Transforming Coaching and Learning with Video

PRESENTER

Jim Knight

Jim Knight, Founder and Senior Partner of Instructional Coaching Group (ICG), is also a research associate at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. He has spent more than two decades studying professional learning and instructional coaching. Jim earned his PhD in Education from the University of Kansas and has won several university teaching, innovation, and service awards. The pioneering work Jim and his colleagues have conducted has led to many innovations that are now central to professional development in schools. Jim wrote the first major article about instructional coaching for the Journal of Staff Development, and his book Instructional Coaching (2007) offered the first extended description
 of instructional coaching. Jim’s book Focus on Teaching (2014) was the first extended description of how video should be used for professional learning. Recently, writing with Ann Hoffman, Michelle Harris, and Sharon Thomas, Jim introduced the idea of instructional playbooks with their book on that topic. Jim has written several books in addition to those described above, including Unmistakable Impact (2011), High-Impact Instruction (2013), Better Conversations (2015), The Impact Cycle (2018), and The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching (2021). Knight has also authored articles on instructional coaching and professional learning in publications such as Educational Leadership, The Journal of Staff Development, Principal Leadership, The School Administrator, and Kappan. Jim is also a columnist for Educational Leadership. Through ICG, Knight conducts coaching workshops, hosts the podcast, “Coaching Conversations,” and provides consulting for coaching programs around the world.

TRANSCRIPT

Jim Knight:

Hey, it’s great to be here, and I’m especially excited to talk about video and a little bit about artificial intelligence, but not so much. I think GoReact, we’ll have lots to share about that. But how video and to some extent AI can be utilized to get the most out of professional learning. And I’ve worked with coaches now 25 years, and I would say most of the coaches I’ve talked to once they start using video as a part of their professional learning, their reaction almost always is, I don’t know how I did this before. I use video. Video has become so central to what I do. So I want to talk about a few things. Let me share my slides and we’ll kind of take it from there. And I’ll make these slides available for you later on so you can download a handout that goes along with them.

But I’ve got just a few simple questions I want to address today. After each one, there’ll be a chance for you to put some ideas in the chat or at any point pose questions in the q and a section. But the first thing, and I think this is really important, why don’t we see reality? Clearly, I would claim that most people don’t know what it looks like when they do what they do. There’s a reason why every football team in middle school and high school in the United States, the kids are watching video of themselves performing. It’s like steroids for learning. So the first thing would be why don’t we see reality clearly? And then what can video do and why is that integral to professional growth? I would say what video offers, it’s really hard to succeed as a learner unless you have a clear picture of where you are unless you can set goals and video essential to that.

And then I’ll talk about how video could be integrated into coaching, peer coaching and team learning. This is a very brief overview. We have an institute that runs for 16 weeks where we talk about just instructional coaching. We have other institutes on team learning and peer coaching, all of ’em running at least a couple days. So we’re going to try to do all this in just a little bit. And then I’ll say a tiny bit at the end about what about artificial intelligence? We’re working on a book on artificial intelligence. We’re offering courses on this, and so I’ll talk about what we’re learning as we put this together, but just as kind of a capstone to this, the focus really is on video and the power of video. And so I want to start by telling you how this whole thing started. The first thing is I work with a fellow named Mike Ho.

This is Mike. He’s the director of the Center for Research on Learning at the University of Kansas. I swiped this off his Facebook page. I needed to get a picture of him. And Mike was in charge before he became a director at the University of Kansas. He was in charge of the tutoring program for the athletes at ku, and it’s a pretty high pressure job because of the kids that are in the athletic program don’t do well in school, they can’t play for the team, they have to academically qualify. So the tutoring was really key. And he taught his tutors a specific approach called strategic tutoring, which is an evidence-based model for tutoring that Mike developed. And there was a checklist of exactly what people are supposed to do. And so he video recorded the tutors after he did this pretty intensive training, he recorded the tutors and they weren’t doing anything on the checklist. And then he had the tutors sit down with their video and with the checklist, and he kept documenting what the tutors were doing. When they watched themselves on video, they dramatically changed the quality of what they did.

