Rebekah (School Leader): One way is setting up planned meetings. We’re trying to gure out how can we help coaches develop coaching strategies that work for our environment. What works at YIS may not work in
every other school, so it could be helping new teachers get used to the culture and, and giving them permission to push the culture. Some of it is with the strategic plan and that’s really she’s (the coach) is a leader talking to the strategic plan – we have a strategic plan that’s built by the community and working with those people who are in teacher-leader, coach-leader models, inuencing that is really important because I don’t know what the current research says on collaboration models -that’s the coaches job to really know that. And so for them to be a resource as we develop our vision for where the school goes next is really important. I think cheerleading is a big part of my job. I love like just saying thank you to coaches – that person really needed you in there. I saw your inuence in there. Knowing when those things are happening is important. It’s not too dissimilar from what coaches do, just on a different level in a different way.

Tico (School Leader): It’s probably a bit the opposite I think in a lot of ways. It feels like, as a school leader, we should be directing the coaches. And what really happens is the opposite. The coaches know what is going on in the classrooms and with students so much better than we do. We tend to get a filtered version of things so the “boots on the ground” type of experience coaches have, is actually illuminating for us about what our school really does look like. I think a lot of times school leaders kind of fool themselves into thinking they know the school and they don’t know it as well as they’d like to believe that they do. In a lot of ways that means that we are subordinate to the coaches and the coaches job is to oftentimes identify how we support them. Eg: “I need help here to help us achieve these goals; I’m seeing this kind of pedagogy or I’m seeing this kind of instructional practice; these are the priorities; this is what it has to do. I’m so glad I’ve got a great coach because they’re helping me gure out what my strategy should be and what my priorities are as I think on the strategic level for the goals of the division.

Niki (Counselor): There’s a system of professional learning. This is how I would probably work with my coach. We have professional learning and so each year we set ourselves goals of what we’d like to achieve and how we want to achieve it. They can be quite fundamental ways of thinking. So not necessarily getting tools to do your job, but maybe trying to shift thinking, shift culture. One of my goals last year was to think about access in our profession. Definitely thinking beyond my school and thinking more about philosophies in my profession. So I would work with a coach to have discussions about how can I make that happen? How can I move that from thinking to practice or how can I shift my thinking to enable that to happen? Why do I want that to happen? Why do I think that’s important? How does it align with my own values, my school’s culture, and you really do get to explore that. Professional learning is the key thing for me here where I have regular chats with my coach about that kind of goal. Then of course as we know with coaching, these things shift and change and morph and then you can refect on them at the end of the year and of course things aren’t contained within a year either. The fact that I’ve got a long-term relationship with my coach means that we can keep coming back to that even if my professional learning goals do shift and change. So that’s one way that I use coaching and it’s really enabled me to grow personally and professionally. Very satisfying. The other way that I use coaching, as you mentioned the digital literacy coach. We’ve got a fantastic digital literacy coach that we work with here, Tricia Friedman and she has absolutely moved me personally and professionally. So I guess professionally the digital literacy piece – making it be digitally literate and that is very empowering in itself. A coach is someone that I can go to with a kernel of an idea and she can help me explore that and move it forward, make it a reality. In terms of our community then, making me better professionally, I can communicate something more effectively going can explore ideas more creatively with the people that I’m working with because of those conversations and very concrete kind of professional ways that I can move on. Personally too, I think a bit like I was saying, I’ve tried to do with my own young people and families I worked with where I try to make them feel a sense of self- efficacy like we were saying and advocacy by allowing me or helping me see what I can do and how I can grow professionally- that does link in personally. Personally I felt like, oh my goodness, look at me. I’m learning something. Even though I’ve been doing this job for a very long time and this has completely shifted the way that I think about this approach. This week actually I was talking to some grade 10 families and parents about this whole process and grade 10’s are really young. They’re 16 years old. They’ve got a long time ahead. Through talking to Trisha about digital literacy, we were talking about metaphors, so this whole thing ended up as a really nice workshop where parents were looking at how they see this as metaphorically in this process and after this talk about self advocacy and how they felt they really needed to be rather than what they wanted to be. I’m not strictly speaking digital literacy, but through a coaching conversation with Trisha,(which was ad hoc because of our culture here) it really was Trisha just coming to tell me a little bit about her holiday I and then it turned into a bit of coaching and some really interesting things came out of that professionally. It’s quite profound our coaching culture.