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 #181
May 22, 2023 What I learned from Peter Liljedahl (and what I'm going to do next) Hello, how are you, and thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter. You rock. This Coaching Letter is about some of what I learned from watching Peter Liljedahl in action over the course of four days in April, and what we’re doing as follow up. Peter is a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and his book Building Thinking Classrooms in
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Coaching Letter #180
April 30, 2023 Friends, welcome to spring! Every year it feels like the view out my window shifts from brown to green overnight, and this year it felt even more abrupt because it happened while I was out of town. Thank you for the huge response to the last Coaching Letter on Ted Lasso—I was initially really disappointed at the lack of response, because I thought it was a pretty good Letter, and then I realized that I had a ton
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Coaching Letter #179
April 7, 2023 What Ted Lasso has to teach us about the holding environment I have had a very big week! I got my hands on the new book for the first time, which was very nice. I spent the week in the workshops we hosted with Peter Liljedahl, which was fantastic (we are in the process of adding photos and resources to this Google site, and if you want to get a better idea of what this looks like in classrooms, check out
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Coaching Letter #178
March 21, 2023 Hi, I hope this finds you well, and thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You are in the right place. My first job out of college was in a residential treatment facility, called the Cotswold Community, for emotionally disturbed boys who had been removed from their homes for a variety of reasons, including their behavior was unmanageable, or because of abuse or neglect. Calling it a residential treatment facility makes it sound very clinical and
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Coaching Letter #177
March 4, 2023 Hi, I hope this finds you well. Thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter—you are in the right place. As is so often the case, I have more going on than I have time to write about, so this Coaching Letter is what’s been important to me lately. But one quick thing first—as I’ve written about before, we are hosting Peter Liljedahl for a week of workshops in April, and as a prelude to that, running an online book
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Coaching Letter #176
February 4, 2023 Hello, how are you? Thank you for reading The Coaching Letter—you are awesome. If you are in the northeast US, I hope you are warm—it got down to -9 at my house overnight, which is the coldest it’s been while I’ve lived here. Thank you to those of you who responded to the last CL on Construal Level Theory—I thought it was horribly abstract, but then it turned out to be a useful idea for some of
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