Nicole S. Turner (00:03):
You are listening to the Simply Instructional Coaching Podcast, a podcast for instructional coaches who want a simple plan with simple steps to get started coaching teachers. I’m your host Nicole, and I’m an elementary teacher turned instructional coach with a little bit of K-12 admin, sprinkled in. Tune in for simple tips and strategies for what and how to coach teachers. Being an impactful instructional coach doesn’t have to be complicated. Let’s make it simple.
(00:38):
Hey, hey coaches. Welcome back to the Simply Instructional Coaching Podcast. I am so excited for this session. I am here with Becca Silver and she is one of my coaching besties, and I am so geeked that she is here for us to kind of talk about resistant teachers and coaching and just all the things. We have been traveling around the country, basically doing a bunch of professional development, and we seem to always meet up at the different conferences. So I got an opportunity to meet and be with her in North Carolina. We went out to eat and then we spent some time when we were in DC at the A S C D conference this past year. So I am so excited to welcome Becca to the podcast. Welcome, Becca.
Becca Silver (01:28):
Hey, girl. Hey,
Nicole S. Turner (01:30):
Hey. What’s going on? Yes, I am so excited. You don’t even know, you have no idea how excited I am to have you on this podcast because I’ve been talking about, okay, I’m going to do one. I’m not going to do one, I’m going to do one, I’m not going to do one. And you started your podcast and it kind of just encouraged me, you and Chrissy encouraged me to go ahead and jump out and do it. So it’s super exciting for you to actually be here.
Becca Silver (02:01):
Yes. And I’m excited that you launched it finally because you were talking about it for a long time and you’re like doing a million things, running around, running summits and being keynote, and you did it. And I’m excited for coaches to hear your voice and your brilliant thoughts about coaching.
Nicole S. Turner (02:21):
Oh, gosh, brilliant thoughts. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure happy to share my experiences with others. So, hey, for all of those that don’t know who you are, kind of let us know who you are, what you do, and a little bit about your podcast. And then let’s talk just a little bit about your journey to coaching.
Becca Silver (02:40):
So hello everyone. I am Becca Silver. I am the ceo and founder of the whole educator. I help coaches impact educators resilience and effectiveness by not only addressing their skills and knowledge, but also their mindsets and motivations. So we do one-on-one coaching. We do whole group PDs, all sorts of stuff. And recently we launched our on-demand curriculum as well called the Whole Educator Foundations.
Nicole S. Turner (03:09):
Oh, that is awesome. I didn’t know about that. Yeah, tell me more. Tell me more.
Becca Silver (03:13):
Yeah, so it’s really great. What we actually did was we have found as we’ve been working with coaches is how busy coaches and leaders are. So we wanted to give them something that they could watch on their own time. And so it’s power punched. It’s really most of our curriculum we recorded, essentially and put onto a platform and for a very reasonable price, coaches can grab that curriculum and watch all six modules and bring you through a journey through distinguishing, distinguishing through different frameworks to understand teachers levels of willingness, distinguishing skill versus will, moving through how do we intentionally build trust and addressing growth and fixed mindsets with adults and what are our own mindsets that are getting in the way. I was doing some work with coaches last night and talking about the shoulds, and we all have shoulds about people, they should do this, they shouldn’t do that.
(04:14):
And that is one way that keeps coaches ineffective. It totally gets in the way of their effectiveness. And so all of this work has been pre-recorded and put onto a platform. And so coaches can go and grab that work essentially and get supported with playbooks that refer to that work and bring them through the process of how to actually implement it. I think sometimes we do this high level work with coaches and it’s hard for them to implement cause it it’s so high level. You know, it’s like, oh, that was really abstract. I don’t know what to do and I’m all about integration and implementation. Let’s actually bring it from the PD and actually do something about it. Right. Action, action, action.
Nicole S. Turner (05:00):
Yes, those action steps, because so many times we have so many people that attend professional developments and then they love it. They have the concept, but it’s why we have coaches because even teachers will go and they will attend the PD and then they try to implement it and come across roadblocks and then they just throw it to the side and say, okay, I’m going to go back to what I was doing before. So really having that support and that content to be able to actually implement and have steps to implement is amazing.
Becca Silver (05:32):
Yeah.
Nicole S. Turner (05:33):
All right. So tell us a little bit about your journey to coaching.
