Coaching, the Most Effective Way to Teach

I (Ashley) have been reflecting on my work with teachers and administrators over the past 40 years and have discovered that I have been and am, not so much a teacher, advisor or consultant, as a coach.  A recent article, Personal Best, in the New Yorker Magazine by Atul Gawande stimulated this "ahah" for me. It was useful to me to hear Gawande’s description of what a coach does and why so many of us need one...regularly.

Apparently coaching is indigenous to the U.S.  (Yale University is the first institution to use a coach for its football team.)  And, perhaps like many other things peculiar to the U.S., the concept of coach is “slippery.”  As Gawande writes:

Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.  They’re not your boss––in professional tennis, golf and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach––but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport [or profession]...Mainly, they observe and they guide.

I relate to this because of my early experience at the Green Mountain Valley School, where I wore many hats: English and Humanities teacher, Director of Academics, Headmaster, and, sometimes, ski coach.  I can see now that it was my experience on the hill with the racers and the other coaches led me to develope my skills as observer and guide.  I learned that I couldn’t tell a racer to perform faster any more than I could tell a student to understand iambic pentameter, or than I could tell a colleague how to conduct classes a certain way.  In each case, I could tell them, but the results would be marginal at best.

On the other hand, through careful observation of the racer, I could reflect for him or her what I saw, and guide the racer to wonder about a change in position, then encourage experimentation...a process when repeated over and over, with diligence, tenacity and whole-hearted engagement (and a liberal dose of light-hearted joy), can lead the individual being coached to reach a new level of achievement and pride that is unique for each person.

I have found that the same approach applies to working with teachers.  So has Jim Knight, the director of Kansas Coaching Project, at the University of Kansas.  Gawande reports that:

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...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.

After writing his dissertation on measures to improve pedagogy, Knight received funding to train coaches for every school in Topeka.

I find our work at Cadwell Collaborative exciting and stimulating.  I know that my favorite work is in the classroom, in the school, with the teachers and administrators, when I am Coach Cadwell.

Steve Jobs Aesthetics, An Inspiration to Educators

Reading about Steve Jobs this past week has been strangely affirming for me, Ashley.  Strange, because I’ve always LOVED every Apple product I’ve owned (since 1984), and yet I’m a bit intimidated by someone so creative that he could actually produce things so useful AND elegant.  Affirming, because the articulated tenets of Job’s aesthetics and creations are provocative and inspiring to the core values of innovative education. Job’s was primarily concerned about culture and aesthetics.  Business was a by-product of creating dynamic culture and inspiring aesthetics.   His burning questions included: How would this “thing” improve our culture?  How would this “thing” actually create culture?  How can this “thing” be beautiful, to look at, to touch, to manipulate?

These are the same questions that are compelling to education.  In striving to answer these same questions we are inspired by Steve Jobs, Grant Wiggins, Reggio Children and Carlina Rinaldi and Vea Vecchi, Ron Berger, Christopher Alexander, Peter Senge, Fritjof Capra, and many others.

Below are excerpts from two different articles from the New York Times that highlight this point.  As I read them I found myself drawing direct parallels to our work in schools.  I found myself asking, could we create schools as highly functional and beautiful as an iMac, iPhone or iPad?

Mr. Jobs made no secret of his focus on design; in a Jan. 24, 2000, interview, Fortune magazine asked if it was an “obsession” and whether it was “an inborn instinct or what?”

“We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing,” Mr. Jobs replied. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service....”

For all his accolades, this aspect of Mr. Jobs was hard for many business people to understand, or to copy. Go into a computer store today, and there’s a bland array of mostly indistinguishable keyboards and monitors — and then there’s Apple. Ditto the cellphone stores.

[Substitute here, schools for computer stores.  Go into a school today, and there’s a bland array of mostly indistinguishable hallways and rooms -- and then there are the early childhood schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, and many others around the world inspired by Reggio Emilia.]

“Most people underestimate his grandeur and his greatness,” Gadi Amit, founder and principal designer of New Deal Design in San Francisco, told me. “They think it’s about design. It’s beyond design. It’s completely holistic, and it’s dogmatic. Things need to be high quality; they have to have poetry and culture in each step... Steve was a cultural leader, and he drove Apple from that perspective. He started with culture; then followed with technology and design. No one seems to get that.” Insert this same perspective into education.  Educators are cultural leaders and they drive schools from that perspective.  They start with culture, then follow with curriculum and school building design. James Stewart, NYT, 10.7.11

Jobs...played a decisive role in restoring a kind of defiant aestheticism to American life.

