Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Article by: Christie Gajewski, Leo Eckman, Paula Kaiser
The research on the positive effects of coaching are clear (Joyce and Showers, 2002). However, creating the space for coaching to be supported– and flourish to uphold the promise of the research– requires some intentional design. So, what exactly is the floor plan for a coaching system of excellence?
You don’t have to dig too deeply into coaching research or literature to uncover the importance of starting with and building from relationships. Even when a culture is established; coaches need a system of support that includes clear role descriptions, collective vision and systems and structures to collect and use data. Often a district will invest energy in fully establishing one of these elements and less on the others. Having a strong system of support may still lack humanity and connections. Strong culture and relationships are critical to success but are not enough.Structures are required to implement programs and strategies to fidelity.
South Milwaukee leadership has been intentional in building both a culture and system of support into their implementation design.
A Foundation of Culture
Christie Gajewski, Director of Instruction, shared that coaching in South Milwaukee looks very different today than it did a few years ago. At that time there were content coaches for math and literacy, and there was a general agreement that this coaching structure was too narrow to support coaching of implementation. The decision was made to shift the coaching model so that there was an instructional coach in each of the elementary school buildings. As often goes with change, this wasn’t an easy shift for everyone and there was a need for some relationship repair work.
South Milwaukee realized for the coaching system to flourish, time would be needed to build a culture of trust as the foundation. Some educators needed to overcome a history of content coaches operating as curriculum experts. Still others were wary of what partnering with a coach might say about their teaching craft. There was clearly a mindset barrier, “I don’t need to be coached.” In this culture, coaches recognized the importance of presence. Christie shared that in the beginning coaches took two approaches, “Where the culture was a little bit on the rocky side, coaches invested heavily on building human relationships. They also partnered with some of our teacher champions and cheerleaders who helped grow the program by word of mouth.” The work took two years of intentional investment, but it paid off.
Leo Eckman, former Director of Pupil Services, shared that in the beginning coaching was a job title and a position, but two years on it is what everyone does. “The culture of coaching is a desire to improve. We are now all consumers of coaching and coaches of others.”
Building on the Foundation
As coaches were in classrooms building the culture of coaching, the leadership team was engaging in construction of its own. They recognized the importance of having a system of support to move the work forward. They started by anchoring in South Milwaukee’s Moral Imperative: The School District of South Milwaukee acts with a relentless commitment to remove barriers and care for students so that they feel accepted and learn without exception. In order to provide clarity to the work, district leaders established pillars to hold up how everything else was built. The district team focused their energy on building and investing in strategic goals.. Schools aligned their improvement goals and coaches partnered with…to begin working towards the goals. Christie shared that, “these priorities helped clarify the direction of our improvement efforts overall.”
With clarity in the work, Leo shared that the leadership team was positioned to begin their data journey. “Our strategic use of data, or data literacy, has grown immensely, especially over the last year and this is an important condition of effective coaching.” The team used the data to inform where coaches could lean into the work with individuals and teams. Leo continued, “The starting point was high level data from the state, but then we started drilling down into attendance and brought in perception data related to the student experience. We wanted to know how students were showing up in our school and what their learning experience is like.”
Creating an Engaging and Caring Environment for All
With a strong cultural foundation and pillars to inform the work, the leadership team worked with coaches to ensure that student needs were being met. One of the leadership team values reads: “We value caring for all students when we: hold high expectations for ourselves and others & create systems that meet the needs of all learners.” Based on survey responses, the educators and leaders in the district recognized that while students generally felt a strong degree of safety and support from the adults around them, they did not feel the same way about their peers. Peer to Peer relationships and a sense of belonging were two areas that really stood out as areas where the system could be improved. At the middle school level, the school leadership team and student services team really took a long look at the data and tried to create an action plan to develop a stronger sense of community within the school--including taking the opportunity to change a course that students take. Last summer, when there was a vacancy in the Family and Consumer Science department--with no suitable replacement in sight, the MS team worked with District administration and the school board to develop a course grounded in Social Emotional Learning Competencies, and focused on developing regulation strategies and positive peer interactions. This class is now a required course for 6-7th graders and is one of the electives 8th graders can choose. " We're still pulling the data together to measure what impact this course may have had on office-discipline referrals and student-to-student relationships, but anecdotally we can say that we have noticed an increase in student self-awareness at the middle school. We're excited to see how far we can get, " Christie reflected.
Continuous Improvement
Everyone has heard that owning a house is a lot of work. Even after the hard work of building is accomplished, maintenance and improvement are always on the mind. South Milwaukee has done the work of building a culture and system of support, but that’s just the start.
Leo reflected, “The amount of change we’ve experienced over the last few years has been immense. There has been extreme dedication to the intentional processes for improving the system and being clear about the work. We’ve lived through a lot of the anxiety of change by shifting from a content-based model of coaching to an individual and team model. The systems work has clarified priorities and what we still need to do to get better. It has been a complete paradigm shift from where we started.”
Leo also shared that he credits much of the success South Milwaukee is experiencing to the collective staff’s willingness to reflect. They also seek and receive a lot of external coaching. The Special Education team, district leaders and the instructional coaches are all working external coaches. Christie likens this decision to the colloquial phrase: “You can't see the forest for the trees. And much like the previous mindset around coaching, having external coaches wasn't necessarily welcomed either. Often people perceive outside coaches or consultants as problematic because they don't know the system well enough to understand why things are the way they are. Over the years, as we've become consumers of coaching, it's easier to see the external coach as one who can help pull us up over the "forest" so we can understand how our individual decisions might impact the whole. External coaching helps us reframe our thinking and work to keep focus on our larger goals vs. being too distracted and reactionary.”
And what does the future hold? Christie shared the importance of sustainability, “Working to build the system that should remain intact if coaches change, leaders change, not dependable to person. School districts don’t improve in time if the systems are messed with. The focus needs to be on the system. The work is bigger than any one of us-we are just committing to sustaining. It's too easy to change course because of external pressures. The question is always, how do we keep focus on the integrity of our improvement design while also addressing issues that arise each year? Determining course corrections has to be done intentionally and with data behind it--otherwise, we see small bumps in improvement and then back to the old ways of doing things that really have had no impact on kids.”