Coaching: A Structure of Support
This is the fourth article in a series on Elizabeth Slade’s book Montessori in Action: Building Resilient Schools written for Public Montessori in Action International. So far I have outlined Slade’s “Whole School Montessori Method”, and looked at the first two “Core Elements” of the method: Constructivism and Equity. In this post, I look at the third core element of the Whole School Montessori Method - Coaching.
Straight Outta Training
When I first sought out a Montessori training program for myself in 2013, a mentor and experienced Montessorian encouraged me to take the same training as he had, advertising it to me as “not for the faint of heart.” He told me that training was one of the single best experiences of his life and that it would “demolish who you previously were, and build you back up anew, piece by piece.” Phew. My goodness, Montessorians can be intense about training. But, of course, I took his advice, I mean, who wouldn’t want a little bit of reconstruction as a 20-year-old? And he wasn’t wrong: my Montessori training has become central to who I am as a person. It was transformative. I now identify as a Montessorian; it is a central aspect of my personal and professional identity. Personal transformation is one of the expressed goals of Montessori teacher training: it seeks to shift the individual teacher’s worldview and fundamentally change their relationship with education. Ours is a revolutionary cause, and new teachers exit training lit up and ready to carry the torch.
But what happens next? Frequently, Montessori teachers experience a gulf between what they’ve learned in training and the everyday realities of managing a classroom. Few classrooms operate in an idealistic vacuum, and suddenly you are navigating the demands of your school leadership, the school district, your colleagues whose training differs from yours, your family community whose values don’t always align with your own, and the children, who, for one reason or another, don’t always seem to follow the training memo either. The consequence of these competing influences and pressures is often either teacher burnout or teachers who feel forced to compromise their Montessori values and practices to meet these complex demands.
How as a community can we better support our teachers? How can we support and maintain their continued growth and development across an entire career - from the enthusiastic trainee to the experienced Montessori sage? How can we sustain the flame of Montessori philosophy, which burns so bright straight out of training, across a lifetime?
What we need is better structures of support within our schools. One such system that is becoming popular in Montessori schools across the US, particularly in public Montessori programs, is coaching.
What is Coaching?
I just finished training as a Montessori coach through Public Montessori in Action International’s Montessori Coaching Course. Elizabeth Slade, the course leader, describes the Montessori coach as “the prepared adult for the prepared environment of the school…a person in the school with a background as a Montessori educator who is now working to support the adults in the building and to allow elements of the system to come into balance.” As she explains in Montessori in Action: Building Resilient Schools, there are three key responsibilities that the Montessori coach has:
Whole school observation and support
Strong implementation of the Montessori Method
Transformation of the Montessori educator
Whole School Observation & Support
The first responsibility the coach has is to approach the whole school as a prepared Montessori environment. This means a daily observation practice of all the different systems of the school and how they interact beyond just individual classroom dynamics - from pick-up and drop-off procedures to how teachers talk with each other in the hallways. Slade writes, “The coach brings the Montessori lens to every interaction, and every decision then is borne out of a constructivist approach.” In this way, the coach can bring to attention areas of school life that may be out of alignment with the school’s Montessori mission and values; they become an internal activist for self-reflection and community change. The coach is also expected to apply a critical lens of equity to their observations, observing for ways in which the school’s systems are potentially furthering inequity for adults and children. Observing for those blind spots and “say-do gaps” that I talked about in my previous article on equity.
Strong Implementation of the Montessori Method
The next responsibility the coach has is to ensure strong and consistent implementation of the Montessori Method across classrooms in the school. As Slade says, “Because Montessori was never a trademarked set of practices, there has evolved a variation in the way training centers prepare Montessori educators, and that translates to variability in teaching practices and technical proficiency…[and] this variance in public schools can impact the children with the least advocacy.” The coach’s responsibility therefore is to help Montessori guides and assistants to become more interconnected, to support them in collaborating and sharing their training experiences, and to establish parity and consistency between the ways the different environments implement the Montessori Method. This isn’t intended to erase teacher creativity or differentiation within the environment, but to bring everyone together “rather than operating in isolation or opposition.” A coach can also look at how we are supporting children across the developmental planes, and act as a connector between the different levels at a school.
One of the key practices we learned on the Montessori Coaching Course was Lesson Study, a practice in which a coach facilitates a gathering of a group of teachers from the same teaching level, presumably all with different training and teaching experiences, to present a particular Montessori lesson/material to each other. This then creates space for everyone to reflect and rethink what they previously understood about this particular lesson/material and how it should be presented. The Lesson Study should conclude in an agreement across the level as to how everyone will implement that lesson/material moving forward in a way that will best serve all the children in the community. Again, we see here how the coach acts as a connector and collaborator bringing together a community of teachers around a common mission and set of practices.
Transformation of the Montessori Educator
Finally, the coach is responsible for one-on-one coaching with educators. This is the work most commonly associated with “coaching,” and where we can finally answer the questions I posed in my opening:
How as a community can we better support our teachers? How can we sustain the flame of Montessori philosophy, which burns so bright straight out of training, across a lifetime?
