I Didn't Change Her. I Saw Her.
A former colleague and dear friend reached out recently to reconnect, years after we had last worked in the same building together. We caught up the way people do after a long stretch apart, and at some point she brought up a teacher we had both known, someone who had been quietly struggling the year I was there. She said, “You changed her and her classroom. I still think about that.”
It took me a minute to process this, as I didn’t quite see it that way. I did not change that teacher; I saw her.
It is a small correction, but the distinction matters.
That teacher was stretched thin in a way that had become invisible to everyone around her, including, I think, to herself. She was doing everything asked of her and then some, moving through her days with a fluency that read, if you did not look closely, as confidence. To me, it did not look like confidence. It looked like breaking. Nobody had done anything wrong. This is just what happens to good teachers in hard years: the job absorbs them, and the parts of them that are not directly useful to the job quietly go unattended.
What I did was not complicated. I spent time with her. I asked questions and actually waited for the answers. I noticed what was hard for her specifically, not what is hard for teachers in general, and I let that shape what we worked on together. We looked at her week and found the places it could bend without breaking, structures that could give her moments to focus on her own transition from one activity to the next. None of it was a technique or theory or research. It was my attention to her, sustained long enough for her to feel it.
She wrote to me afterward. She was generous about the professional development sessions I had led, generous about my expertise, and generous in a way that would make anyone's week. But the sentence that stopped me was not about any of that. It was this one: I know I can always go to you when I face any difficulties.
I have thought a lot, over nineteen years in and around schools, about why some coaching relationships take root and others do not, even when the content is identical. I do not think it is expertise, or at least not only expertise. Schools are full of smart, well-credentialed people who can tell a teacher exactly what she should be doing differently. Being told what to do differently rarely changes anything on its own, especially for a teacher who is already doing more than seems sustainable.
In order to for coaching to actually work, it requires a person who first understands what the teacher is dealing with and sees the whole shape of her week and her worry before offering anything at all. Bryk and Schneider's research on relational trust in schools found something similar at the system level: schools do not improve because a better program arrives. They improve when the adults in the building trust each other enough to take the risk of changing their practice in front of one another. Trust is the foundation, and without it there’s nothing to build upon.
Trust is what I aim to build quickly when I walk into a new classroom or a new school. The trust I am after is not compliance with a framework, but the kind of trust that makes a teacher willing to be seen mid-struggle, and to believe that being seen will not be used against her. Once that exists, the executive function strategies, the learning profiles, the common diagnoses in a classroom, the differentiated instruction, and the UDL framing all land differently. They stop being things imposed from outside and start being tools a teacher reaches for because someone she trusts handed them to her at the right moment.
I did not change that teacher. She was always capable, always working hard, always more than the exhaustion she was carrying. What I did was notice her clearly enough that she could exhale, and then we built from there together.
Trust and empathy are the parts of this work I am proudest of, and they do not show up neatly in a professional development agenda. Trust and empathy are also the reason, I have come to believe, that teachers ask me back.
Further Reading
Bryk, A. S., & Schneider, B. (2002). Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement. Russell Sage Foundation. A study on relational trust as the mechanism behind school improvement.