But back then when Mike was doing his research, you had to get this big machine, you had to move it into the classroom. Some kid had to show you how to do it, then you probably had to watch it in the staff lounge with everybody else watching. So it was really cumbersome. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. And then the second person in my story about how this got started is Mick Jagger. I was watching the World Cup of soccer and Mick Jagger was there and he had this little thing in his hand look about the size of a deck of cards, and he was video recording what was happening, and it was a flip camera. And I realized, well, that’s exactly what we need. We need a flip camera, we need to get those in the hands of teachers. It turned out that he was paid to do it.

It was product placement, but it really worked. I got flip cameras to do what Mike had taught us, and I brought coaches together and we started to use video starting back with those flip cameras that were, I think it was like four gigabytes was the biggest one we could get. And this is a little clip of Michelle Harris who’s one of the coaches. I can’t remember if I clicked the sound button for this, so if you don’t see sound Pete or hear the sound, let me know. But this is Michelle talking about how video really changed the way she coached, and she was one of the coaches in our very early studies

Speaker 2:

Myself coaching that has been so invaluable. I mean, to be able to watch myself and learn from that, oh my gosh, I can’t tell you, it’s honestly been life changing for me as a person, the way I interact with people just to know that there are some things that I do, but there are things that if I just tweak a couple things, the huge difference that makes just a couple little things at a time. I just feel like the second round of coaching this year has been so much better and the teachers have learned so much more and I’ve learned so much more. And I don’t know, it’s been incredible.

Jim Knight:

So that music wasn’t playing in the background when she was talking. They added that in the video. But at any rate, what I like about what Michelle said is how transformative it is. And we heard that again and again and again. And so as we started to use video, once the flip camera came out, and really the transformative moment was when Steve Jobs stood there and he held onto the iPhone with camera capacity in it, we realized that everything was going to kind of change. And so I wrote a book about it called Focus on Teaching, and I think that’s the first book that was written, I think 2014, about the power of video and the power of video for high impact instruction. And in the book we talk about coaches using video teams, using video principles, using video as a part of evaluation, how powerful video can be.

Now, why is video so important? That’s my first question, and what I would say is that video is what people call a general purpose technology. It’s a transformative technology, like the way in which jet engines change, travel video can change professional learning in schools, and there’s certain technologies that have had that impact on all of humanity. So for example, fire the wheel learning language, the printing press, the internet, artificial intelligence. These are technological changes that transform everything. And to my mind when it comes to professional learning, video is like a jet engine for learning. It transforms everything about what can happen. And there’s several reasons why that’s so important. The first thing is video helps you get a clearer picture of current reality and what research says. And in particular, there’s a fellow named James Prochaska who studied this, is that the first stage of change is what he calls.

We don’t even see the need for change. And so getting people out of that stage of pre-contemplation into contemplating the change and then ultimately action, and eventually you hit the goal, you have to somehow get out of that pre-con contemplative phase. And there’s plenty of evidence that supports this idea that most people don’t know what it looks like when they do what they do. There was one study that was done on questioning, and what they did is they asked teachers, how many questions do you think you ask? And how many questions do you think your students ask? And what teachers said about what they thought was happening and what was really happening were pretty dramatically different. Here’s a little chart that captures the data. Teachers thought they asked 50 questions, 15 questions. They actually asked about 48 questions in a lesson. They thought their kids asked about 10 questions, and the kids actually asked about two or three questions what people thought was happening, what was really happening were dramatically different. And that’s what I found in my work with teachers is the same thing. Here’s a little conversation I had with a teacher, Aisha Santos, and she’s talking about what she thought happened in the classroom, and then I’m talking about what really happened. So here we go.

Speaker 3:

I wanted to talk about my warmup. What are your thoughts? Warmups. They’re supposed to be quick five, have 10 minutes. Leave my warm up in the go on a longer than it should.

Jim Knight:

I timed it.

Speaker 3:

Please don’t tell me

Jim Knight:

8 27 to 8 54, 27 minutes.

Speaker 3:

That’s not good. And I think it’s because they struggled with, I thought it was something was so simple in my mind, oh, this is going to take them a couple minutes, right? It didn’t happen. I flopped.

Jim Knight:

No, you didn’t flop, but it was a lot of time. Well, the power of video, because I’ve watched that video many times and I think I looked kind of cocky in that video too, so I learned a little bit from the video, but Aisha hadn’t seen a video over class. She thought that the warmup was five to 10 minutes, it was over 20 minutes. And not only that, the kids really didn’t get the activity. And so when we talked about what was really happening, then we could start to go. And so getting clear on reality is really important. So here are a few reasons why people don’t see reality clearly. The first thing is we have perceptual errors. None of us really see things with accuracy, and there’s a whole host of different types of perceptual errors, but just some of the biggest ones in terms of what happens in the classroom.