In Montessori, we talk about the importance of the “spiritual preparation of the teacher.” There is a recognition that being a great Montessori guide requires a level of awareness and self-possession that takes a lifetime of intention and practice. Training begins this process, coaching can sustain it. One-on-one coaching involves an ongoing relationship between a trained coach and coachee that focuses on supporting the coachee in moving towards the realization of their visions, goals, and desires. Through a process of inquiry and personal discovery, coaching builds the educator’s level of awareness and responsibility and provides them with the structure, support, and feedback to develop as a Montessori teacher. These meetings should occur regularly, ideally once a week, from 20 minutes to an hour a session, over an extended period of time. In the PMAI Coaching Course, coaches are trained in the methods, skills, and structures needed to guide this process with teachers and assistants. This is the spiritual preparation of the teacher given an actual structure and framework of support.
In an ideal situation, a school would have a culture of coaching where all guides, assistants, and school leaders have access to coaching support, where several staff have been trained as coaches, and where you have a few dedicated coaches whose sole job includes the responsibilities listed above. As Slade puts it, a culture where “everyone is coaching and being coached.”
Professional Development That Adds Value!
I think the most eye-opening takeaway from my coaching course was the realization that professional development (PD) can be done differently. At all of the schools I’ve worked at, PD initiatives have often lacked impact, consistency, and relevance. I can’t think of one PD initiative that led to long-lasting, systemic change. One of my previous colleagues referred to these initiatives as “Tupperware” - ideas that you pick up once and then stash away in a cupboard never to use again. My cupboards are full of Tupperware.
At one point in the coaching course, however, Slade shared a template for a year-long PD calendar which has transformed my understanding of professional development. She outlined how PD can instead be thought of as a structure of support and development for all adults (teachers, assistants, admin, families), that is repeated year after year, providing the sort of consistency and long-lasting change that I have been missing in previous institutions. A culture of coaching sits at the center of this plan. Whole-school observation, team coaching, lesson study, and one-on-one coaching offer the structures and practices for exploring different areas of both individual and whole-school professional development.
Each year, three focus goals are chosen for the school: an academic goal (e.g. Math), a “whole child” goal (e.g. Child Study or SEND provision), and a systems goal (e.g. Observation & SEL Learning). These rotate on a 3-year cycle. Each month, the school applies a lens of development and discovery to one of these goals, providing professional development for all adults under this theme (e.g. in September all school-based adults revisit Child Study Training, and all families are educated about Montessori at Home). In this way, over a year, you can cover as an institution many of the essential trainings and practices that need regular reflection and attention. This allows you to catch new teachers up with systems they may have not been trained in previously, to give parents multiple opportunities for education throughout their time with a school, and to help experienced teachers deepen their commitment to practices that otherwise would have been left unexamined. I can’t explain how different this is from the superficial way most institutions practice PD, where a new training is dropped on teachers for a session or two, driven by whatever is most hip and buzzy at the time, and then never revisited. This becomes especially toxic when institutions approach Equity PD in this way, claiming to have trained their staff in ABAR practices because of one workshop.
Coaching the Revolution
We are entering into a brave new world of Montessori education in the US. There has been rapid, exponential growth in Montessori private and public schools over the last decade, and rapid growth in any industry typically requires a reevaluation of systems. How can we meet this moment effectively as a community? In my first article, I talked about Dr. Angeline Lillard’s proposal for an educational revolution and her roadmap for implementing Montessori at scale in the US. One key step she proposes is creating “strong guidance and support networks for the implementation of the Montessori method in public schools, especially for school leaders.” Lillard acknowledges that widespread implementation of any alternative model would “reveal issues with it as well, just as Copernicus's model required refinement following its widespread adoption.” The main problem she anticipates with widespread Montessori implementation is “retaining fidelity to the model.”
Slade acknowledges this issue in her book as well, writing, “What slows us down, often to a halt, in public Montessori schools is the lack of cohesive shared structures that become known and easily used by everyone, fostering independence and a greater sense of agency for all. Instead, each school is innovating in its own way, with much reinvention of the wheel and some missing pieces, leaving them vulnerable to systemic disorder that may ultimately threaten the success of the program.” This is where coaching comes in. A strong system of coaching in a school creates a network of support that allows for greater cohesiveness, consistency, professional development, collaboration, and strong implementation of the Montessori Method. This then creates a school that can be more resilient: a school that can more effectively manage fluctuations in staffing, differences in training or implementation, schoolwide equity, professional development of staff, support for children with behavioral or learning differences, local district demands, and parent education. Finally, imagine a world where all Montessori schools are sustained by such a structure, allowing for all of these benefits on a community-wide scale.
Coaching, I believe, is a step forward for our community, and I hope to see more and more Montessori schools invest in these structures of support and development for their children, families, and staff.
