Being a Boss and a Cocah

By Tynika Young-Aleibar and Greg Moffitt

Understanding how to effectively supervise and coach your team is essential to your leadership and the school’s success, but the task is easier said than done. Can you be both the boss and a coach? You not only can be both, you must be.

We served as assistant principals and principals—one of us in Washington, D.C., and one of us in rural and suburban districts in Northern California—before taking our current roles as leadership development officers with the District of Columbia Public Schools. Despite the differences in our backgrounds, learning how to lead adults was one of the biggest challenges either of us had to tackle. While it was the students who gave our work in schools purpose and meaning, supervising, coaching, and mentoring staff allowed the work to happen.

The Wallace Foundation-commissioned report “How Principals Affect Students and Schools” lists four behaviors exhibited by effective principals:

• Focusing work with teachers on instruction;
• Building a productive school climate;
• Forging collaboration and professional learning among teachers and staff; and
• Managing school personnel and resources well.

That means the most effective school leaders aren’t just good supervisors and evaluators; they are also great coaches
and mentors. To move a school along the continuum of success, school leaders need to provide clear direction to staff while creating the conditions and opportunities for their ongoing reflection and continuous growth.

What do we mean by supervisor, coach, and mentor? The roles are similar but distinct. For the purposes of this article, we’re using the following definitions:

Think of an effective supervisor—current or former—who also supported your growth and development as an educator. What did this boss do to coach or mentor you? Most likely, the answer to that question includes some of the following:

• They got to know you.
• They understood and valued your strengths.
• They made time and space to listen to you.
• They showed genuine concern for you and your growth.
• They challenged and pushed you.
• They focused on continuous improvement.

Now think about your record as a supervisor. Have you have been able to accomplish all of the above? Too often, people falter in offering either effective supervision or coaching, when everyone on staff should experience both. How can principals and assistant principals effectively manage the duality of the role?

5 Key Concepts

The following ideas have helped us navigate the challenges of supervisory tasks such as evaluating staff while simultaneously creating a culture of continuous improvement through coaching and mentoring:

1. Know your people and yourself. Spend time getting to know the strengths of the people you supervise or coach, including their work styles and motivations. Be aware of your strengths, skills, and areas for growth, too. Knowing yourself is key to knowing how to lead others. It helps to develop emotionally intelligent leadership skills.

In The Noble School Leader, author Matt Taylor writes that self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social skills can help in creating conditions that foster connection and care. His five-square approach to emotionally intelligent leadership is a tool you can use to reflect on your own values and to think empathetically about the “stuff” others might be dealing with.

A few questions for reflection:

• What values guide your work as a school leader? What values shape the beliefs of the team you lead? Consider having your team sort and identify your core values.
• What strengths do you and your team members possess? Consider administering a personality or leadership inventory and discussing the results as a team.
• What leadership vision do you and your team have for the year? Where do you want to grow? Consider sharing and posting those visions to increase accountability.
• What personal mindsets or actions might be getting in the way of achieving your vision? Consider having honest conversations as a team about responses that might not be helpful.

2. Know what kind of conversation you are having. While every interaction contains opportunities for coaching, it’s important to know the purpose of each meeting. A formal evaluation is different from a planning conversation or a chat in the hallway after school.

In Learning-Focused Supervision, Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman place learning-focused conversations on a continuum that includes coaching, collaborating, consulting, and calibrating. While the goal is to start and end the conversation in a coaching stance, the person leading the conversation will occasionally need to take off the coaching “hat” and have a calibrating conversation to reset or clarify expectations.

• To determine what type of conversation you are having, ask yourself:
• Who is doing the most talking? If it’s you, you are not coaching.
• What kinds of questions are you asking? Open-ended questions prompt reflection and support coaching.
• When you offer ideas (consulting) or clarify expectations (calibrating), how can you prompt thinking and ultimately return responsibility to the person you are supervising? Asking them to identify their next steps is a good strategy.

3. Know what work needs to get done. The most effective school leaders are guided by a clear vision and direction for the future. They are also keenly aware of where their organization has been. In Getting Into Good Trouble at School, Gregory C. Hutchings and Douglas S. Reed say that it’s important to internalize the history and context of your school—leaders can’t try to change something without knowing what came before. You also need to know any technical and adaptive challenges that need to be addressed and who should be addressing them.

Ask yourself and your team:

• What is our school’s story? What are people saying about the school, and what do we want people to say a year from now? Leaders should delve into the history and the data to understand the school’s needs and its community.
• What challenges are getting in the way of school success, and who can help tackle them? Discern the key challenges for your school community to develop and execute a shared vision.
• What technical or adaptive challenges are at play in the school? Distinguish the types of challenges your school faces, so you can address adaptive mindsets and beliefs.

4. Know how to create the conditions that allow coaching to flourish. When coaching, employ strategies that build connection, demonstrate care, and allow discussion of challenging topics. Lipton and Wellman identify a toolkit of strategies that can help leaders create this kind of psychological safety, including pausing, paraphrasing, and posing questions. Being present is equally important—coaching conversations require your attention.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How am I creating time and space for reflection? Pause before asking a question and after reflections are shared.
• How effectively am I listening to build clarity and connection? Remember to paraphrase to acknowledge, clarify, summarize, organize, and reflect back what’s being said.
• What is the quality of the questions I’m asking, and are they prompting reflection? Pose open-ended questions, and remember: It’s an inquiry, not an interrogation.

How do my actions demonstrate that I am present? Be sure to silence your phone, close your laptop, and tell your team that you’re having an important conversation.

5. Make time for it all. There is a tendency in education to see everything as urgent, making it difficult for individuals to distinguish what’s important. When a leader plans something, it should signal its importance. In Leverage Leadership 2.0, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo says that leaders can prioritize time for supervision and coaching by “defending” their schedules, and they can empower their teams to do the same. Effective supervision and coaching is not the work of the principal alone.

Questions to ask:

• What does your calendar say about your priorities? If something isn’t on your calendar, it is probably not a priority.
• Is your schedule blocked for observations and coaching conversations? Be intentional about calendaring annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly instructional priorities.
• How often do you meet one-on-one with team members? Empower your leadership team to also effectively supervise and coach through regular check-ins.
• Do you make time for your own growth and development? Set aside scheduled space for personal reflection and continuous improvement.

Supervision and coaching aren’t easy jobs. But we believe that a school leader can make the work of being both boss and coach manageable by leveraging the stan­ces we emphasized above. Educators want to be valued in their school communities, by leaders who provide a sense of psychological safety, clear direction, and the conditions to grow professionally.

School leaders who follow these practices and make time for conversations can effectively supervise, mentor, and coach so that their students can ultimately experience academic and social-emotional success. Are you ready to lead by being both the boss and a coach?

Tynika Young-Aleibar is director of the Equity-Centered Pipeline Initiative with the District of Columbia Public Schools.

Greg Moffitt is director of school leader preparation and development with the District of Columbia Public Schools.

https://www.naesp.org/resource/being-the-boss-and-a-coach/