Executive Leadership Coaching FTW

I am the Associate Principal for Instruction and former instructional coach. When I became an Associate Principal last year, I realized that our instructional coaches have more coaching training than many of our administrators, so I was excited to learn about Apple Executive Leadership Coaching. I reached out to fabulous Christine Klynen to do coaching sessions with my Division Heads because I saw how she coaches our new teachers with the Apple Coaching cycles. The way she reflects with teachers is profound. I set up meetings with my division heads and Christine to establish our individual learning goals, to visit classrooms to see evidence of how that looks in practice, and I had them observe and reflect on her questioning. That is Christine's gold. We shared as an instructional team what questions we wanted to steal from her to use with our teachers during the evaluation process. Some of our collective favorites included the following:

1. As you moved through the lesson, what were some of the cues you saw that let you know they were on track?
2. What were some of the feelings you felt - (awareness of how teachers felt)?
3. Is there any part of the lesson that might have had a negative impact?

I had the Division Heads also reflect on her nonverbal communication. We reflected on her posture, her tone, volume, pitch, and her facial expressions. It was a safe way to use an objective/outside expert to study and process how we use questioning in our own practice with teachers.

Christine came alongside us and led us from a place of curiosity, excitement, and safety. I'm very grateful for her support and the work my Division Heads and I participated in. Executive Leadership Coaching FTW! :). #D214