The inquire

The first step into the coaching system is inquire and what better way to start that then with a kickoff meeting! It is a great way to build a working relationship with a colleague that you don’t know or haven’t worked with before. This is an informal meeting to get to know one-another and discuss what coaching is about. Apple provides a meeting guide template which is a good starting point. When having this meeting you want to be sure to use a lot of open ended questions to start the conversion and get information from your colleague, then move to closed ended questions to narrow certain issues down.

You could always start with an ice breaker.  I dislike them greatly, like more than greatly, but some people live for them, to each their own. From there you want to share a little bit about each other. It could be all professional information or you may wish to share some personal information as well. Then your colleague takes a turn. Now at this point you need to be doing more than just sitting there nodding you head. You want to be employing your active listening skills and taking notes. This is where you begin to find out your colleague’s background and attitude towards teaching and technology.

Next, we want to talk about what coaching is and is not. We want to stress that the coaching is a tool for professional learning and growth. It is not an evaluation tool and you, as a coach, have no input in evaluations. We will delve more into what this professional relationship looks like next.

We transition in talking about how this will be a partnership. We want our colleague to come away with the idea that both of you will being working towards their goal. They will learn from you and you will learn from them and there will be things that you learn together through this cycle. Your colleague will be bringing their experience and ideas into conversations and you’ll be bringing your ideas on integrating technology and creativity into student learning.

Now we want to do a brief overview of the coaching cycle for our colleague, starting with the name and goal for each step:

Inquire - helping you to identify a goal

Plan - helping you to create a plan to reach that goal

Act - you implementing the plan and I’m there to help you

Reflect - we’ll talk about how it went and what the next steps should be

And finally, technology!! Yes, we finally talk about technology not about how awesome your are with it, but what is their comfort level using technology on a scale of 0 to 5. You can also ask about general technology use or specific apps or devices.

Finally, we want to allow time for our colleague to ask any questions that we may not have covered. We would also set a time for starting the inquire step together.

At the next meeting with your colleague you’re going to be asking questions, a lot of questions, to determine what they want to achieve in this coaching cycle. Again you want to start with more open ended questions and switch to closed ended ones to narrow the focus. Apple again provides some excellent guiding questions to help you and your colleague determine what a successful cycle looks like; these questions will range from what type of creative projects student have done in the past, what the lesson objectives are to what type of support your colleague and students will need before and during the lesson.

Once you have this and possible more information your colleague will want to come up with at least two goals that they want to achieve in the cycle, they can have more, but its smart to keep it to a realistic number to start, and yes, you can help them determine a goal, but you don’t want to be the one making it up for them.

From there is it time to write up the goals, actions, deadlines, and what evidence there will be to prove success. They are written from your colleges point of view, what they want to do for each goal. The action will describe what they will do to achieve the goal, the deadline is one determined by them, so a date at minimum. Then a description of what success will look like to your colleague. I would recommend writing these in the SMART format or something similar.

With that the inquire step is complete and you move on to plan. The step where you write out what activities will happen when.

This is an excellent foundation to a coaching  program at any school or district.