Like the glories of Art Deco and the allure of the “Mad Men” era, his products were a rebuke to the idea that the aesthetics of modern life needed to be utilitarian and blah....

If [tomorrow’s innovators] learn anything from Steve Jobs, it should be that their vocation isn’t just about uniting commerce and technology. It’s about making the modern world more beautiful as well. Ross Douthat, NYT, 10.8.11

In my opinion, educators must play the same role, “a decisive role in restoring a defiant aestheticism to American life.”  It won’t be with a Steve Jobs in the lead; however, drawing from his model of excellence, it could be, in time, that together, we can “make the modern world more beautiful as well.”

The Power and the Pleasure of Curriculum Mapping

The Power and Pleasure of Curriculum Mapping In this post we will share some of our experience and practical ideas about what is called Curriculum Mapping.

Curriculum Mapping is the collaborative process of documenting, discussing and improving curricula through creating visual "maps" of the essential understanding, skills, experiences and assessment that shape courses and projects.

This practice was pioneered by Grant Wiggins who wrote Understanding by Design, and Heidi Hayes Jacobs who wrote Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping. This process is invaluable as it clarifies for everyone, including students, teachers, and parents, the essential "big ideas" that curricula is built on, maps the journey of learning that students and teachers will travel, and specifies the form that the results of the learning will take.

In schools where we work, we strive to create conditions for students to create exemplary work for a real community audience.  Here is an example.  We worked with The St. Michael School of Clayton faculty to articulate and assess the enduring understandings and skills that kindergarten through sixth grade students gain through richly integrated, creative project work.

About a year ago, Anthony Huberman, chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, asked The St. Michael School educators to organize a day on creativity that would be open to the public, involve The St. Michael School students as leaders and teachers and focus on family participation.

The faculty and administration of The St. Michael School and Cadwell Collaborative decided to create a curriculum map that would articulate the critical 21st century skills and habits of mind that The St. Michael School students were learning and that the visitors that day would be introduced to.

The maps that we composed outlined and articulated what the students were learning, and at the same time opened doors for new thoughts and ideas for all who read it. The map featured what The St. Michael School values and teaches. We would be glad to send you a PDF of the summary map seen in the thumbnail below.

We invite you to think about composing curriculum maps in new ways to reach a public audience beyond your schools whenever you have the chance. This was the first time we have created a map in this way for a special purpose. In addition to engaging faculty in the shared practice of improving teaching and learning, maps that are designed for a wider audience provide a way to feature and advocate for exemplary student work where young people play an active role in engaging their communities in purposeful, creative initiatives.

Engaging Our Grounds: First International Conference on Schoolyard Transformation in United States

Announcing: Engaging Our Grounds

Conference: September 16–18, 2011, Berkeley & San Francisco, California

We want to recommend an inspiring, upcoming conference, a delightful colleague and the great book that she has written.  Sharon Gamson Danks is the author of the widely acclaimed book, Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Trans­for­mation (New Village Press, 2010).  Sharon is an environmental planner and founding partner of Bay Tree Design in Berkeley, CA.  As a researcher, writer and hands-on designer and planner, she has visited and documented over 200 green schoolyard and park projects in North America, Europe, Great Britain, and Japan and has helped over three dozen schools transform their grounds into vibrant ecosystems for learning and play.

Ashley and I met Sharon a number of years ago when my sister-in-law, Susan Boyd, of Sustainable Communities online introduced us.  Sharon guided the three of us on an extensive tour of public school gardens in Berkeley, California and we were inspired by the work of students, teachers and parents all over the city.  Sharon's beautiful and practical book was published last year and we recommend it to every school and all teachers with whom we work.  It is a terrific resource no matter what stage of this process you are involved in.

In two weeks, Sharon and a host of other international experts are offering the first international conference on this subject to take place in the United States.  This conference is co-hosted by Bay Tree Design, inc., the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, and Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility.  We have told everyone we know about it.

Invited visionary leaders of the school ground movement from Canada, England, Germany, Japan and Sweden will share their experiences, case studies, and best practices. Speakers include:

-  Dr. Petter Åkerblom, Movium & Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Uppsala, Sweden)

-  Cam Collyer, Evergreen (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

-  Manfred Dietzen, Grün macht Schule (Berlin, Germany)

-  Mary Jackson and Julie Mountain, Learning through Landscapes (Winchester, England)

-  Dr. Ko Senda, Environment Design Institute (Tokyo, Japan)

-  Bernard Spiegal, Playlink (London, England)

-  Birgit Teichmann, Teichmann Landschafts Architekten (Berlin, Germany)

The conference’s schoolyard tours include four schoolyards in San Francisco where during the last decade schools have transformed their traditional, paved, urban schoolyards into a vibrant outdoor learning and play spaces.  Also included are three inspiring sites in Berkeley: The Edible Schoolyard; the City of Berkeley’s Adventure Playground; and an elementary school with a green schoolyard created by the school community.

