Normalize Learning from Mistakes
Just like teachers with their students, our underlying beliefs about teachers shape the method and impact of our coaching. A key belief that I’ve found makes for great coaching is this: Teachers can embrace mistakes and not fear them.
We all expect kids to make mistakes. But as adults, we feel a great deal of pressure to have it all together at work. As coaches, we work to undo this pressure, normalize mistakes, and insist that the best teachers learn from their errors and failures.
As Shakira sings in Try Everything from Zootopia, “Nobody learns without getting it wrong.” (Can you tell I spend a lot of time listening to music in the car with a five and seven-year-old?) In our coaching partnerships, we strive to help teachers grow and be the best teachers they can be for the sake of their students. In order to learn, teachers need to feel safe. Learning is also deepened and accelerated by space for teachers to learn from their mistakes.
In their foundational article on instructional coaching, professors Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers explain the importance of a coach as a companion to move teachers forward, out of the isolation teachers can feel in the classroom. They write, “Coaching’s first function is to provide interchange with another human being over a difficult process...Companionship provides reassurance that problems are normal.” Engaging with teachers through challenges and normalizing problems is central to the coaching process.
When coaches normalize teacher errors, we help model how teachers can normalize and embrace student mistakes in their classroom. Ideally, the more a teacher experiences the benefit of space to learn from mistakes, and the language and actions that make this possible, they’ll work to establish a similar space for their students.
Practically, how do coaches normalize errors?
3 ways coaching can normalize errors:
Be transparent about your own mistakes and the learning that you are doing as a professional.
Practice responding to mistakes in the coaching meeting. By role playing a scenario or co-planning a lesson, teachers will make mistakes right on the spot. As you offer bite-sized and specific feedback in the moment, teachers get to practice correcting missteps without the pressure of actual students seeing them slip up.
Consider your coaching mottos. What are the things you say over and over again in your coaching meetings? Include a coaching motto that gets at this idea: “making mistakes is a part of learning.”
Reflection questions:
How do my words and actions communicate that I want teachers to be able to embrace and learn from their mistakes?
What are my underlying beliefs about teachers that impact my coaching?