How Do We Cultivate a Coaching Culture at Our Schools and Organizations?

At GOA, we’ve seen how a coaching culture supports well-being and high performance. When leaders show up with presence, ask thoughtful questions, and make space for reflection, they create conditions where growth becomes contagious. Coaching helps leaders shift from solving problems to developing people, and that shift builds capacity across a team. Three practices have done the most for us: cultivating community, cultivating conversation, and cultivating reflection. Each one is something you can use whether you’re leading a school, supporting teachers, or working directly with students.

One strategy for cultivating a sense of community is to encourage people to share their stories. It can be easy to dismiss or not hear from others fully if we don’t know their stories. Expert coaches Jim Knight and Elena Aguilar have written and spoken on the power of storytelling—in both how we deliver information and in how we build safe spaces with others. Whether you're leading students or faculty, what are the intentional ways you're inviting storytelling?

Storytelling is a sustainable practice. Cultures that share together benefit from that regular practice, in any format and any year. Storytelling also provides us with an opportunity to create safe spaces and to practice curious mindsets. We get to know one another through coaching and we establish the conditions for learning together. And it models what we hope we’re empowering our students to do—own and share their stories.

Here’s one idea to try. In a meeting, conduct a storytelling interview with a colleague. Ask your colleague to think of another colleague. Ask your colleague to think of another colleague whose work they admire.

• What traits did they demonstrate that you admired?

• How did you see those traits in action?

You could also ask people to tell a story about themselves (which might be a tad harder!). Here are a few reflection questions for individuals, and you could ask people to share out if they felt comfortable:

• What new skills have you gained recently? Or, put another way: What can you do that you couldn’t do before?

• What is something in your role that’s really working?

• What’s something new this year that you’re trying?

• What do you hope is the impact of your work in six months?

In coaching conversations, you may want to employ strategies such as storytelling, but there are other tools you can include in your toolkit to ensure you build psychological safety into any coaching culture.

Consider having a “third point.” A third point is usually a document such as a rubric, a reflection, or a self-evaluation tool that both parties can refer to in an impersonal way. The third point does not belong to either party and a third point helps establish psychological safety. We think you could also substitute the phrase “third point” with “shared experiences.” This could include experiences such as: book studies, shared readings, shared learnings, podcasts, field trips with colleagues, and retreats. Consider how you are building opportunities for third points in cultivating a coaching culture at your school.

One way we’ve built shared learning experiences, and created space for a “third point”, is through our quarterly Ideas Salons at GOA. We’ve been leading these for over two years and they’ve become a favorite way to learn together. Each Ideas Salon centers on a theme and begins with a short, curated playlist and an essential question. Participants meet in small cohorts of four or five people for a focused, collaborative conversation. These Salons create space for connection, perspective-sharing, and reflection, all anchored by a shared resource or idea that no one person owns.

This year we're opening that idea up to member schools. Coaching Commons gathers a small cohort of middle leaders who meet monthly from November through April to coach each other's work in progress. The cohort is the shared experience, and the protocol is the third point. There's no expert at the front of the room.

“The practice itself is all about learning, looking back on the day (without bias or regret) to contemplate your behavior and its consequences. It requires sitting with yourself, taking an honest moment to think about what transpired, what worked, what didn’t, what can be done, and what can’t. Reflection requires courage. It’s thoughtful and deliberate. Being at the ‘top of your game’ only comes when you extract from your past how to engage the future.” 

—James R. Bailey and Scheherazade Rehman

At GOA, we’ve found reflection to be one of the most helpful shifts an educator can make in their classrooms to support leading their own learning. Building in reflective practices in our schools, whether or not we label it a coaching strategy, can have immense impact on how we see our own learning, share our learning, and cultivate collaborative communities focused on professional growth.

At GOA, regular reflection routines with our students have been transformative. And yes, there are very deliberate semester pauses where students gather evidence for learning, but more than that, it’s the small ways that students are invited to reflect every day that brings about the most change.

In a coaching practice, you may likely already have reflection routines in place. Coaching cycles build in reflection. As we think about nurturing school communities that prioritize coaching cultures, think about ways reflection can be embedded in faculty meetings and in professional learning communities.

Want to reflect on reflecting? Here are a few prompts to get you started:

• “Something I struggle with in reflection is…”

• “An impact reflection makes on professional life is…”

• “At my school, when it comes to reflection, we…”

From school leaders, to classroom teachers, when we take a coaching stance, we seek to build capacity in others to maximize learning processes. No matter our strengths, changing anything about our practice is really hard work. Becoming aware of what we do and why we do it, and is what leaves us open to learning more, and to shifting our practice.

Start with one. Pick the next meeting you lead and choose a single move from this post: open with a storytelling question, put a third point on the table, or close with two minutes of written reflection. Notice what changes in who talks.

If you'd like company while you work on it, that's what Coaching Commons is for.