Becca Silver (05:37):
So, gosh, this is such an interesting journey, so I’m going to give you a little more detail than I usually give. I was a teacher for 10 years, and actually some of my journey within teaching was I taught abroad in the middle of teaching in the United States, and I’ve taught in Peru and in Tanzania, in East Africa, so mostly in the United States and then also abroad. And my 10th year teaching, I was like, my passion’s really worth working with adults. So I became a coach at a school and at the same time I became a life coach. And I noticed very quickly that there was a lot of crossover skills, and my life coaching was kind of seeping into my teacher coaching, and it was really enhancing the work that I was doing. And I also found as I was sharing with other coaches that they didn’t have this work at all. So when I became a consultant and I created The Whole Educator, I started creating curriculum that impacts the mindsets and motivations and training coaches how to do that, how to impact teachers’ mindsets and motivations that really are at the source of a lot of their ineffectiveness.
Nicole S. Turner (06:49):
Oh, that’s awesome. Life coaching with instructional coaching. That’s what’s up.
Becca Silver (06:54):
Yeah. One thing, I also, I do clarify with people is I’m not teaching them how to be a life coach. This is not life coaching training. It’s just the stuff from life coaching that is helpful in impacting, impacting human behavior. In schools, we’re so often focused on building skills, teachers skills, and it’s limiting it that when we do that, we only impact some teachers and some teachers really need impacting in their mindsets.
Nicole S. Turner (07:24):
Yes. Because you know what? I tell the story all the time about working with teachers or identifying or recognizing really that they have trauma, like being real with that. Because the one thing that I’ve noticed is that we will tell teachers, Hey, some of our students have trauma. They may have been yelled at by their mom, they may have all of this before they arrived school. But one time I was in a PLC and it was eight o’clock in the morning, and I had a teacher who was so mad. I mean, when I say she was mad, Becca, she was mad, and I didn’t understand.
(08:02):
I’m like, it’s eight o’clock in the morning, what could you possibly be this upset about at school? Well, to come to find out, she had had an experience where her husband did not take the dog out, and that morning the dog ended up pooping in the house, and then she had to clean up, take the dog, all of that before she got to work which made her a few minutes late, and it was just that she was dealing with something else outside of that, and it was starting to affect the P L C and everything that was going on.
(08:37):
And so sometimes we really have to start to realize that teachers also have trauma. They’re humans. And so we sometimes have to dig past the things that they are going through in order to coach them the same as if I was in a classroom, I would have to build that relationship and dig past some of the things that my students were going through in order to teach them. And so that’s a really good lesson, and I know that’s probably somewhere in your life coaching strategies that coaches have to use or someone can use to communicate or work with another adult.
Becca Silver (09:13):
Yeah, for sure. And a lot of it, I’ll just tell you, a lot of the most important work that I do is in listening. Like we can all listen, right? I’m not giving someone life advice or life coaching when that’s happening, but that is absolutely a life coaching skill to be able to listen in a way that someone’s willing to share that, right? Yeah. That’s absolutely within our professional realm of working with educators and listening isn’t something that we’re naturally good at.
Nicole S. Turner (09:46):
Oh, yeah. And let me tell you, I have to tell my children all the time, I need for you to listen to comprehend and not listen to respond. I don’t need you because they’ll cut me out and I’m like, no, Uhuh uhuh. No, no, no. You have to listen to comprehend what I’m saying, process what I’m saying, and then respond to me. That is definitely something that coaches need, that skill and that strategy is important.
Becca Silver (10:13):
And often coaches listen to fix.
Nicole S. Turner (10:16):
Oh, yeah. So you know what’s funny is that in my keynote, that is what I talk about. I talk about being Olivia Pope, and that sometimes we as coaches, we become Olivia Pope instead of being the coach that we’re supposed to be.
Becca Silver (10:34):
Yeah, exactly. No, I love that. Yeah. It’s so important. Yeah. And it’s an underappreciated skill.
Nicole S. Turner (10:41):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I say that coaches themselves are the invisible heroes a lot of times because we don’t get recognition. We’re just quiet, but we do so much,
Becca Silver (10:56):
Do so much
Nicole S. Turner (10:58):
In the midst of it all.
Becca Silver (11:00):
Yep.
Nicole S. Turner (11:05):
Hey, hey coaches, I have a few questions for you. Are you struggling to get coaching cycles completed? Are you still trying to figure out what to coach? Are you confused about how to coach teachers? If you raised your hand and said yes to any of these questions, I want to invite you to join me and more than a hundred instructional coaches inside the Simply Coaching Hub. The Simply Coaching Hub is a professional development resource and community hub that will provide you with practical, relatable, and actionable professional development for new and seasoned instructional coaches. The hub is specifically for instructional coaches created by me, an instructional coach. In the hub, we focus on providing specific pathways that meet you where you are in your coaching coaching journey. Differentiation is important when we work with students and even when we coach teachers. Shouldn’t it be important when it comes to your growth as a coach too?
