I get a lot of questions and “help me!” emails and Facebook posts from coaches, leaders and teachers! My favorite thing to do is coach people – – even if it’s by email!
I have been talking with a coach friend of mine and she’s been working on getting very specific action step at the end of her coaching. She’s taken some advice from me and the last time she did, it didn’t go quite as she had planned!
BUT – this doesn’t mean that she will quit (she’s not a quitter by any means!), it just means that she needs some support to “fix up” what ails her in her coaching practice.
Peek into the feedback I gave her when she said that she tried to be very specific with a teacher and it went terribly wrong – the teacher clammed up and it ended on a very awkward note:
“It takes guts, but you have to do it.
Go back to that teacher and say something like this: “Okay – I want to walk through how our debriefing deteriorated yesterday so that I can learn how to be a more skilled coach. What I’m trying to do is to get to the point with each teacher during a debriefing where we arrive on something important that they’ll try. I didn’t do that well with you yesterday. What feedback do you have?”
Be gusty with this – she has valuable information that you need.”
See, the real power is to go back. Slinking away (which ALL of us want to do when coaching goes poorly!) isn’t going to solve the problem. I have always seen that modeling how to fix things up with and to teachers is as powerful as teaching them to teach better! This coach had the opportunity to model a “fix up”…little did she know it was going to be about her own coaching!
She’s a trooper and a committed coach…she’ll do it.What do you do when you mess something up and it gets really awkward during coaching?