Submitted by Marie, May 7, 2007 12:04

This is in response to the comments of Maury Leon.

You said, "So, you have a "coach" coaching a teacher, who is a coach" as if this is a perplexing phenomenon. As someone who has been in education for some 40 years from coast to coast, why would you find this odd? One of the qualities that distinguishes a brilliant teacher from one that is simply "good enough" is the brilliant teacher's capacity for learning - and growing over time. Excellent teachers never have the attitude of "I've arrived". Rather, they look at teaching as an ever changing field - one they must keep up with in order to bring the best of practice to their students.

As a teacher, I can tell you that yes, I can get information from books and from workshops and from university classes. I've learned a tremendous amount from my colleagues down the hall. But nothing has compared to having someone share the space of my classroom with me - a coach - informing, nudging, encouraging not only my students, but me as well. The first year I had a coach in my classroom it was for 8 hours - one hour a day, once a week, for 8 weeks in a row. Sounds hardly worth mentioning in the scheme of a 182 day school year. Yet those 8 hours changed me as a teacher forever - because it was the right coach.

I think the bigger issue with this article on the TC Project is not the notion of coaches, but who these coaches are. Many of them are wonderful classroom teachers from NYC and the surrounding suburbs who have been brought into the Project to encourage teachers to learn/use the teaching methods of the Project and many similar projects across the country. However, a wonderful teacher does not automatically make a wonderful staff developer. Anyone who has the philosophy of "weeding out" teachers does not belong in staff development work - I don't care how much they know about reading and writing workshops. Coaching is as much about relationships with colleagues as it is about content in curriculum areas. It's a tricky balance and not one that many pull off successfully without a lot of support and training themselves. Yes, that's right, there are coaches for the coaches - at least in the places where the staff development really works. That really may make your head spin.

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