Download Surgeons, Singletons, and Coaching in PLCs

Surgeons, Singletons and Coaching in a PLC
Posted: 27 Nov 2011 04:53 AM PST
In a recent New Yorker article, noted surgeon and author Atul Gawande makes an interesting observation:
Professional athletes – who are already at the top of their game – almost ALWAYS hire a coach to guide
their continued growth yet successful professionals in fields like medicine and education somehow believe
that “being coached” is beneath them.
This dichotomy stood out starkly to Gawande after squeezing in a tennis lesson with a 20-something
tennis pro who helped him to improve his already impressive serve – Gawande was once a highly ranked
high school tennis star in Ohio – in just one lesson.
He writes:
“Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel.
The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a
coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure
they are as good as they can be.
But doctors don’t.
I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay
someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?” (p. 2)
Determined to experiment with his theory that coaching carries potential for
professionals working beyond the courts, Gawande contacted Robert Osteen – a general surgeon
that Gawande had admired and trained under during his residency – and asked him if he’d be willing to
serve as a surgical coach.
Osteen agreed and began observing Gawande’s practices in the operating room over the next
several months.
From the first procedure – a routine thyroidectomy that Gawande had performed thousands of times –
Osteen’s observations proved to be invaluable.
He picked up on seemingly minor things – the way Gawande held his elbows during the procedure, the
negative impact that patient draping curtains were having on aides and assistants, the positioning of
surgical lights – that Gawande could work on immediately.
As Gawande explains:
“That one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five
years.
It had been strange and more than a little awkward having to explain to the surgical team why Osteen
was spending the morning with us…
Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the
eight years since I’d established my surgical practice.
Like most work, medical practice is largely unseen by anyone who might raise one’s sights. I’d had no
outside ears and eyes.” (p. 7)
The principals of PLCs can learn real lessons from Gawande’s coaching experience.
Here’s three:
Finding coaches for every faculty member – including singletons – is essential for
continued improvement.
Perhaps the most important lesson in Gawande’s coaching experiment is that every professional –
experienced teachers included – can benefit from the guidance and advice offered by talented peers who
observe their practice.
That is a lesson that resonates with the principals of professional learning communities, doesn’t it? After
all, we’ve embraced the notion that collective reflection around practice can change educators.
The challenge, however, is ensuring that EVERY teacher – including singletons and teachers working in
small schools – has access to a capable reflection partner.
While finding logical intellectual pairings for singletons and teachers in small schools can be difficult, it’s
not impossible.
New digital tools and spaces can make giving and receiving feedback around instruction possible for every
teacher. Physical boundaries are no longer an insurmountable barrier for creative schools and teachers
who are willing to explore the potential in electronic teaming.
Coaches don’t automatically HAVE to have experience in the field where they are
coaching in order to be valuable.
One of the most interesting twists in Gawande’s story is that he wasn’t initially sure that Osteen – a
general surgeon who spent the bulk of his career removing cancerous tumors – would be able to offer any
kind of meaningful support simply because he was a specialist in endocrine surgery.
What he learned, however, is that there are a TON of skills – body positioning, tool management, patient
monitoring, pre-surgical planning – that transfer across surgical disciplines.
While Osteen may not be able to offer specific advice about thyroidectomies – the first surgery he
observed Gawande conducting – his input on the skills that DO translate across disciplines has helped
Gawande to reduce his surgical complication rates.
For those leading small schools or trying to support singleton teachers, this lesson is perhaps the most
important, isn’t it?
Just like the skills that cross surgical disciplines, there are PLENTY of skills that cross educational
disciplines – and interdisciplinary teams of teachers focused on these skills can result in productive
learning for teachers, too.
Why can’t art teachers join together with language arts teachers to study persuasion or giving and
receiving feedback?
Students in both fields must master the skills of influence and critique, right?
Why can’t social studies and language arts teachers join together to study nonfiction reading strategies?
Students in both fields must master the skills necessary to tackle challenging texts, right?
Why can’t teachers in ANY domain join together to study 21st Century skills like problem solving,
information management, and collaborative dialogue?
EVERY student must master these skills if they are going to succeed in tomorrow’s workforce.
The point is a simple one: The content of our curricula isn’t the only factor that teams of teachers can
study together.
Meaningful learning can occur when educators with disparate professional expertise focus on shared skills
that cross disciplines.
Non-instructional staff can and should be involved in improving the performance of a
PLC.
Perhaps the most troublesome part of Gawande’s coaching experience, argues medical specialist Virgina
Tyack, is that he never mentions any efforts to learn from the nonsurgical personnel that are a part of
every procedure.
“Gawande, like all surgeons,” she writes, “operates with other members of a surgical team, and his piece
doesn’t explore the shared experience of his team members, all of whom are vitally aware of the progress
of a surgery.
“I once worked in a lowly position in an operating room. I was never consulted about how any aspect of a
procedure, however minor, might be improved, until the hospital was faced with a malpractice lawsuit”
(Tyack, 2011).
Professional learning communities make the same mistake, don’t they?
Instead of working to incorporate the voices and experiences of non-instructional staffers – secretaries,
janitors, teachers’ assistants parents, community leaders - we tend to fall into comfortable patterns where
important choices are informed by teachers only.
The fact of the matter is that we inadvertently hobble ourselves when we overlook the experiences and
expertise of the people in our professional learning communities that are working beyond the classroom.
In the end, Gawande’s argument that coaching matters for professionals regardless of their
level of expertise is fundamentally sound.
He writes:
“Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to
develop the full range of abilities that success requires.
You have to work at what you’re not good at.
In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed.
Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious
incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short. (p. 5)
Our challenge as leaders of professional learning communities, then, is to make sure that EVERY teacher
– regardless of their field or the size of our schools – have coaches to learn from.
Whether we embrace electronic tools to pair teachers of similar content areas together or choose to
encourage teachers of interdisciplinary teams to focus on the kinds of broader skills that transcend
content, we have to make sure that peer coaching plays a role in the professional growth of our entire
faculties.
We also need to ensure that we work to maximize the contributions and to take advantage of the expertise
of our non-instructional personnel. Overlooking their contributions is nothing less than shortsighted.
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Related Radical Reads:
Twitter for Singletons in a PLC
Electronic Teaming for Singletons in a PLC
Organizing Learning Teams in a PLC