Coaching in the Classroom: A Guide for Empowering Students and Teachers

Copyright © 2024 Linda L. Hopper, Ph.D.

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ISBN: 979-8-7652-5235-2 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-5236-9 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-5234-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024909615

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/15/2024

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

My Story

It’s Time to Reexamine the Role of Education

Chapter 1The Coaching Mindset

Chapter 2The Empowerment Model

Chapter 3Empowering Students through Self-Awareness

Chapter 4Empowering Students to Handle Stress

Chapter 5Empowering Students in Self-Efficacy and Self-Confidence

Chapter 6Empowering Students in Responsibility

Chapter 7Resources

Appendix

Acknowledgements

A Note from the Author

To my greatest teachers: Justin, Nathan,

Rachel, and all my former students

For Lydia

PREFACE

The COVID-19 pandemic changed our lives forever. The global shutdown allowed many people to reevaluate what they wanted for their lives. Slowing down from the hectic pace we set for ourselves, we came back to what’s most important to us—our well-being. This book offers a way to bring greater self-awareness of well-being into the classroom to benefit both teachers and students.

I want to thank you for taking the time to explore the ideas this book represents for education. It is the culmination of my life’s work in trying to mesh coaching with teaching. Coaching can be implemented by any teacher who wants to reconnect with the passion to make a difference in the lives of students. Through coaching, we help our students and ourselves in designing lives that bring more joy, more creative use of our abilities and strengths, and greater freedom from stress.

As a professional coach and mother of three, events catapulted me into making the decision to enter the classroom. I spent many years as an involved parent in education, but when my son dropped out of high school and my clients began asking me why coaching wasn’t used in schools, I made the decision to get a master’s degree in education and become a teacher.

Education as it has been structured in the past is failing our youth. The model we have continued to use is a one-size-fits-all approach to learning that was patterned after the industrial concept of mass production. Why are we expecting all students to learn the exact same things at the same time of development and then offer only one way of evaluation (standardized testing)? An education system such as this is one that limits the creative potential of students and is disempowering for many. As I recently played with my fifteen-month-old granddaughter, I was reminded again that we develop in our own ways in our own time. We don’t expect babies to talk, walk, or work puzzles all at the same time in the same ways. How is it we change that expectation once our children attend school? Our students need so much more than what we are currently offering in a school setting.

Teachers are the only ones who can change this. You can’t wait for the governing bodies or experts to make meaningful change. You have the knowledge, wisdom, and relationships to offer students a different way of learning—through coaching. No real change can happen in education without the teacher. This book offers you an opportunity to shift your perspective and call back your power as a teacher/coach.

As I took the time during the pandemic to reflect on my upcoming retirement from teaching, I realized that I was being gifted the perfect opportunity to bring coaching more forcefully into my classroom. I made personal growth and development a priority and weekly focus for most of the 2021–22 school year.

This book reflects what I have learned over thirty-five years as a mother, coach, and teacher. I share stories of my fourteen years of teaching and coaching in middle school and high school. Some of them are based on recall and to the best of my ability. In most cases, I changed the names and personal information to protect anonymity.

It is my hope that this book can be used as a springboard to greater possibilities for you, your students, and our education system as a whole. You have amazing abilities, insights, knowledge, and experience. This book offers you an opportunity to use them more fully in empowering students through coaching. Change is often driven from within. You, dear teacher, are uniquely positioned to do that. I know many of you share my vision of someday having an education system that allows every student to explore and grow and develop at a pace that is conducive to him or her. This book offers you one way to contribute to that vision.

Linda L. Hopper, PhD

January 2024

INTRODUCTION

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful

committed individuals can change the world.

In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.

—Margaret Mead

I had two years of teaching under my belt, and my level of confidence as a teacher was increasing. Entering my third year, I taught a section of eighth grade AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination). I had taught the AVID curriculum to most of these students the year before when they were in seventh grade. The AVID program was designed to target bubble students, those students who may need extra help and preparation for gaining college admission. Many of these students did not have any family members who had gone to college. While the structure of the program was firmly defined (organizational, methodology, tutors), the content was not. I saw this as an opportunity to explore coaching in a classroom setting by introducing concepts that were new to the students. I was unclear how coaching would fit in the classroom or even how the opportunities would present themselves. I was very much a fish out of water, not yet mastering teaching and lesson planning, and at a disadvantage in coaching teenagers since all of my coaching experience had been in a business setting. It was with this eighth grade class that I began to formulate my ideas on what coaching in the classroom could look like.

AVID’s curriculum is based on adhering to a prescribed set of organizational skills, developing reading and writing skills, discourse and debate skills, and test-taking skills, among others. College tutors are hired to work with students in groups, targeting classes where students have the most trouble. Anyone who has taught middle school or junior high knows that many students at this age lack the organizational skills to keep track of six or seven different classes and teachers. AVID offered a prescribed method of organizing using a binder and planner. These were checked for grades on a regular basis. Binders had to be organized in a specific manner for each of the students’ classes. Students were required to use a planner to write down their assignments, tests, and extracurricular activities. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? My eighth grade students already had experience with the system of organization and were used to it, and the system was working for most of them—but not all.

Although the core of my eighth grade class was made up of students from the prior year, a few new students were added to the class. One of them was McKenzie, known as Kenzi, a confident, petite blonde who took learning seriously. Kenzi struggled with AVID’s system of organization. As a serious student, she had developed her own system utilizing Post-it notes, colored index cards, and colored folders. After several weeks of trying to use the AVID method, she was exasperated and asked, Why can’t I just do it my own way if it works for me?

