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 #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
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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
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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
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Coaching Letter #169
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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Coaching Letter #168
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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Coaching Letter #167
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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