To learn more about the conference visit the conference website.  We imagine that attending this conference will feel as though you have walked right into Sharon's book and it has come alive!

21st Century School Design

Among the exciting possibilities in education today is this one: the design of schools can change to better support the 21st C. pedagogy and the development of 21st C. skills.  Over the past year, Ashley has had the opportunity to work with one of the great educators in North America, Dean Ena Shelley, and one of the most famous architects in the world, Gyo Obata.  Together, they are transforming an old school to one that will be an inspiration for the future.  This is what Ashley has to say about this exciting process. Ena Shelley is the Dean of the College of Education at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN.  Among her many accolades, she was named Educator of the Year in Indiana.  A year ago, Ena shared her vision of transforming an old school building on the edge of campus, circa 1930, into the new home for her College of Education.  Ena told me that she wanted the building to represent transformational education...innovation and best practice, to enhance the beautiful facade of the old and create a vision for the future.

Cadwell Collaborative and HOK have just delivered to Butler University the schematic design. Among the many patterns that we have articulated in our design, I'd like to highlight three of the broadest ideas, ideas that may be applicable to your own school, in large or small ways (in the end I'll describe three small examples):

• transparent interconnectedness
• sustainability
• interconnectedness with community

Transparent interconnectedness School buildings need to be formed in ways that academic disciplines are distinct AND integrated in spaces that are flexible, transparent, and of varying sizes.  To manifest the transparent interconnectedness even more clearly hallways become galleries for expressions of student/faculty research, places that communicate the learning stories, the dynamic history and the values of the community.

With the College of Education at Butler, our floor plan template was a classic 20th C. school design: a long, centered, double loaded hallway on each floor, with uniform classrooms along each side (with each grade or academic discipline siloed therein).

To change this floor plan we gutted the building back to its essential concrete post frame, and created a gradation of spaces, rooms of varying sizes (large studio-lab-project rooms, medium sized seminar rooms and conference rooms, and small, more private, meeting rooms) all with significant transparency (interior window walls and glass doors).  We then further integrated the rooms with hallway galleries, a meandering hallway of varying widths, designed for displays of student work.  The hallway also offers inviting nooks and crannies for small group gatherings.  As an added feature, we created a faculty collaborative studio, with clusters of work stations gathered around meeting areas.

Sustainability School buildings can be living laboratories for sustainable built environments (carbon neutral with visible and monitored mechanical and renewable energy systems).  School buildings can embrace the natural elements that enhance human productivity: natural light, clean air and even temperatures. The College of Education building will incorporate many of the most advanced systems available today as well as maximize the benefits of passive solar and active water cycling.  Furthermore, the ground level studio/lab will be equipped with a computer monitoring system that will allow students to engage in authentic research on building sustainability issues.

Community To make schools an integral part of their community, school buildings can be open to their immediate surroundings.  The building should signal WELCOME to the community from the entry courtyard and front steps and glass atrium entry.  The building can foster social interaction in comfortable hallways and interior piazzas, and outdoor rooms and gardens.  The details of the building can manifest excellence in their aesthetic beauty.

In the College of Education at Butler University we have included all of these elements. The three renderings included here are of the new atrium and entry tower on the south side of the renovated old school building.

The new College of Education at Butler University will be a beacon for 21st C. school design and 21st C. education pedagogy.  In addition to the exciting possibilities the building will fulfill for the college program, it will also add an eastern hub for campus life as well as an inviting intersection with the surrounding neighborhood and extended community.

For me, working with Ena Shelley and Gyo Obata on this project has been a dream come true.  My hope is that this success will lead to other exciting school design projects.  For one thing, old schools like Butler's are ubiquitous, and each one of them could be renovated in a similarly dynamic way.  For another, all new schools could incorporate the design patterns we have developed.

Furthermore, these same design patterns can be used in incremental renovations of areas of schools or even in one room at a time.  Here are three simple examples:

1. Insert interior windows or window walls between the classrooms and hallways.
2. Install a solar panel on site (on roof or on grounds) and link monitoring of electricity to the science classroom.
3. Transform the walls in the entry to galleries of the best student work.

To see some prime examples of these architectural remodeling patterns in place, come to St. Louis.  Consider attending our Site Seminar April 19th and 20th, 2012, Myth Busters: Challenge Assumptions and Learn for the Future.  To register contact Ashley.