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January 4, 2010

Working in Low-Socioeconomic-Status Schools and Using Cognitive Coaching^SM with Teachers

Thank you Louise, Guy, Catherine and Chris for your thoughtful comments and ideas for Sustaining the Journey. We will attempt to respond to your ideas in the next months.

Guy wrote of the challenges of working in schools serving populations of low socioeconomic status. While there are no easy answers to the challenges, Cognitive Coaching^SM does provide some tools and resources for working with both teachers and students. Efficacy of teachers is often low in schools with students from poverty. Teachers may feel ill-prepared or discouraged. Their worldview and life experiences often differ from their students, and there are values clashes. Teacher turnover is high, one symptom of low efficacy. Research on Cognitive Coaching^SM has consistently shown that teachers who are coached show growth in efficacy. Some teachers in low-income schools have an external locus of control, blaming the environment and the students' background for lack of success. As efficacy grows, an internal locus of control develops, empowering the teacher to have optimism about his/her own capacity to use strategies that are best practices. One generic question that coaches can use with low efficacy teachers is: "Over what do you have control in this situation?" Others might be:

• "What are some ways you can maximize the benefits of your time with your students?"
• "What are some places in the school where successes are occurring?"
• "What seem to be the critical variables contributing to those successes?"
• "What actions does this suggest for your work?"

Other States of Mind are also useful to develop higher resourcefulness in teachers working with students of poverty:

Consciousness

• "What were some of the reasons you chose to work with this population of students?"
• "What do you bring as strengths in working with this population? How are you acting on those strengths?"
• "What might be some assumptions you hold about your student population?"
• "What are you learning about your students that you didn't know in the past? How does this impact your decision-making?"

Craftsmanship

• "What are some research findings that inform your work?"
• "How do you use data to make decisions regarding your practices?"
• "What are some of the criteria you are using to make decisions about your curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices?"

Flexibility

• "How might your students be perceiving ___________?"
• "How do your life experiences differ from your students, and how might that be affecting your choices?"
• "What alternatives are you considering as you think about the needs of this population of students?"

Interdependence

• "How important is collaboration to you? With colleagues? For your students?"
• "How has the teaming in this school supported your work in the past?"
• "What are some contributions you are making to others in developing a sense of collective efficacy here in this school?"