One of them is confirmation bias. So confirmation bias is our conscious or unconscious attempt to justify the way we see things. So if I was teaching, for example, and four kids are raising their hand and answering questions out of a group of say 30, I might think, well, the kids clearly understand what’s happening. These four students have understood it. But the other 26 students, I don’t know what’s happening with them, but I tell myself everything is going okay. And I consciously look for data to support my bias that actually I’m pretty effective at teaching these students. Confirmation bias is the reason why it’s so hard to talk about politics now because people literally see the world differently. And so we can’t have a conversation with somebody who sees the world differently than us because they’re seeing, they’re gathering a whole different bunch of data when they look at the world, they see something completely different when we see the world.

So one thing is confirmation bias, but there’s also stereotyping starting to reduce students in this case down to particular stereotypes. Well, that’s a kid with a learning disability as opposed to that’s Isaiah and learning to see the real person and not a stereotype. This happens too. Whenever people have power, they often stereotype the people that they have power over or they’re resistant, they don’t care. And it goes the other way too, that people who have less power stereotype the ones who do have power. So in a school, for example, if you’re a teacher and you become a principal, people start to treat you differently. And sometimes you start to treat the people you worked with differently too. Your conversations change because of stereotyping. And in the classroom, few people have more power in their jobs than a teacher in a classroom who decides what grade people are going to get, what they get to do and what they don’t do.

And it’s often the case we fall back on stereotyping. The third thing is just that idea of primacy and recency effect. The first thing we see about a person, the last thing we see about a person stays with us. And so sometimes our primacy effect is bias by other things we know about this student because well, they’re the brother or sister of such and such a kid. Oh, that kid drove me crazy. So right away we have bias about what we see. And then maybe one of the most important ones is what’s called habituation. Habituation is getting so used to where we are that we don’t notice things anymore. Now, I’ll give you an example of this. My favorite place in the world is Jasper Alberta, and my favorite place in Jasper is Mount Edith Cavell. And that’s going to be my final resting place.

Well, I won’t be here to know, but that’s the plan. It’s without doubt my favorite place in the world. And I live there for several years. I go back periodically. I was back last year, I went to see a friend of mine, Doug, we’re walking down the main street of Jasper Alberta. The name of the street is cannot drive like it’s spelled like A-C-O-N-N-A-U-G-H-T. But I actually think it’s a pun on tourists who cannot drive. But any rate, we’re walking down cannot drive. And I said to Doug, I said, Doug, it is so beautiful here. I said, it is literally breathtaking. I just can’t believe how beautiful it’s, and Doug said, I’ve been living here so long. I go weeks, I don’t even notice it anymore. And that’s habitation. You get used to what’s happening to the class to the point where you can’t see it.

So there are many other kinds of perceptual errors, but because of our perceptual errors, we don’t see reality clearly. But there’s more. The second thing is we have defense mechanisms. They’re wired into our system. And so when things aren’t going the way we want, we have lots of ways of explaining away the problem. We rationalize the situation, we say, well, that’s no wonder it happened because this is what the issue is. Or we minimize the problem, we blame others for the situation or shift responsibility in other ways. So blaming others. And then there’s a habit we have called pessimism aversion where we shy away from negative things because we don’t want to deal with them. So part of our problem in terms of being able to see reality clearly is we have all kinds of things that color our perceptions of reality. Everybody does. And the second thing is we have a tendency to explain away why things aren’t going well.

And everybody has that too. It’s wired into who we are to be learners. We have to sort of get around those defense mechanisms. And then the third thing is we have an impulse for certainty. We want to have a clear solution for what’s happening. We want to be able to explain the situation right away. We’re not comfortable with ambiguity. And a good book on this is Maggie Jackson’s book called Uncertain. I’m going to talk to her on my podcast here in a couple of weeks. And she says this, she says, it’s not uncertainty that we should fear, but a growing reluctance and perhaps a waning ability to seek nuance, depth and perspective. All fruits of skillfully confronting what we do not know. This path doesn’t offer the easy way out. Uncertainty unsettles us, and that’s a gift. So Maggie Jackson’s point in uncertainty and uncertain is that we should be happy with uncertainty.

