Coaching-Based Supervision

A trip down memory lane for you, dear reader: Think about a time fairly early in your career, when you were a novice teacher or administrator. Think about your supervisor and the supervision process. Did your supervisor fully understand your work and its challenges? Did you receive regular feedback that helped you to improve your performance? On a scale of 1-10, how much did the formal supervision process contribute to your professional growth?

We have asked this question of thousands of educators, and the responses do not paint a pretty picture. The vast majority of respondents do not report that the formal supervision process significantly contributed to their professional performance. Yet those of us who have been in supervision roles sweat bullets to adhere to the typical formal processes and timelines.

Here is another exercise for those of you who supervise teachers, those most important players in our nation’s schools. Identify a handful of teachers on your staff who are in the middle of the performance spectrum. Dig out their summative evaluations for the past five years. Do you see evidence that those teachers have received the specific actionable feedback and support that would help them to move from average to extraordinary?

That we do a poor job of supervising and supporting our teachers and school leaders can be of little doubt. Historically, around 98% of teachers in the United States are rated as effective or higher. In California, an average of 2.2 teachers of around 300,00 a year are dismissed for cause. Supervision has two fundamental purposes, nurturing professional growth and quality control. In education, by and large, we fail at both. Let’s face it, the typical evaluation cycle for a tenured teacher consists of a summative evaluation written once every two or three years based upon two pre-announced formal observations. This model flies in the face of what we know about how adults learn and in no way allows us to adequately assess professional performance.

Yet the supervision and support of teachers is arguably the single most important responsibility of site administrators, and principal supervisors have equal responsibilities towards their charges.

In prior blogs, we have shown how coaching can be a powerful tool for professional development. We suggest here that if a central goal of the supervision process is to help education professionals to improve their performance, coaching should be at the heart of supervision. We suggest that the Blended Coaching model, in which the coach establishes an ongoing trusting relationship with the coachee, focusing upon the development of professional ways of doing and ways of being, can be the engine that drives effective supervision.

We suggest here that if a central goal of the supervision process is to help education professionals to improve their performance, coaching should be at the heart of supervision.

Some folks argue that supervisors can’t coach. We think that that argument is absurd. The work world and schools are chock full of examples of supervisors whose primary responsibility is to coach. Think every athletic coach in every secondary school in the United States. Think every military officer, senior law partner, and medical director.

In training educators in Coaching-Based Supervision, we practice Blended Coaching as the core of supervision. We do suggest, though, that supervisors have two additional powers and responsibilities that are not held by pure coaches. They are the ability to provide Supervisorial Direction, and Supervisorial Feedback. Unlike a pure coach, a supervisor has the ability to direct a coachee, and to hold the coachee accountable for taking that direction. And, while a pure coach can and should provide a coachee with feedback, the coachee can take or leave that feedback.  Feedback from a supervisor is a different matter; ignore it at your own risk.

Effective supervisors give direction, and that direction is followed by a coaching conversation as the supervisor helps the supervisee to develop a plan for and commitment to following that direction. Effective supervisors provide feedback, feedback that is specific, actionable, and tied to standards. They coach their coachees as they digest that feedback and as they change in response to that feedback.

Many readers of this blog are central office leaders who are responsible for the design of supervision systems. We encourage you to examine them. In our experience, many systems work against the implementation of a coaching-based approach. They:

• Are overly complex and require the completion of multiple forms at the expense of meaningful conversation
• Rely (for teachers ) upon one or two formal, pre-announced observations per year
• Require supervisees to expend excessive time compiling “evidence” rather than relying on shared observations and carefully selected data
• Attempt to quantify performance with semi-arbitrary point systems
• Rely upon vaguely worded rubrics

If yours is a system in which annual or semi-annual deadlines to submit evaluation paperwork trigger a bit of a panic, take a look at that system. Take a random look at your personnel files. What do they tell you about the quality of supervision your folks are receiving? Does your system support ongoing professional growth tied to standards, district and individual goals? Are your supervisors drawing upon multiple data sources? Are they providing actionable feedback and following up on that feedback? Is there inter-rater reliability; are expectations clear across your system?

In our experience, evaluation models that support Coaching-Based Supervision are:

• Grounded in a coaching-based culture that recognizes that, up, down and across the system, the primary purpose of supervision is to improve performance, rather than to complete paperwork.
• Built upon clear professional standards and expectations
• A high priority for all supervisors, the process taking up at the least the plurality of their time
• Train supervisors, who  participate in ongoing professional learning communities in order to focus and improve their supervision practice
• Integrate multiple, ongoing data sources including formal and informal observations, surveys, test scores, etc., etc.
• Iterative, each formative session building on the prior session, each set of goals informed by prior goals, each summative evaluation building on the prior evaluation.

Coaching-Based Supervision thrives where districts have embraced the notion that their systems exist in order to support the growth of students, staff, and community. We will share some ideas and examples around building coaching-based cultures in our next blog.