The Coach in the Operating Room - The New Yorker - 37 views
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I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.
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anonymous on 14 Dec 16this is one of the most important reasons for data and using the data to help guide instruction
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the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.
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Why wouldn't we want a coach? Our supervisor or administrator often serves as an evaluator but might not have the time due to time constraints to serve as an effective and dedicated coach. Yet, a coach doesn't have to be an expert. Couldn't the coach just be a colleague with a different skill set?
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They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
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always evolving
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Please tell me what profession isn't always evolving? It something isn't evolving, it is dying! So, why doesn't everyone on the face of the earth - regardless of his/her profession or station in life - need coaching periodically to help them continue to grow and evolve?
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We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.
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no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
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outside ears, and eyes, are important
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For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
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So, instead of having students take test after test after test, why don't we just have coaches who observe and sit and discuss and offer suggestions and divide the number of tests we give students in half and do away with half? Are we concerned about student knowledge? student performance? student ability? student growth or capacity for growth? What we really need to identify is what we value!
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California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
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Of course they are more effective! They have a trusted individual to guide them, mentor them, help sustain them. The coach can cheer and affirm what the teacher is already doing well and offer suggestions that are desired and sought in order to improve their 'game' and become more effective.
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they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.
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Knowledge of the content is one thing and expertise is yet another. Sometimes what makes us better teachers is simply strategies and techniques - not expertise in the content. Sometimes what makes us better teachers could simply be using a different tool or offering options for students to choose.
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The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.
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The conversation with the coach and the coach listening and learning what the teacher would like to expand, improve, and grow is probably the most vital part! If the teacher doesn't have a clue, the coach could start anywhere and that might not be what the teacher adopts and owns. So, the teacher must have ownership and direction.
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teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.
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This could provide specific categories to offer teachers a choice in what direction they want to go toward improving - especially important for those who want broad improvement or are clueless at where to start.
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must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.
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most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
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The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.
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So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
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“What worked?”
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“How could you help her?”
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“What else did you notice?”
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These questions are quite similar to what we ask little children when they are learning something new. How did that go? What else could you do? What could you do differently? What more is needed? What would help?
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something to try.
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Suggestions of something to try! Any colleague can offer this - so why don't we ask colleagues for ideas of something to try more often?
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three colleagues on a lunch break
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Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.
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I probably need this printed out and stuck to the monitor of my computer or tattooed on my hand!
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“listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.”
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coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is
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trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.
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Encouraging people to think - it is important to teach and encourage thinking rather than teaching them WHAT to think!
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a whole list of observations like this.
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one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.
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watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.
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routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others.
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I always hate seeing a video of me teaching but I did learn so much about myself, my teaching, and my students that I could not learn in any other way!
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I know that I’m learning again.
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It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.
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But it still works and is effective at nudging even those who are fabulous to be even better!
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modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things
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coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.
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We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
