Imagine it is a January Monday morning in Chicago. Icy cold, gray skies, biting wind, and snow flurries in the air. I’ve lived in this city for over 40 years, and this remains, for me, a season of complete misery. However, there was one saving grace to my day—a bi-weekly Coaching Huddle that always made me feel better, even on the dreariest of days. If that doesn’t sound like something that’ll make your heart soar, read on to find out why it does mine.
Every two weeks, my Network for College Success (NCS) colleagues and I connect with each other to learn and grow our practice as Transformation Coaches. A project at the University of Chicago, NCS works to cultivate postsecondary readiness and success for all students by translating research into practice and supporting high school leaders to organize their schools for improvement and innovation. My teammates and I take up this mission by leading the Freshman Success for Equity (FS4E) Improvement Network, a group of 11 schools that works toward the high achievement of Black and Latine ninth graders through racial equity work and continuous improvement. The Coaching Huddle is a collective space where my colleagues and I explore and expand our coaching actions and beliefs, as well as problem solve to improve our coaching skills.
The Coaching Huddle has become a place of deep learning and discourse for me and my team. It is a protected time in which we take risks and lean into vulnerability to uphold our aim of repaying the educational debt to Black and Latine ninth-grade students across our network.
To understand why the Coaching Huddle means so much to me, you need to know what my team does. The FS4E Network has the following three goals:
To achieve these goals, I coach two ninth grade team leaders—an instructional coach and a teacher—who work in two of the FS4E partner schools. I work with my coachees on developing their skills to lead a collaborative, problem-solving team of adults, and to keep racial equity at the center of the team’s work. I meet with coachees in-person, on a weekly to bi-weekly basis, for one-on-one coaching sessions and to observe them leading their team. During coaching sessions I share strategies, tools, and protocols to strengthen team leadership, give feedback on team meetings, and ask questions, listen attentively, and hold space for coachees to talk about their beliefs, behaviors, and ways of being. To improve my coaching skills in this last area, my goal this year was to build my own emotional literacy skills—specifically, active listening, building trust, and naming and exploring emotions with others—in order to set the conditions necessary for my coachees to deeply examine their practice, take risks, be vulnerable, and thrive.
Everyone in the Coaching Huddle does similar work to me. We all have an improvement project and our own group of coachees. Every two weeks, we meet to engage in a simple yet powerful huddle protocol to improve our coaching practice. Each time we meet, one of us takes on the role of facilitator, another serves as notetaker, and a third person keeps time. Then, we follow the huddle protocol steps—adapted from the Improvement Collective’s Huddle Protocol Form (Grunow & Park, 2021)—to share the coaching strategies, practices, and ideas we have been trying over the previous two weeks with our coachees and school teams.
Here’s how our adapted version of the protocol works:
Each of us takes a turn sharing what we’ve tried. For example, in early March, I developed and tested a new data protocol to examine team feedback with my coachee.
We share bright spots and then talk about our struggles, ask questions, and provide support to each other.
We each name and commit to a next step that will improve our practice, and we finish by completing an “exit ticket” to give feedback on the process and our objectives for the meeting.
Together, throughout the year, our team generated impactful results in coaching practice marked by the simplicity of routine, consistency in holding the bi-weekly space, and discipline to follow the protocol each time we met.
As I look back, I can pinpoint specific low points in my work and how the Coaching Huddle helped me overcome them. Early in the year, for example, I focused on how to build trust with a new coachee educator and her team. My teammates shared clear ideas to help me improve in this area, and they encouraged me to directly ask my coachee, “How do you need me to show up for you during team meetings? What, specifically, do you need from me?” This strategy led to a deep conversation with my coachee about how she was feeling as both a new member of her school community and as a team leader. In turn, she asked me to provide feedback on the team’s sense of community and to ask more probing questions during team meetings. This turning point not only strengthened my coaching practice, but deepened trust between me and my coachee, helping to cultivate a more honest team space.
Mid-year, I remember feeling frustrated because I could not secure a consistent meeting time with a different coachee. Upon sharing my frustration with the team, one colleague suggested that I try showing up in person at the school instead of scheduling a virtual coaching session. This idea turned the trajectory of my coaching around. It was the push I needed to take a “warm-demander” coaching stance—one in which I was fully present with my coachee. I could be supportive and reassuring while also holding high expectations of her, the team, and their ability to better serve their least-reached students. Most recently, I was nervous to share unfavorable school team feedback with a coachee. When I opened up about this to the Coaching Huddle, I received immediate support on how to structure the conversation to help my coachee de-personalize the data and focus on how to use the information to support her growth as a team lead. In my next coaching session, I shared the data with my coachee using an updated protocol based on the feedback from the Coaching Huddle. To my surprise, it led to a powerful conversation in which my coachee examined her power as team lead, reflected on what she needed to do to support the team in building collective ownership of the work, and named actions she would take to improve their collaborative relationship.
The positive impact of the Coaching Huddle on my colleagues’ practice was also evident throughout the year. Exit ticket data collected between the end of September and mid-April indicates progress toward our objectives (see Figure 1). During the year, my colleagues consistently reported that the Coaching Huddle supported their growth in coaching by learning, exploring new beliefs and practices, and problem-solving together.
Figure 1: Data from the FS4E Coaching Huddle Exit Ticket
Additionally, the feedback from my colleagues sheds insight into the sacredness of the space, the deep trust we built as a team, and the influence of the Coaching Huddle on our practice:
“Never ceases to amaze me how much support we can give to each other in such a short time.”
“Sometimes it’s just nice to look each other in the eye, be honest about where we’re messing up, and tell each other we’re still doing a good job.”
“It was really helpful to hear about how to bring coachees’ goals back into the coaching space as a reflection tool, as well as reflect on how our coaching is building the leadership skills and capacity of coachees beyond the [freshman success] space.”
It took my colleagues and I a full year of holding the Coaching Huddle before it became the routine practice we engage in today. To avoid our mistakes and to start using this practice as soon as “next Tuesday” in your work, consider these recommendations:
I am proud of the Coaching Huddle my colleagues and I put into practice, and am excited to continue engaging in this deep professional learning routine in the years ahead. I look forward to deepening my coaching practice as a member of the NCS Freshman Success for Equity team and making a greater collective impact with my teammates in the future. For more information on NCS please visit ncs.uchicago.edu.
Grunow, A., & Park, S. (2021). Public resources. Improvement Collective https://www.improvementcollective.com/resources-page
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