(12:02):
Absolutely. And that’s why when you join the Hub, you will be prescribed a coaching pathway that will address your specific needs. The Hub also provides a simple framework for you to implement right away. It’s time you start coaching with confidence. And most importantly, the Hub is a community. With over a hundred instructional coaches from all over the world, you will connect with someone who can support you through any situation you may be dealing with. And the best part is you have a coach walking side by side to support you in your journey. It’s time to elevate your instructional coaching with the Simply Coaching Hub. Check out www.simplycoachinghub.com to learn more. I will see you in the Hub.
(12:56):
Alright, so let’s dive in and talk a little bit about resistive teachers. I know that you have been doing a lot of work with coaches around working specifically with resistive teachers. So why do you think that resistance happens?
Becca Silver (13:12):
Well, this is one thing that I say often, and I took this from Peter Block who wrote a book on consulting actually, and he says, when change happens, expect resistance. And that is a natural human response to change. We resist it. So if you actually think about the situation of schools, right? School leaders are interviewing teachers, and they’re hiring them partially because of their ability to be flexible, adapt, and be critical thinkers, right? And then we turn around and we’re like, we’ve given you a directive and you must follow that, actually taking away or ignoring that critical thinking element. And so it’s actually perfectly natural for teachers to question the directions or the initiatives that they’re being given. It’s perfectly natural, and we want to come at it with compassion and curiosity. Like, why are you resisting this? Instead of, you need to follow directions. And I want you to imagine actually, what if in schools, what if a direction was given, you know, must implement this curriculum and everyone automatically did it, no questions asked, they all just did it. What would you have? You would have actually a group of compliant teachers and it would potentially lack engagement. Like, they’re just following the directions. We want people to ask questions, we want people…
Nicole S. Turner (14:45):
It would be like the step for wives, maybe.
Becca Silver (14:47):
Yeah. Exactly. We don’t actually want that. And it’s interesting because a lot of times people’s reaction to resistance is almost like they do want that. Why are they just following my directions? We don’t want that. We want to appreciate resistance for what it is. Someone grappling with change.
Nicole S. Turner (15:06):
That’s a very good perspective. That’s a amazing perspective actually, that we do want them to be resistant because it does bring about the change in creativity and other people’s thoughts through that process. That’s awesome. All right, so my next question, what are the motivations behind resistance to change?
Becca Silver (15:28):
So there’s lots of motivations. I have a few of them, and they come from Dr. Anthony Mohammed’s work. And I was telling you earlier, I’m a huge fan girl of him. If anyone can read any of his books, I think he’s just wonderful in his applicability and realisticness of, if that’s a word, of what he shares to do with resistance. And what the most common motivation behind resistance is that a teacher doesn’t understand why the change is happening. And the thing I want to say about that is just because someone, a coach, a leader has said why the change is happening doesn’t mean the teacher heard it. I’m going to say that again for the people in the back, just because it was said, right? Just because the reason why the change is happening was said, doesn’t mean the teacher heard it. So that’s one, that’s the most common reason. And then other reasons include the people might not trust the leader to make good sound decisions for the instruction of children. And another reason might be they’re actually lacking the skills to implement that change. And the resistance is really a coverup to not look incompetent or an avoidance tactic because they don’t think the risk is worth taking to implement the change. They think it might actually cause them more stress or a negative result.
Nicole S. Turner (16:57):
That’s quite interesting. That is quite interesting. All right, so here’s our next question. What pitfalls do coaches run into when addressing resistance?
Becca Silver (17:10):
I think one of the main ones that I actually see very, very often, I see this with leaders and coaches is the shoulds. And this is when people have the thought, and I think I said this earlier, they should do this. They shouldn’t do that. And it’s very much laced in our thoughts, and it’s not very obvious to us. But if you just start noticing your thoughts about other teachers, about their behaviors, about whether they should or shouldn’t be doing that, that absolutely gets in the way of impacting resistance. Because what that does is it resists their resistance. And when we do that, when we resist someone’s resistance, it actually keeps it in place. One of the things I live by is what we resist, persists. And that, it’s like ironic because it’s a very thing we don’t want to keep around. And so one of the things I actually do with coaches is help them work out their own resistance because they’re ironically keeping teachers’ resistance in place.
