In this #coachbetter episode Kim talks with several members of the instructional coaching team at Shanghai American School in China. This is such a big team, that even with 6 guests on the show today: Alex McMillan, Alex Braden, Yuri Liu, Andrew Ranson, Bick McSwiney and Scott Williams, this is still less than half the team!

We’re excited to share this episode with you today because SAS has been doing phenomenal work in very intentionally developing their instructional coaching program both at the leadership and school wide level, and with the instructional coaches themselves. Associate Director of Ed Programs, Scott Williams has been leading this work, and Kim has partnered with SAS to support their coaches in their own private cohort of The Coach Certificate and Mentorship Program, as well as spending some time at SAS working with coaches and leaders together. SAS is also one of our Founding Member Schools of AAICIS. 

This episode is a window into the intention and strategic planning it takes to develop a coaching program in a very large international school! If you’re curious to learn more, Scott and Kim have also written an article for the AAIE InterEd Journal which goes deeper into many of the elements we discussed in this episode.

In this episode…

• The history of coaching at SAS
• The vision and goals for the program as it’s being developed now
• The key documentation the team has developed
• The team at SAS
• What coaching looks like right now
• The way’s they’re planning to socialize this work with all educators
• How they intend to measure the impact of coaching
• The specific contextual challenges for SAS
• What school leaders should know when embarking on program development like this

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Bonus! Watch the Spotlight Version on YouTube!

Show Notes

Please share a little bit about the history of coaching at SAS. (Bick)

Coaching has been around since before all of us were here. Literacy coaches at the ES level & tech coaches / facilitators for a while. Around 2015 things started to change, and became more focused on coaching. We were more focused on consulting, project based learning and had experts come in and join the staff and embed that learning. That aspect of the program grew, and grew into a more meditative program like we have now. Finding the capacity of teachers. The program grew larger, had subject area based coaches. Covid hit and the program diminished. During COVID the role became very facilitative.

Based on where the school is at right now, what is the vision & goals for coaching at SAS? (Scott)

We’re at a really good time to look at coaching as a whole right now. How do we develop a comprehensive professional learning system? Creating conditions of trust, psychological safety.. Job embedded support that is sustainable over time.

You’ve created significant documentation this year (Framework, Toolkit, Playbook), can you tell us about those pieces and how they’ve been developed? (Scott)

Our foundational year, drawing forward the good work of the past. Took a strategic approach. Mapped out the impacts we hope to have. Mapped backwards to develop some key outputs: Framework (core beliefs, program integrity, measuring impact, competency map for coaches). Involving multiple stakeholders. The development of the outputs has been an opportunity for deep dialogue. Changed the language from version 1 to a “living document” allows us to have conversations over multiple years to move us forward. Toolkit: core practices that coaches engage in. Tools that coaches use in their role. Playbook: core strategies that a coach can offer to a teacher. Focus on UDL, CRP and AI, looking at developing strategies tightly aligned to those frameworks.

You have a strong (and large) team, please tell us a little bit about who you have on staff and how they are working with educators, and with the EdPrograms team? (Alex B)

This is the first year that the vision Scott was talking about and the history Bick was mentioning. At each divisional level: instructional coach & tech coach; chinese coaches. Been meeting at regular times throughout the year. Cross divisional meetings have been so key in standardizing language. The school making the time for us to have that luxury has been very important.

Given all of this development work, and the outstanding team you have on site, what does coaching look like in your setting right now? What makes it work? What creates challenges? (Bick)

At SAS we have 4 support functions: consulting, facilitating, collaborating & coaching. The hope is that we’re spending as much of our time as possible coaching. Each of us are trying to build our own portfolio of teachers who we’re working with to start coaching cycles, but also being open to the hallway conversations.

Mission creep is a really big thing, if someone asks for help, and it’s not really in my lane, I’m still going to help. Making sure the roles are defined clearly is really important. Has been really beneficial to be in the same office as Yuri and Verina, that cross-pollination is happening all the time.

What processes are you considering to socialize this work among the staff? How do you expect to roll this out? (Andrew)

So much dynamic energy, one of the many things that are in motion, all of us have been coaching for this full year. In the fall, all of us will present in the same language, with the same graphics. There will be consistency of message and language – at divisional language. Coaches in each division will be able to speak to the needs of that division. In every division, of each six divisions, everyone is in a different place with relationships. How do we sprinkle in through the rest of the year, who we are and our role.

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Show Notes continued…

Looking ahead, what are your ideas about measuring the impact of coaching – in terms of student learning, coaching practice and the coaching program? (Alex M)

It’s a journey, no school / coach is perfect, able to nail it every single time. We’re all professional learners, it’s a form of teaching and learning, we love learning that’s why we’re in schools. We’re all trying different techniques, and we’re all at different points in the journey. Being visible, being present, showing that we’re part of the team. Getting into classrooms is one of the most impactful things. Student feedback, student reflections, building a culture of reflection by modeling that with our teachers. Measuring coaching practice, having shared expectations through the framework. Knowing what we’re all trying to document. Being able to collect data and share with other stakeholders with confidentiality, and share meaningful data has been very impactful. This year we’ve been getting our systems up and running. We now know, what we’re trying to do, what we’re looking for, now we can start the year with that. Evaluating our coaching program, competency map (self-evaluation), ongoing feedback including an end of year survey. If you’re not tracking your coaching there might be blind spots.

In general, based on your experience and learning, what are the challenges for instructional coaching in international schools specifically? How can we work to avoid those? (Yuri)

International schools are by-nature fast paced environments and we have a lot of autonomy. That means these things are always evolving, so we have to keep up with the trends. We’re facing lots of competing priorities. We have to keep a balance between coaching cycles and individual teacher work and pacing. We have to keep up with the pace of the school. Because of the fast evolving environment, we have to learn and accumulate professional knowledge and skills. 

At the micro level, when we’re looking at the huge diversity in our faculty groups, we would think we need to know how to be culturally responsive, but it’s not that simple, sometimes it has to be culturally strategic as well. As a cultural insider I may have to be extra sensitive to understand where all this comes from. If we’re cultural outsiders it might be hard to understand what might be causing the challenges. To address those, I’ve been trying new strategies:

• Aiming for developing transparent, healthy and effective coach-administrator partnership
• Fostering a learning organization within our coaching team. In this team we can talk about our own learning.
• We’re a really strong team, but at the core I believe we need to stay consistent. If we practice our coaching through a very consistent approach, and we all aim for teachers growth and student centered learning results, when we deliver our services with clarity. That really helps our teachers

What should school leaders (or coaches) consider when working towards building a coaching culture? (Andrew)

• School leaders should work really hard to clarify the student learning outcome that’s desired. Coaching is a strategic tool to get to those outcomes. 
• Ask coaches questions like “how can coaching help us get to this goal?” and then listen to the answer.
• One of the ways to measure coaching is having other people who aren’t named coaches sound like coaching because that’s how they start talking – it’s not just the coach doing these things, it’s lots of people having these kinds of conversations.
• It’s often an associated belief that it’s the coaches job to build the coaching culture, but if the principal is unintentionally putting obstacles in the way, it’s one person on their own and they don’t have the positional authority. The partnership between principal and coach is key. If those two people are able to act like coaches with each other, theres a great potential that others will act as coaches too.

How can our listeners find out more about the work that SAS is doing? (Yuri)

Upcoming event for Chinese teachers and instructional coaches: global and regional Chinese conference hosted at SAS and the pre-conference day will feature 3-hour long sessions, and one of the topics will be coaching.

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