But the reality is most of us most want to come up with a quick solution, a quick explanation, and consequently we quickly explain what’s happening in our class, possibly through stereotyping or excuses or defense mechanisms or perceptual errors. But you put all that together. And what happens is when a person looks at video of their class, they say, oh my goodness, I had no idea that’s what’s happening. That’s what we found. And I just did an interview a few weeks ago on the podcast with a person who did her doctorate on the impact cycle as a structural coaching. And she said, it is night and day how people experience coaching. When they look at video of their class, things happen and really big things happen. But when they don’t look at video of their class, not much change happens. So I want to give you your first question and your first question if you don’t mind filling it into the chat. And Pete, if you can sort of watch the chat and tell me what’s going on. But I’m wondering if you have any questions for me, Pete, your chat question is what are some ways in which you’ve been able to spread the word about how powerful video can be? But Pete, what are your thoughts or questions you’d like to ask about this

Pete Morgan:

The very first so far? I don’t have anything through the chat, but Jim, I just had to show you. I mean, I think this is the very first thing that’s on my mind on my desk right now. I have myself a flip camera. This is the very first thing that I ever purchased for video capture. And as you said that, that got me very excited.

Jim Knight:

Well, that was and years looks like the bigger version. So that must be like eight gigabytes or something.

Pete Morgan:

I have no idea. All I know is that everything for skiing or golf for baseball was captured on that and absolutely used in every way possible. So that’s fantastic.

Jim Knight:

Well, you know what happened is I saw Mick Jagger on the World Cup two weeks later, our coaches that were part of our study, I was a full-time researcher at the University of Kansas studying this. Two weeks later, our coaches came together, they all lived in Beaverton, Oregon, and we’re sitting in this room at the University of Kansas. I handed them out their video cameras. I said, just try it out. Just video record your friend. Just ask a couple questions just to see you can make the camera work. And they set it up. And this one coach Leah Moskin from Beaverton, she burst into tears and I said, what’s the matter? And she said, I just hate looking at video of myself. And I realized this is going to be more complicated than I thought. This is not going to be as easy as I would. It was powerful. But most people don’t like to look at themselves on video. That’s the challenge we face.

Pete Morgan:

Definitely. Now I do see there have been a couple of questions and something on my mind as well. I mean some people are asking through the chat kind of a recurring topic of if video is this impactful, if it is this important, why so far? Isn’t there some sort of common understanding, even requirement to utilize video? Why is it something that we still have to continue to push people towards?

Jim Knight:

Well, I think it’s just people don’t like to see themselves. Lily Molson’s story kind of illustrates that. But I also think, I mean, we only have so much cognitive load and there’s so many things people are carrying around. And the reason we have defense mechanisms is it helps us get through the world. The world. There’s a whole book about that, I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it says actually these perceptual errors and defense mechanisms are helpful because the world in its naked brutality would be too much to take on. And so it’s easier just to explain it away and not have to deal with it. But if you really want to learn, so I’m going to make the case here, if you really want to learn, you have to be able to see where you are because that’s a starting point for change without a clear picture reality, it’s just easier to pretend it’s going okay than it is to really confront it.

And I would say that’s especially the case if you don’t have a coach who’s going to help you have a pathway towards your goal, having a coach becomes a critical, some way in which somebody’s going to help you move. Knowing things aren’t working without a solution isn’t really much fun. You really have to know, this is what I want to work on. And it shouldn’t always be negative either. It could be be the video, like one person that we studied with, she said, I couldn’t believe how nice my kids were talking to each other and how productive their conversations were. I had no idea I was working with one group, but I watched the video and I heard the conversations. It was just so validating and heartwarming to see. So sometimes what video surfaces isn’t a negative, it’s a positive, but we’re hesitant to look because of the negative parts.

