
  • How similar/different are coach-related policies across the US?
  • When and how did the concept of a coach arise and then spread? who was influential in pushing a coaching model (NYC, San Diego, CA RF, etc)
  • Coaches have different types of knowledge- persuasive or motivational knowledge and content/pedagogical knowledge (Shulman).
  • What's the relationship between MK and CK and PCK and coach's work and teachers changing their classroom practices?

2 comments:

Jeff Woulfin said...

I don't know the education-policy-accepted definitions of the words, but it seems that persuasive and therapeutic are qualities that depend upon the teacher, whereas empathetic is a quality that depends more solely on the coach. In other words, whether the coach is persuasive depends on the persuaded; whether s/he is therapeutic depends on the one experiencing results from that therapy; whether the coach is empathetic simply depends on how well that coach absorbs, understands, and feels the experience of the ones s/he is coaching - in two, the result is measurable in the coached, in one, it is measurable in the coach.

Unknown said...

That's an interesting point Jeff!

I was going to say Sarah that a historical paper on where coaching came from would be really interesting. It's such a popular reform now, but where did it start? When? Big districts I'd imagine, this isn't a reform coming out of rural ones. Or is it?

Also thinking about coaching across subject areas. I wonder if early reading coaching would be a completely different beast from middle school math for example (which I think has coaching programs too).

When I look at your work I always go down the road of thinking about why middle management matters, how intermediaries between larger organizations and ground-level people play a particular role (and very important given the current complexity of organizations).

Hope this week is going well for you!