Building Incubators

   I was a swimmer growing up. My siblings and I grew up in an inter-aquatic household. My mother was a national level swimmer and my dad had been thrown in the pool at a young age, been scared to high heavens, and avoided swimming for a great portion of his life. My parents saw it as part of a covenant, their children would be comfortable around water. So we went to Indian Boundary YMCA and participated in swim lessons. We learned in groups of five or six from teenage teachers, returning each week to learn a little more, and when we hit the wall with that, we joined swim team. On swim team, the teen-age instructors turned into college age and adult instructors. The learning more frequent, the adjustments more nuanced. While the workouts were told to us, I can remember vividly discussing and reflecting with Coach Oda on ways to improve my stroke. The work became job-embedded. The improvements were made from shared-ownership rather than the gradual release method of earlier lessons. As a result, the changes were as much mine as they were coach's.
   I'm pretty confident that the reason I graduated high school and college was swimming. It taught me so many lessons, whether it was organizing my day, reminding me that there were 1000's of people out there better than me, teaching me to learn from my failures and improvement comes from reflection, refinement, and work, or simply making me so tired that I had to sit in the chair when I was in class. As I learn more about schools and how they work, the more I realize I can learn from my swimming experience.
   In swimming, I was in an incubator. It started in lots of small guided instruction learning opportunities. Sure they were teenagers leading the groups, but they were small, intense, and had lots of repeated practice with modeling and direct feedback. As I got older, the incubators changed. The coaches were there and setting up the course for the day, but more importantly, they were guides on the sides. They asked questions, held reflective conversations, and provided consistent opportunities for technical analysis and feedback. I see similar things now in the reconstruction of the Chicago Bears. While no one knows if it will work, the Bears for the first time have created an incubator around their sophomore quarterback Mitch Trubisky. The head coach is a former quarterback and offensive guru. The offensive coordinator is an offensive guru from Oregon. They have hired Brad Childress, a former head coach, offensive coordinator, and offensive guru to be a special consultant to the coaches. The backup quarterbacks sole strength is understanding and dialoguing about developing as a quarterback in this system. They brought in an offensive line coach who was seen as a guru in both college and professional football. The whole organization has become an offensive football incubator meant to support the growth of their quarterback and offensive side of the football.
   As I think of schools and think of our opportunities to grow students, staff members, and instructional leaders, I wonder where are our incubators. One wise instructional coach once told me the reason our implementation failed was simply we didn't have enough boots on the ground. We didn't have enough coaches and instructional leaders who understood what we were doing well enough to provide the immediate timely job-embedded learning support that when snags occurred, they could get the support they needed. Support as a system was too little, too late, and too far away. As a result, many well-intended instructors would retreat back into arenas they were comfortable when the process became too overwhelming.
   If we want to continue to improve our schools, we need to go back to our coaching roots. We need to provide ongoing coaching support to our teachers and our leaders in meaningful ways. As we first walk in those classrooms and as leaders in buildings and departments, we need to consider guided support. As we build confidence and skills, we can release to that job-embedded reflective support. In both situations we need enough boots on the ground in order to incubate for growth and success.

Think Only Tree