Elena Aguilar: Addressing Emotions is Key to Coaching Teams and Transforming Schools

“Everything is held together with stories.
That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” – Barry Lopez

This quote posted in Elena Aguilar’s twitter stream says a lot about this veteran teacher, school leader and instructional coach who now spends her time sharing what’s she’s learned about The Art of Coaching and The Art of Coaching Teams as a workshop leader, consultant and keynote speaker.

Much of Aguilar’s experience as an educator was earned in the Oakland (CA) Unified School District – one of California’s most challenging public school systems. She is also a photographer, writer and international traveler and is working on a new book on cultivating emotional resilience in educators.

After reading The Art of Coaching Teams, I asked Elena if she’d answer some questions here at the ABPC blog. As you can see, she was generous with her time and wisdom.

What motivated you to become an instructional coach and then a coach of coaches?

My work emerges from a commitment to educational equity and I’ve always been deeply concerned with impact, and with having the greatest impact I can. I’d taught for about 10 years and I was effective in the classroom—I’d figured out how to get middle school students engaged deeply in their learning, treating each other with respect and care, and thinking critically. Other teachers would visit my classroom and say, “How do you do that?! How do you get them to produce work like that?!”

And I realized that I wanted to help other teachers pursue their visions for what their classrooms could be like. I knew they couldn’t be me—that’s not what coaching is about. I wanted to help them become the teacher they’d always dreamed of being. As a coach, I sensed the potential to indirectly impact hundreds of students.

I became a coach of coaches for similar reasons. Once I’d figured out how to be an effective coach, I wanted to support other coaches on their journey. Coaches receive so little support, feedback, or professional development of any kind—and we need it just as much as teachers do.

And again, I’m concerned with impact—as a coach of coaches, I see potential for indirectly positively influencing many, many children. Ultimately, my motivation always comes back to a desire to see kids get what they need and deserve in schools.

In your book, you intersperse stories of your work with two teams: a highly functioning team and a pretty dysfunctional team. For all those educators who coach others, what were your key insights from these two experiences?

There were so many insightful moments along the way. But key insights:

First, team development is a skill set, and it’s one that as a coach or facilitator we’re not explicitly taught. When we don’t have skills, we’re likely to blunder. A great deal of the dysfunction inside the struggling team was due to my own lack of skills, knowledge and emotional intelligence.

Another insight: conditions matter. The context in which you are leading a team matters. You might be the most skilled facilitator in the world, and yet, if the context that you’re leading a team in is toxic, then you might still really struggle as a leader.

And three: It’s all about emotional intelligence. Your own, to start with. And then the EQ of others on your team. As the team facilitator, it’s your responsibility to cultivate the EQ of team members. Addressing emotions is part of leading a team; it’s part of transforming schools. We need to become more comfortable with dealing with feelings and also stop seeing them as an obstacle or problem to manage.

Throughout the book, you talk about this importance of developing that emotional intelligence of teams. What more can you share with our readers about this important aspect of working with teams?

Think about challenges that you’ve faced as a team member or leader. I bet the great majority of those challenges fall into the broad bucket of things-to-do-with-feelings.

Perhaps you felt frustrated that meetings were always a waste of time, or there was one person who dominated the discussion, or a team member regularly hijacked the meeting with their mood. We have to explore feelings if we’re going to lead teams and transform schools.

The emotional intelligence of a team has a great deal to do with how people communicate, what they can get done together, and how much they can learn together. EQ might be at the root of all challenges we face in teams and we’ve long ignored it. Furthermore, feelings can be powerful sources of inspiration, motivation and connection.

When working with educators, we often hear that time is a barrier to innovation or improvement. What advice can you give to instructional coaches who are working with teacher teams about getting buy-in from participating colleagues who voice concerns about the lack of time for this type of work?

We can start by listening—listen to whatever they say, including, “We don’t have time for this.” Listen with true curiosity about they’re saying.

Often what they might be saying is, “I’m tired and I don’t feel like I get to make enough decisions about my time and I’m asked to participate in a lot of things that don’t feel meaningful or relevant.” Start there. Listen.

And then yes, let’s tackle this—we don’t have enough time. That’s a fact. But we can have influence over how we use our time. So let’s take a close look at how time is used, what the impact of using time in the way we use it is, and whether or not kid- and adult-needs are really being met.

I think the problem isn’t that we don’t have time, it’s that time isn’t used well. We need to make the time or the meeting matter to whomever is asked to participate in it. We (if we’re team facilitators or coaches) need to make sure the meeting is a really meaningful experience.

We need to be extremely prepared. We need to be kind to the people who show up. We need to listen to them. We need to learn to nudge them along in their learning with love and care. We need to connect their needs as teachers to the needs of kids.

Sometimes schools get very adult-centered. It’s true that most teachers work too much, don’t get paid near enough, and are under increasingly inhumane pressures. We can acknowledge that experience and the resulting emotions, and we need to still remember that the experience and success of children is why we’re there. And that actually— when kids do well and love school—we’ll feel better about our work.

There isn’t enough time. So make the time you have with a team so invaluable, nourishing, meaningful and rejuvenating that it becomes the top thing that that group of teachers wants to do.

Almost every professional book I read stresses the importance of having an effective instructional coach in every school. Yet that still remains a unrealized vision for so many schools. Given that reality, what can we do in such schools to improve teaching practice?

Work in teams. Learn from each other. Learn how to learn from each other. Learn how to effectively communicate with each other so that we can learn from each other. Observe each other. Give each other feedback.

And at the same time, we can’t accept the current reality in most schools—the reality that there isn’t enough meaningful PD for teachers, that there isn’t an instructional coach in every school.

We need to organize and push back on this—we need funding in schools for authentic, quality professional development (which includes coaching). We need to work in our districts, states and country to demand a change in funding structures. There is enough money—it’s just about how it’s used.

If you were making the case before a school board that investing in school-based coaching will have a high “return on investment,” what key points would you make?

Coaching can have a high return on investment, but there have also been so many coaching initiatives that are a waste of time and money. We need to acknowledge that. I appreciate it when boards or administrators are reluctant to launch coaching programs because I’ve seen many that were ineffective, and then people become cynical about coaching.

So I’d say: Make sure that there’s someone in charge of the coaching program, a central office person, for example; someone who is passionate about coaching, who will be responsible for the program, who is accountable.

Make sure there’s a coaching framework. Ask these questions:

• What is the goal of the coaching program?
• What are its core values and theories of action?
• What criteria defines an excellent coach?
• How are coaches evaluated?
• What kind of PD do coaches get?
• What do coaches focus on with teachers?
• Who determines the focus, goals, or agenda for coaching?
• What is the broader professional development program of which coaching is a part?
• Who oversees and evaluates that program?
• What does coaching need to do in this district?

A school or district must have a coaching framework articulated before beginning a coaching initiative. How this is created and by whom is another topic, also very important, but it must exist. Many coaching programs fail because they aren’t intentional.

If goals for a coaching program are articulated and narrow, if coaches are well-trained and supported, if there’s a way to monitor coaching and evaluate its efficacy, coaching can be very successful.

Coaching can have an impact on teacher retention (especially in hard to staff positions) and on teacher performance on professional standards; coaching can contribute to improvements in student performance; and coaching can be a key lever to interrupt educational inequities.

Elena Aguilar is the author of The Art of Coaching (Jossey Bass, 2013) and The Art of Coaching Teams (Jossey Bass, 2016 – also available as an audiobook). Elena is a frequent contributor to Edutopia, Education Week and other publications. Read her complete bio and visit her website to learn more about her consulting and other work in support of coaches and children. You can follow her on Twitter @artofcoaching1