January 21, 2023 Hello, I hope you’re enjoying the weekend. Thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter. You are awesome. And clearly many of you forwarded it to others, as there were a bunch of new sign-ups in the last couple of weeks. Thank you for that. Here are your reminders to sign up for the Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics book study, and our annual Coaching In-Depth at Mercy-by-the Sea on May 10th, and Coaching for Leaders in
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Happy New Year! I hope that you got to spend time with people you love, and that you also had time to rest, think, and rejuvenate. Thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter—you rock. Can I ask a favor?—this would be a great time for you to forward the Coaching Letter to someone you think would enjoy it and suggest that they subscribe; here's the link. We have, as usual, a lot going on, and with the break I had a
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Hello, I hope this finds you well and looking forward, if you are in the US, to getting some time off later this week. I always feel a huge amount of pressure to deliver a profound Thanksgiving message, which is silly really, because if I were my own coaching client I would ask myself about the egocentricity of that pressure… what makes me think that my Thanksgiving message is so material to others that I should stress about it? My
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Hello, I hope you’re well. Forgive me, but first of all a bit of advertising: We run several networks that you can read about here, and right now we are soliciting districts to join our Acceleration virtual CoP: 4 sessions, first one December 7, learn more here. We facilitate a Coaching Institute every September that regularly sells out; this year, encouraged by our friends in Torrington, we are hosting an additional summer institute, solely for school and district leaders, July
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Hello, I hope you are doing well. I’ve been thinking a lot about mindsets recently, so this Coaching Letter, and maybe the next one or two, are about that. In education it seems like the notion of mindset is dominated by the work of Carol Dweck, who is a psychologist at Stanford. And she indeed has done amazing work. She is best known for the concepts of fixed and growth mindset: a fixed mindset is the belief that your abilities
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Happy October! Long-term readers of the Coaching Letter will know that I try and write something about goals every year at around this time. Goal-setting is, I think, one of the most poorly understood constructs in education. So this Coaching Letter is a re-hash of several previous CLs, especially Coaching Letter #91. Goals are not an unmitigated good. There is an article in HBR that is about the danger of confusing metrics with strategy—that paying too much attention to the target
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Hello, I hope this finds you well. Thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You rock. This is a great time of year to be in New England, my family is happier and healthier than we have been since the start of the pandemic and maybe even before, and I have fascinating work with terrific people, so my life is good. Thank you to everyone who responded to my last Coaching Letter—some of those emails were quite unexpected and
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Good morning, I hope this finds you well. I know many of you just started the new school year, and many are just about to start. I know exactly that particular combination of anxiety, nervous energy, optimism and joy that accompanies the beginning of school. May all your best hopes transpire. I am writing this in the dining car of an Amtrak just south of Jacksonville, and the guy two booths down is singing along, loudly and stereotypically off-key, to
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Hello, I hope you are well and that you are reading this after you get back from vacation. This Coaching Letter is ONLY about the tools that I use to keep myself organized and (more or less) productive. This is in response to multiple requests over the last few months—it’s not like I think I have a lock on productivity, but I have spent some time trying to figure out how to make apps & extensions work for me, because
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Good morning. Today is Day One of Milford’s HQI Live!, which for me is a Very Big Deal. I wrote about it the first year it took place, and this year it’s significantly more ambitious, with 100 teachers from across the district coming together to watch teachers teach real kids in real time, sandwiched between activities designed to engage adult learners on important questions about instructional practice (What is high quality instruction? What matters in giving and receiving feedback? What’s
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