Coaching in Action

In his New Yorker Magazine article, surgeon and acclaimed author Atul Gawande explores coaching. What caught my eye was this excerpt from a teacher-coaching program in my own county school system that he visited with, coaching researcher Jim Knight, and witnessed coaching in action. Good coaches, Knight said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves. Hobson and Harding “listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.” They also parcelled out their observations carefully. “It’s not a normal way of communicating—watching what your words are doing,” he said. They had discomfiting information to convey, and they did it directly but respectfully.

With so much mis-information out there about what coaching is and is not, it’s nice to see concise explanations like this in popular media.