In Education Week Teacher, Elena Aguilar writes an insightful piece about the promise of transformational coaching. Excerpts appear below:
I believe new-teacher support programs must be linked to schools’ moral imperative to meet the social, emotional, and academic needs of every child, every day. To that end, the overarching objective of a teacher-support program should be to enable teachers to use their energy and skills to interrupt educational inequities within their own classrooms and schools.
Let’s name the challenges faced by new teachers that many current mentoring or coaching programs don’t address. My observations are heavily influenced by my 20-plus years working in urban education, but I’ve seen new teachers in suburban and private schools dealing with these same challenges, perhaps with different degrees of intensity. I categorize these challenges as:
- Managing the physical, cognitive, and emotional load of teaching.
- Dealing with the range of stressors.
- Finding work-life balance.
- Developing positive relationships with students and parents.
- Understanding kids and parents who are different from them—who are of a different gender, race/ethnicity, or class background.
- Teaching students with learning differences.
These challenges are individually distinct, but I believe two capacities underlie the ability to meet all of them: emotional resilience and cultural competence. These are two areas that have been poorly addressed by new teacher-support programs, but they are the keys to the above delineated goals. What’s needed in schools today is a transformation model for coaching that closes the gaping holes in current support programs and helps educators build these central capacities.
The realities that teachers experience in the classroom necessitate an expanded and holistic approach to new-teacher support and development and a focus on resilience. The realities that our students experience likewise require an approach that cultivates cultural competency in teachers, that intentionally surfaces and explores beliefs, and that fosters the skills necessary to build equitable schools.
Emotional resilience is essential if teachers are going to explore questions of identity, race, beliefs, and inequities—I doubt we can transform our schools without massively boosting our resilience because it is hard and emotional work. But at the same time, we must transform our schools. There are far too many children who are not served in our schools, especially far too many children of color, far too many black and brown boys, and far too many children with learning differences.
It is incumbent upon new-teacher support programs to integrate the strategies that aspire to meet these outcomes, and the transformational coaching model is a powerful approach to doing so. Yes, this approach takes more time, and yes, coaches themselves need intensive training and support to develop it—but what we’ve been doing isn’t producing the results that many of us hope for. It’s time to try something different.
For more, see