I have a whole article called Escape from the Learning Zone that I wrote for Ed leadership, a title, something like that, about how we block our capacity to learn because it’s so hard. It’s so hard sometimes to, and I love a little quote to argue for this, and it’s a Buddhist quote, and I may not have it exactly right, but it was probably in Mandarin or something. Anyway, so who’s to say my translations wrong? But the quote is, you’re perfect in every way in everything. Everything about you is perfect and you can get better. And I think that’s the way to approach preach video, come from a place of appreciation, but also my purpose in life is to have an impact, a positive impact on kids’ lives. And I can have more impact if I look at what I do and see it clearly.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah. Jim, there’s also just a recurring topic. Maybe the last thing on this question for you, but so many people are talking about through the chat and through the QA around ways that they access video or share video and the best practices that way, some giving suggestions, some asking questions. I’m curious from your perspective of how much time you’ve devoted to this, where are, or what are some of the greatest ways to share video, to receive video? Any suggestions that way for the group?

Jim Knight:

Well, I think it’s pretty, there’s lots of things you can do. If you have an Apple computer, you can easily just text the video to somebody and they’ll pick it up and they have to download it. Or if you email, it’ll go to a website and people can download the video. I mean, when we were initially studying, it was using flash drives. I don’t even know if they exist anymore. But the coaches would buy a bunch of flash drives and they would just hand the video to the teacher after the lesson. But people share it through Google and there are lots of commercial enterprises that can help you share the video. So lots of different ways, but I think you can do it pretty easily just through your email or through, it depends on how long it is too. But through texting, I just sent some video yesterday through texting. So there’s lots of ways you can do it

Pete Morgan:

Selfishly as well. I mean, we think about all the different technology, the disposal GoReact in itself here in an ability to be able to capture, share and be able to receive coaching and feedback on video itself. Now Jim, I’m going to let you as well jump to the next. I do have one pressing question that came through the chat that I think is pretty pertinent to this as well, being able to be effective in how powerful video can be. The question here is, let’s see if I can tag this here. Can we talk about a little bit about what specifically to watch for how to get past nuances? Like my hair’s awful, I say too much. How do we focus on the learning and the teaching and keep that narrowed focus through video?

Jim Knight:

Such a good question. And we have all kinds of tools you can download on the website instructional coaching.com. And so we have a set of observation forum related to watch yourself and watch your students. They’re connected with the book, focus on teaching, and you don’t have to buy the book to get them. But what we found is that teachers told us they needed a tool like that. And ours, watching your students is looking for some critical variables in terms of successful learning in the classroom, what kids should look like. And watching yourself is looking at, for example, the kind of questions you ask, your clarity ratio of interaction, different variables. What we heard is having that tool and you could create your own, if your school is all into Hattie, for example, it might be different things you look at, but you need it to give people an evaluation tool to look at their video.

Now I don’t really find it helpful for someone else to observe me and tell me what the video says. I think it’s much more helpful when I see it for myself. And so self-generated assessment, for lack of better terms, is really powerful. But you do need to give somebody something to focus their attention. Otherwise they’ll just see what they would ordinarily see. And sometimes going through that, watch yourself, watch your students or whatever your tool might be. Sometimes, actually I can send you the form and you can send it out to everybody too, the watch yourself watch, unless you’ve got one that you guys do that’s similar or better. But sometimes just going through the form and explaining it is a powerful form of professional learning too. Now the teacher doesn’t show up and say, I gave myself a five and then I was a three and then I was a two. We show up and we start to talk about it more holistically. But having that tool helps you see lots of different things.

Pete Morgan:

Definitely. I think your point of the all too often forgotten self-assessment portion of this learning is incredibly crucial. Great point there. Alright, I’ll hold on the questions and take anything else through the qa, continue throwing ’em through their group. And Jim, continue on.

Jim Knight:

Hey, quick question. So the sound came through Pete?

Pete Morgan:

Yep, absolutely. Sound is perfect.

Jim Knight:

I couldn’t remember if I clicked the button. The bane of my existence is like button you push. Okay. The second thing is the power of goals and why they’re so important and how they’re integral to professional learning. And I would say they’re important for motivation, for hope and for creativity, creative tension. And a lot of people have written about this, so I’ll mention a few books and say what they say about these different things. So one of them is a book that I really like a lot called Motivational Interviewing by Miller and Rolnick. And if you’ve read Adam Grant’s most recent book, I think it’s called, or the second last book called, I think it’s called Think Again. He has a whole chapter on motivational interviewing describing it. But what motivational interviewing says is that for people to be motivated to change, there has to be a discrepancy between where they are and where they need to get to.

