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 #242
August 28, 2026 My copy of Berlin’s classic essay On foxes and hedgehogs Hi there, I hope you are doing well, and thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You are amazing. This Coaching Letter concerns the challenge of trying to discern and preserve the complexities that comprise the science of learning (or anything else, actually) as we currently understand it. This topic was prompted by my encountering several pieces lately that flatten many of these complexities
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Coaching Letter #241
August 24, 2026 Last gratuitous snap of the summer, for the Pink Floyd fans… On reading the citations Hello, how are you, and thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You rock. It is surprisingly cool here in New England today; at my house right now it’s trying to decide whether to rain or not—this is a state my mother would have called “swithering”. I know that many people reading this are preparing to start school again,
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Coaching Letter #240
August 4, 2026 Just an excuse to post a photo of Edinburgh Castle On "Making the Ask" Hello and thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You rock. This post, too, comes to you from Northern Europe. This trip has included, so far, several flights, a 6 hour ferry plus some smaller boat trips, and two long train rides plus another one on Thursday. Most Coaching Letters sit on my computer in draft form for several weeks;
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Coaching Letter #239
July 28, 2026 Stavanger Harbor, which has nothing to do with this post On coaching and systems Hi there! Thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You rock! I’m writing this in Stavanger, Norway, where it’s 57 degrees and rainy. Bliss. For those of you who have received emails from me at weird hours, this should explain a lot. Wherever you are, I hope you are well and happy. This Coaching Letter has two purposes: to convince
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Coaching Letter #238
July 20, 2026 Andrew’s note to me, April 8, 2026 An apology to high school teachers TL;DR: This Coaching Letter is an apology for assuming that high school teachers are difficult. The first year of the HS NIC taught me how wrong I was. People do not automatically resist change because they are stubborn or set in their ways. They make predictions about what will happen next based on their priors. I have argued for years that behavior
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Coaching Letter #237
July 11, 2026 Yet more on Building Thinking Classrooms At the end of June, we hosted a conference about Building Thinking Classrooms, which was a huge success and very fun and the list of people I am grateful to is a whole Oscar speech by itself. My personal highlight was Rydell’s keynote—Rydell Harrison is my colleague, my co-author, and a brilliant human—and you can, and should, watch the speech here. Every conference should have a Rydell keynote. One of my jobs was
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