Nicole S. Turner (18:14):
That is a great point. When we resist, it persists. So it’s constantly, it’s constantly happening.
Becca Silver (18:23):
Yeah.
Nicole S. Turner (18:24):
Well, you have said some deep things today. Said a lot of things that I have to process because I, I’ve dealt with a lot of resistant teachers, of course over the years. I’m thinking about some of these different strategies and some of these different ways or different approaches of working with teachers and coaches are great. And I hope that our audience is able to actually implement some of these things that you’ve said. Now, the best part is, is that Becca is presenting at the Simply Coaching Summit 2023 this year. Becca, what is the title of your session?
Becca Silver (19:01):
It’s called Breaking through Resistance.
Nicole S. Turner (19:03):
Yes. So when she is giving you all of these key things, now, I’m sure inside of that session, she is going to go a little bit more deeper and you’ll be able to actually take away a lot of strategies that you’ll be able to implement right away. So make sure that you join us at the summit and make sure that you watch Becca’s session. Okay, Becca, everyone who’s coming on the podcast, I’m asking them this question. If you have two or three things to leave with coaches, what would they be?
Becca Silver (19:37):
Two or three things to leave with coaches. All right. One thing, the first thing that came to my mind, and we were talking about this earlier, is develop your skills and listening. So often coaches are looking for what to say, and before you learn what to say or know when to say the thing that you’re given, what to say, you have to be able to know when to say it, when it’s appropriate. And the only way is listening. So I want to leave them with develop your skills of listening. It is hugely, hugely important. Another thing I want to leave with coaches is, oh, this is great. This is a great little nugget. I love to leave with people. When you are working with teachers, start to assess what their needs are, whether it’s additional knowledge, like content knowledge, additional skills, or a shift in mindsets.
Nicole S. Turner (20:24):
All right. Well, that sounds amazing. You are one person who just, like I have no words because it’s making me think as I’m process, I’m really processing the things that you’re saying. And normally I could just talk and talk, but I’m really processing the things that you’re saying today, and I’m ready to actually put some of these things into action as I continue to work with coaches through this process. Well, Becca, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I am so excited that everyone gets to attend your session, who will be at the summit, and then get to see you at all of the different conferences, coaching conferences around the country. And I am so happy to be a coaching bestie of yours. And hopefully I am a coaching bestie of yours.
Becca Silver (21:18):
Yes, you absolutely are.
Nicole S. Turner (21:19):
You’re definitely one of mine. It’s so funny, y’all, because me and Becca were in, now, this is funny. I had saw her on Instagram tons of times. I knew who she was on Instagram, and I remember when I first discovered your page, I was like, who is this? And what is she doing? And I was just like, oh, okay. That’s pretty cool. And then we were in, was it,
Becca Silver (21:43):
It was like a
Nicole S. Turner (21:44):
A membership or something, right? Yeah,
Becca Silver (21:45):
It was a membership.
Nicole S. Turner (21:47):
And then we came to the live session together.
Becca Silver (21:49):
Yes. Just the two of us.
Nicole S. Turner (21:50):
Yes. It was just the two of us that showed up at this live session and we were talking, and then we found out who each other were, and we were like, oh my God.
Becca Silver (21:59):
And I was a super fan girl of you too. Oh, so it was, yeah. And it was so much fun to be like, I know you. I know you. And then we just were like quick friends, right?
Nicole S. Turner (22:10):
Yes, yes. And then I was in North Carolina for the Get Your Teach on last year, right? Yeah, this time last year, February of last year. And we went out to eat. We saw we Met, yes. And Hung out before I caught a plane back. And that was exciting. So yeah. Woo. Well, you guys know that you can meet coaches and build a community and build friendships online. Becca has helped me and talked to me through a lot of things, and it has just been exciting to have someone, another coach who really thinks like me or even thinks opposite of me in some instances where she can give me a different perspective or different things like that. So make sure that you get out there and you meet other people, you meet other coaches, and you start to build your support system in coaching because there are a lot of coaches out there that can support you. Well, thank you so much for tuning in into this episode of the Simply Instructional Coaching Podcast, and I will see you guys in the next episode. Happy coaching y’all.
(23:17):
Thanks for listening to the Simply Instructional Coaching Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and you’d like to help support the podcast, please share it with other coaches and teacher leaders, post about it on social media, and leave a rating or review. To catch all the latest for me, you can follow me on Instagram @SimplyCoachingandTeaching_ and on Twitter @Coachandteach. Thanks again and I’ll see you in the next episode. Happy Coaching.
