Coaching Whole School Change

School coaching is an increasingly popular school-change strategy, yet we have relatively few detailed pictures of actual coaching practice. This book provides an in-depth look at the practice of coaching in a small high school, and includes case studies, stories, tools, and artifacts from the life of the school. The authors identify and describe a set of “coaching habits” that foster instructional planning across the curriculum, distributed leadership, and the development of a strong professional learning community. Because effective coaching is always collaborative, the text looks at coaching from the perspectives of the coach and three of the teachers whom she coaches, as well as that of a school-based researcher. This guide to effective coaching:

• Focuses on “change coaching,” which encompasses school culture and organization, as well as curriculum content.
• Describes how coaching develops and changes in the life of one school over a period of 5 years.
• Provides examples and tools that will be invaluable to school coaches, administrators, district staff, staff developers, and organizations that support coaching.

David Allen teaches secondary English education at the College of Staten Island. His most recent books are The Facilitator’s Book of Questions (with Tina Blythe,) and Looking Together at Student Work, Second Edition (with Tina Blythe and Barbara Powell). Suzanne Wichterle Ort has been a teacher, a school coach, and a research associate at NCREST. She is an assistant principal at Park East High School in New York City. Alexis Constantini and Joseph Schmidt teach at Park East High School and Jennie Reist formerly taught at Park East.

“A whole encyclopedia of coaching in the form of an easy-to-read account of one coach and her school. This book is thoroughly engaging from the opening anecdote onward.”
—Joseph P. McDonald, New York University

“The heart of this book is the detailed descriptions of coaching relationships as they were worked out over the years. The authors eschew academic abstraction and deal with what people see and say and feel—with the relationships and reality of classroom life. And because they are gifted teachers themselves, we get an extra treat—a vivid portrait of good teaching.” —From the Foreword by Thomas Sobol, professor emeritus, Teachers College, Columbia University and former commissioner of education for New York State