Coaching Cut #25 Get the goal!

Coaching cuts: bite-sized tips for better coaching

Today’s tip

Work with your coachee to pin down what their goal was (or ought to have been) in the teaching situation you are focusing on. We call this their situation goal. Before you get anywhere near discussing the issue in their teaching, get that situation goal.

A quick note on language: there are lots of different meanings of the word ‘goal’ when it comes to coaching. Often it makes people think of longer-term aspirations or even short-term targets like action steps. In this post, when we say ‘goal’ we don’t mean either of those things. We mean the teacher’s goal in the teaching situation they were in - hence, situation goal. For example, a teacher signalling for her class’s attention can reasonably be said to have the situation goal ‘getting all student’s attention’. A teacher holding a class discussion may have many goals: ‘getting students to challenge each other’s ideas’, ‘rehearsing key ideas before written work’, etc.

As coaches, it’s our job to bring a situation to the coaching conversation. This is the situation where we think something didn’t go as well as it could have done and student learning was affected. We need to work out what the teacher’s goal was in that situation to help them see a) if their situation goal was good enough b) if the actions they took were likely to meet the goal.

So, when you turn your attention to that key situation, zoom in on it and ask your coachee -
”What was your goal in that situation?”

Once you’ve got the goal, agree what happened. Usually, you’ll find that your coachee’s actions were not the best ones to achieve their goals. The best part? Because your coachee has agreed what their situation goal was, it’s easy for them to gain insight on the issue themselves.

Watch how…

Coach Adam wastes no time in getting coachee Katie’s goal. She says her goal was for her children to make independent choices in their writing.

Then, we cut to later in the conversation, after they have mapped out her actions and the effects. Watch how Adam continually refers back to Katie’s goal when he’s asking her questions. By doing this, she’s able to see that the approach she took to modelling only showed students the result of her thinking and not the process of making good choices. In other words, she has the insight that her actions did not meet her situation goal!

Why might getting the goal be important?

Our behaviours are driven by our goals - our situation goals.

In our upcoming book Coaching for Adaptive Expertise, Adam shares an example: imagine a teacher repeatedly asking her class, “Do you understand?” To a coach, that might look like a poor check for understanding.

But what if the teacher’s goal wasn’t to check understanding at all - what if it was simply to check students were listening? In that case, the whole class saying “yes!” might actually meet her goal by confirming they were at least awake and attentive.

You might still coach her towards a more reliable way to check for listening, but notice what happened: by clarifying her situation goal, you get insight into why she acted the way she did.

If you skip this, you’re guessing her goal and guessing is risky. It’s how coaching conversations go off track.

It’s also important to get the goal because as you see from today’s clip, it enables the coachee to have an insight into the issue. This is almost always a version of “Ahhh, my actions didn’t serve my goal well enough”. It’s not always possible, but if we can help our coachee’s come to their own insights, they are probably more likely to be bought into the change they need to make.

When would and wouldn’t you get the goal?

We honestly wouldn’t start this stage of coaching off any other way: zoom in and get our coachee’s situation goal.

You might have also noticed that Adam mapped out his coachee’s goal on the whiteboard, as well as her actions and the effects. This process of ‘mapping’ is a super helpful tool/scaffold you can use to support you and your coachee to examine their decision-making. To learn more about mapping, see this post and a neat webinar on using mapping to prepare for coaching.

Get in touch if you’d like to work together on coaching! (sarahcottinghatt@outlook.com) and stay subscribed for more coaching cuts!

HUGE thanks to the relaxed and remarkable coach, Adam Kohlbeck and his BRILLIANT coachee, Katie!