Status Updates From Evocative Coaching

"The Great 8 Movements of Evocative Coaching Story Listening 1. Initiate 2. Elaborate Expressing Empathy 3. Validate Appreciative Inquiry 4. Appreciate 5. Extrapolate Design Thinking 6. Innovate 7. Deliberate 8. Activate"

"When coaches and teachers communicate what they are working on with others, the systems and structures in schools shift into alignment. When coaches and teachers share the stories of their design experiments, including details as to how things went, what worked well, and what things were helpful to them, the news begins to spread. Such stories can have a huge influence on school environments."

"How can teachers and coaches influence an entire hallway, department, school, or school system? Isn’t that the work of principals, superintendents, and school boards?...Can lightning really flash from one classroom to an entire web of environments? According to Bill Byham (1992), that is often the only way it ever starts. One person has to catch the energy and run with the ball."

"If we think about the collective emotions in a school as the clouds in the atmosphere, we might think of the collective efficacy beliefs as the wind. When the wind is at our back, it can speed our progress and reduce the effort needed to move ahead in the directions we want to go."

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."

"A Buddhist teaching holds that we never step into the same river twice. Neither do we show up at the same school with the same teachers twice. Each day, each conversation presents a new opportunity to foster productive change."

"The better teachers feel about themselves and their work, the more teachers aspire to make themselves and their work even better. At their best, such aspirations go beyond yearning to the place of vision."

"Rearrange the letters in listen and you get silent. Silence is an important part of every coaching conversation. As teachers tell their stories, and as coaches respond with empathy and inquiry, teachers often pause to think, feel, or connect with their truth."

"Setting a minimum number of possibilities to generate • Setting a time limit to keep things moving rapidly • Withholding judgment or evaluation of possibilities • Encouraging wild and exaggerated possibilities • Letting no possibility go unsaid • Building on the possibilities put forth by others • Combining and expanding possibilities • Going for quantity rather than quality"

"There is no one universal path to competence in any profession, unless that path is the love of learning and a commitment to continuous performance improvement."

"We prefer empathy and inquiry as approaches because of how they open up teachers to the prospect of change and because of how they engage teachers in their own, unique performance-improvement processes."

"Simply put, coaching is a conversational process that brings out the greatness in people. It raises the bar of the possible, so that people reinvent themselves and their organizations in the service of transformational learning."