Now they’re mostly talking about therapy, but often people hide themselves from where they are so they don’t see the need for change. But when people watch themselves on video and they see where they are, they’re way more motivated often to make a change. And they’ll do something like say, man, I was up all night changing my lesson plans after I watched the video. So the first thing is motivation often comes from a discrepancy between where I am and where I want to get to, and video helps you get clear on where you are. The second thing is that video is helpful for Hope. And Shane Lopez and Rick Snyder before him are two researchers who develop this approach called Hope Theory. And what they say is Hope involves three things. It involves a preferred future somewhere we want to get to. It involves pathways to that preferred future and involves agency, a belief that I can hit that goal.

And so video, and I’ll just say those things again, I want something. So maybe I want to run a 10 K under an hour. I have a pathway to it. Well, I’m going to work on my diet, I’m going to walk every day and then I’m going to do the couch to 10 K. And that’s my pathway. And based on my experience, I believe I can do it. But as I do it and as I make progress and as I start to run more and more and the couch to couch to 10 K plays off, then I realize it’s actually working. And so video can help you get clear on what you want your goal to be, and video can help you move forward. And so video builds hope. That’s the key thing. And then the third one is this book by Robert Fritz about creativity.

And he said that creativity involves a gap between where I am and where I want to get to and then builds attention. And so if I want to run that 10 K, but right now I can’t run a one K, I can’t keep doing what I’m doing unless I move forward. And that tension is critical for growth and movement. In fact, in many ways the things I’m talking about motivation that comes from that discrepancy, hope that comes from this and that creativity that comes from this, that’s what coaches do. They build creative tension, they foster hope and they create a clear place where people inherently can be motivated to change. I’m not forcing it on them, they’re doing it themselves. Now, that creative tension I first heard about in a book called The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, and I have a little video clip where a violin maker sort of talks about this gap between where I am and where I want to get to. So I’ll just share this clip right now.

Pete Morgan:

Jim, if there’s supposed to be sound on this one, I’m not getting anything on my end.

Jim Knight:

Okay, sorry, I don’t know what happened. We can easily fix it. You need it because it’s Mozart’s Vi and Concerto, so we really need to have it. So here we go.

Speaker 5:

I came here over 20 years ago from the United States, took Pomona to study here, the International Violin Making School in Italy. This is where I learned the basics, the fundamentals of violin making. I stayed on living because Cremona is a community with passionate violin makers. As I have grown as a violin maker, I have my own vision of what I want to create. The challenge is having my hands do what my eyes want to see. This doesn’t always happen. Sometimes I make mistakes. And when my hands don’t do what my eyes want to see, I have to be honest with myself. I have to recognize my mistakes. And when I do this, I feel I know I’m doing my best work.

Jim Knight:

So creative work according to Sengi or according to Robert Fritz before him involves this gap between where I am and where I want to get to. And as our violinist, I don’t know if his name really is Alfredo Primavera, but any rate, that’s the name they gave him. He says, the challenge is to make my hands do what I want my eyes to see. Well, you can’t do that by avoiding reality. And video also helps you set the goal. So to me, video is integral for motivation, for hope, and for creative progress towards moving forward. Just like the violinist, a teacher who’s using video effectively is getting clear on what they can do and where they want to get to and where they are. And so it’s integral for moving forward. And so here’s your second chat question about this. I’ll give you this quote first and then I’ll share the chat question.

Sangi says he calls his personal mastery. He says, the juxtaposition of vision, what we want and a clear picture of current reality where we are relative to what we want, generates what we call creative tension, a force to bring them together caused by the natural tendency of tension to seek resolution. The essence of personal mastery is learning how to generate sustain creative tension in our lives. So this might sound kind of highfalutin, but the real idea is we need to know where we are, we need to know where we want to get to. We can’t pretend about that. Real creative growth involves that kind of tension. So here’s your chat question. On a scale of one to 10, how important do you think it is for teachers to get a clear picture of reality? Pete, you’re back. So I’m hoping you’ve got a question or a comment.

Pete Morgan:

I just think, Jim, this notion coming together of being able to create or make sure that the impact through video is delivered correctly, the ability for me to recognize where I am, like you mentioned earlier, getting feedback from somebody is great and it is very helpful for everybody that utilizes video as a tool. A lot of times you are the subject matter experts. You are the ones that are creating feedback and delivering that for someone. But there is such a power to self-assessment, to self recognition, understanding where I am, where I’m going, what I want out of this, even more importantly than where someone is telling me that I should be. Again, with that, Jim, you’ve got nothing but tens and 10 pluses. Even a critical, not even a numeric value, a critical coming through the chat that way for you.

