When Coaching Teachers, Practice Makes Perfect

From the Marshall Memo #452

“Teaching requires getting everything right in the few moments of performance and with no do-overs,” says Newark, NJ school leader Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in the first of his regular Kappan columns. The key to effective classroom performance, he argues, is offstage practice, but educators rarely engage in the kind of focused, repetitive work that athletes, stage performers, and medical professionals routinely do. “You’d never expect a surgeon to step up to the operating table without having practiced and perfected the surgery in some less critical context,” says Bambrick-Santoyo. “Given how immensely we value teachers, students, and education, why should teachers have less preparation than that?”

As an example, he describes how his daughter was prepped for a speaking competition in the half-hour before she went on stage. As she practiced, the teacher gave her small corrections every few minutes:

Turn your body more this way.

Lower your volume and slow down at this line to provide more emphasis.

Lean in as if telling us something very important.

Finally, the teacher had her run through the speech several times without interruption until it was perfect.

Should school leaders work this way with teachers? Bambrick-Santoyo has studied the most effective principals and believes this is one of the keys to their success. He describes how one administrator coached a new teacher on a think-aloud strategy she was planning to use. The teacher tried the lesson segment a couple of times, correcting herself, watched the principal model it, and tried again. Within 20 minutes, the teacher had the skill down and was ready to implement it successfully in this lesson and others in the future. “By engaging in deep practice, she was building a knowledge base that would last,” says Bambrick-Santoyo.

The key for school leaders to make this kind of impact on teachers, he believes, is to make three commitments:

• Build a culture that allows errors. Practicing in front of colleagues is scary because mistakes are an inevitable part of the process, so leaders have to create a safe, non-evaluative space for teachers to stumble on their way to proficiency. 

• Carve out time. Studying how the most successful principals work with their teachers, Bambrick-Santoyo has noticed that they spend serious time coaching teachers. “The most successful leaders never scheduled an observation without scheduling follow-up practice with the teacher in question,” says Bambrick-Santoyo. “Even during a busy school year, practice always happened.” 

• Keep it bite-sized. “The key to effective practice is to focus on small challenges, not large ones,” he says. Rather than tackling an overly broad challenge like keeping the whole class on task, teachers should be guided to target one specific skill like scanning the room for compliance. The best way to decide on grain size is to ask whether the teacher can accomplish the new technique in a week. If not, it’s too large. 

“Little by little, precise action steps like these develop schools in which every teacher has mastered the principles of excellent instruction and management,” concludes Bambrick-Santoyo. “The process may sound excruciatingly slow, but every moment pays off in permanent improvement.”

“Perfecting Practice” by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in Phi Delta Kappan, September 2012 (Vol. 94, #1, p. 70-71), www.kappanmagazine.org; be sure to check out Bambrick-Santoyo’s excellent and highly practical new book, Leverage Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2012), available on Amazon.