Her question hit me like a thunderbolt; why indeed? And it forced me to consider, in that instant, why coaching was so necessary in a school system that operated in a business model of mass production. The coach in me really wanted to help the students find their own methods of organization that worked for them. However, in order to carry out the integrity of the program, Kenzi was required to be consistent with the other students in class in the AVID method of organization.

I admire the AVID program and believe it helps a lot of students, but I also knew that it would be my last year teaching it. I was feeling uncomfortable that I was not aligned with my beliefs and values. In education, we don’t always allow students to figure out for themselves what works in their learning or growing, and we don’t always allow them to figure it out at their own pace. I think anyone who works with young people (or people in general) knows that we all grow, learn, mature, and develop at individual rates. From that incident, I knew I wanted to coach students in self-awareness, especially of their strengths, abilities, and aptitudes. It felt like an overwhelming challenge to create a balance between a rigid education system that seeks to place students in the same progression of learning at every age and the more fluid, individual, and empowering process of coaching. Coaching is about personal growth and development, and that growth happens when we become self-aware. This book is the result of more than a decade of seeking to bring more empowerment into the everyday lives of teachers and students through coaching. It is my hope and wish that my experience of coaching in the classroom inspires you to take a fresh perspective of what is possible in education and how your knowledge and innate wisdom are needed now more than ever.

MY STORY

I was fifty-two years old when I first entered the classroom. Even though I had many professional experiences of getting up to speak in front of adults, I was terrified to stand up in front of students. I knew without a doubt that I was taking on something that would challenge me like nothing else could. And I wasn’t wrong. My greatest lessons in life have come from children, first my own and then my students. I knew that, upon entering the classroom, I was going to have to grow in ways that would sometimes be painful. Stepping from business into education was no easy feat, and I cringe whenever I think of my first years of teaching. I’m grateful for all I’ve learned and how I’ve had to grow personally.

My background is in business; I have a master’s degree in international management, and my first career was working at a major bank as a commercial loan officer. Once I started a family, I made the decision to start my own business as a consultant, coach, and trainer in order to have more flexibility in my schedule. I also became very involved in my children’s schools, serving on the PTA and forming a district parent group to tackle issues in the school district. I served on the local chamber of commerce’s education committee. My involvement as a parent in education led me to a job working as a trainer and facilitator with a state organization, a coalition of education stakeholders who worked with school districts throughout Illinois. After funding for the organization ended, I went back into business for myself, integrating business and education clients.

When my oldest son dropped out of high school and my clients began asking me why coaching wasn’t in high schools, I felt compelled to complete a master’s degree in teaching and go into the classroom. At the time, I interrupted my studies for a PhD in coaching and human development, which I then went back and completed a few years later.

Over my fourteen years teaching middle school and high school, I looked for opportunities to bring coaching into the school and the classroom. I formed advisories on leadership, did after-school workshops, and brought coaching into the AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) classes I taught. However, my vision was always to figure out how to bring coaching into every teacher’s classroom in ways that minimized teacher workload but took advantage of the incredible teacher creativity and innate wisdom I witnessed every day in school.

As an elective teacher in middle school and high school, I taught students from every walk of life. Two of the middle schools I taught in primarily served low economic and underprivileged students. The high school I taught at housed the ESL (English as a second language) program for the district’s high school ESL students. I often had students from numerous countries in my classes, and many of them did not speak any English.

My experiences in education as a student, parent, community member, and teacher allow me to have a unique perspective. I’ve seen education from almost every angle—from her noble endeavors to her disturbing warts. I have taught both gifted students and low-performing students. And I have taught students from ages eleven to eighteen. I have worked with every stakeholder group: administrators, school boards, teacher unions, and parents.

In the more than thirty years I’ve been involved in education, I’ve heard the refrain that schools look and feel just as they did a hundred years ago. Yes, we are using more technology, but what we teach—and, in many cases, how we teach—is the same. It’s time to change our focus in education to a more empowering model. Teachers are no longer needed to teach content for content’s sake. Today, you can learn virtually anything online. Our young people need more support to help them successfully navigate challenges during trying times and build the resilience and self-knowledge necessary to move forward in achieving their dreams. We can do that through coaching.

IT’S TIME TO REEXAMINE

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION

As a teacher, are you feeling beaten down or feeling a lack of inspiration, despair, helplessness, or frustration? Do you feel like there is more you could be doing to help your students succeed, but you are not sure what or how? Then this book is for you. It’s way past time to bring coaching into the classroom where it is vitally needed for both teachers and students. Coaching is an empowerment model that has reached mainstream society, but it is underrepresented and underdeveloped in schools. Why isn’t coaching more widespread in K–12 classrooms? We can’t wait for a program or for someone else to implement it for us. Your students need it now more than ever—and so do you.

This is a clarion call for a grassroots effort for teachers in the classroom to take up the challenge of exchanging victimhood and apathy to empowering themselves and their students through coaching. This book is a call to educators like you who are tired of feeling ineffectual at making lasting change, who don’t feel they are fully using the wisdom and knowledge they have to improve the lives of the students they teach, and who feel they are swirling ever faster down the despairing hole of education in the United States.

This is about starting a movement—from the grassroots of teaching. We are professionals. We know the students we teach in our schools. We see their needs. We can make a difference. And, trust me, I know there are times when teaching is overwhelming, but incorporating coaching into your classroom will help your students and help you as you learn and practice your own personal growth and development. Coaching in the classroom is the gateway to self-awareness, leading to living healthier, both physically and mentally, for students and teachers. The amount of time you spend with your students over the course of the school year means that you are uniquely positioned to do this.

While many advances in education have