The Coaching Letter
The Coaching Letter is written by Partners’ staff member Isobel Stevenson, who has extensive experience as both a leader and a coach. The Coaching Letter’s perspective is that leaders could be a bit more successful if they thought and acted more like coaches, and coaches could be a bit more successful if they thought and acted more like leaders.
Coaching Letter #175
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
Read More
Coaching Letter #174
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
Read More
Coaching Letter #173
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
Read More
Coaching Letter #172
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
Read More
Coaching Letter #171
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
Read More
Coaching Letter #170
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
Read More
