Kenny McKee is a gifted author and passionate coach, who I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with in creating curriculum for school districts. We had a chance to connect and share our passion and excitement around positively impacting instructional practice. He is the co-author of the ASCD book Compassionate Coaching: How to Help Educators Navigate Barriers to Professional Growth.

Instructional Coaching as
Collaborative Action Research
by Kenny McKee

Over a decade ago, I had an amazing opportunity to be part of a year-long professional learning program for instructional coaching. I was a novice coach with only about 3 months in my role as I began this program. And, it was a phenomenal program that laid the groundwork for the coach I would become. But, as I listened to instructional coaches discuss their roles from across my state, I found that there were distinct differences in how we viewed our roles.

This distinction was especially illuminated when we had conversations about how we introduced our role to students. Many of the coaches would say things like, “I teach the teachers,” or I am the “Teacher of the Teachers.” One coach proudly proclaimed herself, “Queen of the Teachers.”

I found these descriptions and titles odd. Maybe it was because of my newness to the role or my age at the time (my first coaching role was at age 31), but I felt like I could not be the “Teacher of Teachers,” as I was still learning. I was often learning from the teachers I coached. And mostly, we were learning alongside one another.

I found that teachers sometimes seemed to hold similar assumptions about how I would approach them as a coach. Some expected me to tell them what to do. Some expected me to position myself as the expert on what was happening in their classrooms. Many seemed disarmed by me, when I would ask questions about how certain strategies might work with their learners. Or they might look surprised when I might say, “This might totally fail. We are going to find out together,” once we had planned a course of action.

These early coaching interactions began to frame my lens of instructional coaching as collaborative action research. I began to frame coaching cycles as opportunities to experiment with new approaches and to test hypotheses. What does this form of instructional coaching look like? Here are two important shifts:

1 | Framing the focus of coaching around a specific research question

Early in a coaching cycle, instructional coaches can ask, “What is the question you are hoping to answer?” The teacher’s response essentially becomes a research question that can help establish the focus of a coaching cycle. The research question will probably need to be narrowed, and that can be part of the coach’s role – to ask clarifying follow-up questions for this purpose. For example, a teacher might begin with a question like, “How do I engage my students?” After a few clarifying follow-up questions, the new research question might be, “What impact does personalized goal-setting have on my students’ engagement?”

2 | Utilizing third points

Instructional coaching collaborations should not be a battle of opinions. When we take the lens of action research, we shift how we approach the coaching relationship. For example, the coaching plan we design (the strategies, the success criteria, the format of the coaching, etc.) needs to be influenced by third points. The three points are the teacher, the instructional coach, and the evidence - with evidence being the third. Utilizing a third point, allows the teacher and the coach to engage in a collaborative inquiry of evidence to inform their decisions. This could be reviewing research, prior successes, and instructional resources to support how they design their coaching plan.

The evidence they choose to collect during and after the coaching cycle is also a third point that helps them assess progress. Those third points can be student work, video, student surveys, or assessment results. The bottom line is that the plan for coaching and the success of the coaching are calibrated with evidence - and not with the opinions of the teacher or coach.

Using a collaborative action research framing for instructional coaching is of the ultimate benefit for the coach, teacher, and students. Being open to learning guards us against the fixed mindset thinking that can often show up in our beliefs about best practices. It positions the teacher and coach as collaborators and co-learners in the process. And, it makes the coaching partnership about the evidence of learning - both the evidence that guides the coaching cycle and the evidence of what students learned as a result of it.

So how do I introduce my role to students? My answer is, “I am a teacher who partners with other teachers to discover together what helps you learn best.”

Kenny will be facilitating a webinar in the Learning Forward Florida & Florida ASCD Webinar series on Collaborative Professional Learning Structures for Teachers. Join him live on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 at 7:00pm ET / 4:00pm PT for this informative and engaging session. You can also learn more about Kenny McKee and his work on his website: KennyCMcKee.com