Coaching Skills for Coaching a Team Towards Inclusive Education

(upbeat music) - There are a myriad of skills that effective coaches need when supporting a group of people, whether that's a small team of people or a whole school on their path towards inclusive education. Let me just mention three of them that I think are applicable to any kind of coaching in the area of inclusive education. The first is that I think everyone who serves in a coaching role needs to be self aware of his or her own strengths as a coach and weaknesses as the coach, and always seek to improve the areas in which you might not be so strong. The second rule of coaching is that it's all about relationships. I've known folks who had the greatest technical knowledge in the world about inclusion for students with complex access needs, but they were not very skilled at developing or sustaining positive social relationships with the folks whom they were coaching. And so even before a coach sort of asks the team to dive into the content and the how to's of inclusion, I think that coach should take some time to do what are, in the coaching world, called one-on-ones. And a one-on-one is, just as it sounds, it's a time to sit with someone with whom you will have a coaching relationship and get to know one another. And in a one-on-one conversation, the goal is really for the coach to learn about that person. Who are they? What's their personal history? Where they live. How did they get into the field of education? What do they like to do in their spare time? Sort of all the mundane things that we find out about people over time, but also beginning to probe a little bit into finding out kind of what makes that person tick. Is this a person who makes decisions based on emotion, or is this a person who makes decisions based on data? Is this someone who likes to communicate best via email, or would they be someone who would like to communicate through a phone call, as rare as those are these days? So establishing that early relationship, and then putting energy into those relationships over time is going to give great payback when difficulties or when conflicts of ideas arise, which they inevitably will. And I think the third kind of coaching tip that I would offer folks is the importance of learning, how to run effective meetings. When a school begins to go down the path of change towards inclusive education, inevitably there will be more meetings. And the way to discourage folks from this work is to have meetings that are poorly run, that people feel like are waste of their time. So learning how to run an effective meeting and asking for feedback from folks who are in your meetings is a way for coaches to grow their own skills and to grow the collaborative skills of folks who are participants in those meetings.