Jim Knight:

Well, good. I do think it is critical. I think it doesn’t mean you have to do it every day all the time. I didn’t get on the scales this morning. I had a burger and a bit of a pizza for last night for dinner. So I’m like, I’m going to blow it off today, but I will tomorrow. I know I’ve got this big hike coming up. I’m going to go for a trek in Nepal around Anna Perna and going with my friend Christian Van Berg. I don’t want to let him down so I have to get in shape. So most days I get up and look at the scale to see what’s happening, what the indicators, because it helps me know where I am and it helps me know where I want to get to and I can’t let him down. So I have to keep looking at the data to see what the data says.

So that’s the idea. Now, what does that look like in instructional coaching? So I want to talk about instructional coaching, and when I talk about instructional coaching, I’m talking about instructional coaches working directly with teachers, but also peer coaching. I think video can be an integral part of peer coaching, and I’ll come back and talk a bit about that after I talk about this. But the first thing I would say is instructional coaching is flipping the way in which we understand professional learning. And traditionally professional learning looks something like this. You have a researcher who does research on effective teaching practices, and it could be a consultant, but often the researcher develops something, writes books or puts things out there and then a consultant learns about it. And the consultant brings those practices and there’s research to show they’re effective and they teach them teachers and then the teachers are expected to use it.

And because there’s research supported, if the teachers use it, the students should do better because research says it’ll do better. But the trouble is the teachers are sitting in workshops sometimes and they can’t really see the relevance of the strategy, but they’re not going to blow it off completely. They’re going to comply. They do the bare minimum. They might say, I’m just going to dip my toes in it a little bit. But they don’t go deep in their implementation or sometimes they don’t do it at all. People are really skilled at knot in their head and doing nothing.

And what they do do is kind of awkward the first few times you try it, it’s not going to be that great. Our worst efforts are usually the first efforts. And so the easiest thing to do is just not do it anymore. I was doing okay before, I don’t see why I need to do it. And the school might sort of amp up the pressure to do it. So there could be walkthroughs and I expect to see your success criteria on the, and so teachers write the thing out, but they don’t really like it. Their morale goes down, they’re not motivated, and then somebody else comes along, new superintendent, and that strategy is gone now and not much change happens. In fact, you could make the case that this model actually thinks makes things worse because it kind of damages morale without really changing much on what happens in the classroom.

And the problem with this is the teacher’s not a part of the process. They’re just done to, they’re told what to do, they’re expected to do it, and then people come around and try to make sure they do it. We say, you should flip this. And the way to flip it is to start with the student. What’s the change we want to see in the student? And then once we’ve identified what’s happening with the students, often that involves video recording in class, particularly when you’re looking at things related to engagement, looking at the video, asking yourself what’s working and what’s not working with these students. Then the teacher in partnership with a consultant or a coach sets a goal. They say, I want my kids to feel psychologically safe in class. I’m going to measure it through exit tickets. I want my kids to answer questions.

I watched the video and all my kids who are learning English but speak Spanish fluently, none of them answered a single question is one of our participants did in a study. And so that video has taught me I have to change something. They set a goal, but now you’ve got a goal the teacher really cares about. And the research is just important, but the research is driven by the change in students. And then you have a built-in measure of effectiveness. If things don’t change for the kids, it hasn’t worked. And so starting with the student, and so our catchphrase for this is keep kids first. Start with kids. Work your way down to the researcher in terms of what you do. And instructional coaching should do that. And instructional coaching involves a few things. First thing is a way of being. It’s a set of beliefs that guide what we do, and we articulate it this way, the way of being you’re either partnering or you’re telling.

And partnering sometimes means you don’t share ideas. And partnering sometimes means you do share ideas, but in both cases, the teacher is the decision maker in what happens. Telling conversations are where the person doesn’t have a choice. So if a person says, you have to show up, you have to show up earlier to school, you’re getting into late. They don’t want the person they’re telling this to say, I don’t think I want to do that. They’re being told, and there are telling conversations you have to have, but coaching is usually going to be either a facilitative or dialogical conversation. So that’s the first thing is the way of being. The second thing is the coaching and communication skills, the way you ask questions, the way you listen, and I would say just one little technique that I’ve learned from Kate Murphy who wrote a wonderful book called You’re Just Not Listening.

