Quality Teaching in a Culture of Coaching
Quality Teaching in a Culture of Coaching
Author: Stephen G. Barkley
Binding Type: paper
Year Published: 2004
Availability: In Stock
Price: 29.95
Steve Barkley's newest book is here! Read the description and foreword below, then order your copy today!
Description
This book promises to provide a framework to incorporate a culture of coaching into your own educational environment. It outlines the why, who, what, and how of a sound coaching program. Steve has included concrete examples, opportunities to practice specific skills, a clearly defined coaching process, and real-life anecdotes and quotes to pepper it up in the process.
We hope this book will both inspire you to continue or initiate a coaching program, and serve as a resource as you implement and build your own coaching program.
Foreword
By Adam Urbanski, Ph.D.
Adam Urbanski is President of the Rochester Teachers Association, a Vice-President of the American Federation of Teachers, and the director of the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) of AFT and NEA Locals. A native of Poland, Dr. Urbanski immigrated at the age of 14. He earned a Ph.D. in American Social History from the University of Rochester. A former high school teacher and college professor, Dr. Urbanski is an active proponent of change in education.
Many daunting problems in education are borne from the isolation of teachers. Teaching requires the highest concentration of adults in the workplace of nearly any profession and, ironically, it is the most isolating. There is no such thing as excellence in teaching when in solitude. By definition, excellence in teaching is a form of communication and group activity.
A coaching relationship contributes significantly to diminishing this isolation, particularly when the coaching involves experienced and expert practitioners sharing their knowledge and skills with more novice educators. There are national impulses in the direction of more collaboration among educators, yet it is changing much too slowly. In most schools, teachers are judged on their work as individuals. Policies and practices encourage individualism and do not sufficiently promote collective actions on the part of teachers. New teachers end up learning their job by "sink or swim."
Thus, it was with great relief and excitement that I learned Steve Barkley was authoring a book on the subject of coaching. Not only is Steve a highly skilled educator and presenter, his focus on the empowerment of teachers has always been paramount. Rather than viewing teachers as targets for reforms, he equips them with the capacity to be agents of reform. His approach underscores the value of the synergy that comes when teacher and coach spend productive time reflecting, polishing, improving, and focusing their efforts toward greater rewards for student and teacher alike.
Japan has long known the exponential benefit of coaching and teaching. While Japan’s school year is the longest in the world, teachers' direct contact with students is less than in the United States. Japanese teachers devote half their work time to joint planning; sharing their lessons with other educators, conferencing about students and learning from each other. They call this "polishing the stone." American teachers should take example from this process and spend less time in frantic isolation and more time in thoughtful collaboration.
I envision a teacher union that acts not only as an advocate for educators but also as a lobby for all students. Coaching provides a piston for that effort. Steve Barkley played a vital role in bringing peer coaching into our teachers’ negotiated contract as early as 1987. We believe in this direction so strongly we have included peer coaching assistance, peer review, and now coaching and mentor programs in all our negotiated contracts.
These programs are hugely successful, and they may not have been without the infrastructure of knowledge that Steve and Performance Learning Systems® provided us. We have now leveraged those programs into new provisions that call for team transfers. Teachers no longer view themselves as individual practitioners; rather, they combine with other teachers —those who have been coached or are coaches in order to transfer into the same low performing schools. The distinguishing difference about Steve's approach is that he shares with a wider audience and with the educational community the work he has actually done and work he has honed over two decades. This is not a question of someone offering commentary on the work of others; this is someone exposing work formed by his own experience. A book written by a dynamic and skilled practitioner such as Steve is vastly more actionable, valuable, and pragmatic than someone offering up only theoretical speculation.
Steve's broad experience throughout the country, and his knowledge about practices in other countries, gives him the basis for observing patterns and for commenting and for helping us to avoid negative findings and false starts, wrong turns, pitfalls. This is wisdom gained from decades of experience about what to do and what not to do, what works and what doesn't, and it's a huge bargain for the reader of the book to have that concentrated for them so they can avoid the hard knocks involved in gaining direct experience on this critical theme.
Bravo, Steve. A book about coaching in teaching by an accomplished teacher coach is a book whose time has come.