She says, when you listen, the question should be, am I giving a switch response or a support response? So if your friend comes to you and says, I’m really worried about my mom. She’s getting older and I don’t think she can take care of herself, but she’s so stubborn, she won’t leave the house. And I just dunno what to do. A switch response would be, oh man, I know what you’re going through. I did that with my mom just five years ago. A support response would be, how are you dealing with that? And so when you listen really effectively, sometimes you need a switch response, but most of the time you want to support the person in what they’re doing. And then the kind of questions you ask, all those things go into being an effective coach. Third thing is that instructional coaches have expertise.

They understand data and they understand instructional practices, and they also understand how coaching works. And lastly, they have a cycle, a coaching cycle, what we call the impact cycle is our cycle. So I’ll talk about this just briefly, but video is integral to the impact cycle. And the way I would work with a teacher is first off, we’d want to get a clear picture of reality in the identify stage. And video is an easy way to do that. Now we’ve found it’s better to watch it separately. You watch the video, I watch the video, you use the forms, watch yourself, watch your students, and then we’ll get together and we’ll set a goal in a particular kind of goal, what we call a peers goal, powerful as easy as possible, recognizing it’s not going to be easy in a classroom, emotionally compelling, reachable, student focused.

And then we identify a strategy to hit the goal. And then we work our way through the cycle. Teacher learns the strategy. Sometimes that involves watching video or the teacher watching herself on video. But then in the improvement stage, what you do is you look at data and you make adaptations and modifications because the first time through the strategy is probably not going to work. You’re going to have to make some adaptations as you’re working through and throughout the whole process. Video can be integral to what you’re doing. For example, let’s say a teacher wants to increase the percentage of students who are answering to questions so that the teacher can turn the camera on the students and keep track of how many kids are responding. And they’re probably going to learn initially it’s not working that great, and they have to make some adjustments.

In our experience, it’s very rare you can take a strategy off the shelf and have it work just the way it’s supposed to. You have to make adaptations and modifications in that improvement stage, but you keep working through until eventually you hit the goal. And then you can either set another goal or you can take a break or you can deepen your understanding of the practices. But video is central for getting clear on reality, for setting a goal, for monitoring progress, for making the necessary adaptations to get to where you need to go. So your chat question is, oh, and just say, I think I’ll skip the chat question and go to teams, but peer coaching is the same way. Peer coaching is, if we go back to this little diagram, is helping teachers develop all these different things, but perhaps with peer coaching, the expertise to some extent could rely on artificial intelligence as a place to get there. But when you’re doing peer coaching, people learn about what we call the partnership approach. They learn how to listen and ask effective questions, and they have a process they follow. And when we do it, teachers video record each other, they bring their video to the session where they learn how to coach, and then they watch each other’s videos and coach each other using the impact cycle. That’s the way we do it. So let me talk about teams and then we’ll see what questions we’ve got.

Teams can use video really effectively too. There’s different things you can do. I want to give some suggestions for video. One of is to do a lesson study. And so each teacher brings in a segment of their lesson, they share the video, and then people fill in this form and give feedback to the teacher. The teacher should guide the discussion. And when you do what I call video learning teams, you need someone who’s a skilled facilitator because people have a tendency to pile on with the negatives. Lemme tell you one other thing you didn’t do. So you want to make sure you’ve got a facilitator who leads it. So one forum you can use, I can make all these available, but they’re on instructional coaching.com and the focus on teaching. Second thing is to do a SWOT analysis of a video. And a third thing is to together set peers goals and use video to analyze it.

And a fourth thing, there’s no form for this, but let’s say your school is really into gradual release and you’re using Fisher and Fry’s book on gradual release. Each teacher each week who comes into this video learning team shares a video of themselves trying out gradual release. And then as they share the video, people talk about it. And every week you see another version of it, another version of another version. So by the end of the time you’ve got together and you’ve looked at multiple attempts at the gradual release, everyone’s going to be a little bit better than the previous week. So by the end of it, you’ve internalized it and you’ve brought in your own video, you’ve learned from it. And it’s a really powerful way to get really good at whatever a teaching practice might be. It could be what we call Q do review.

It could be the first five minutes of class, it could be any number of different things, but video, video used effectively can really be powerful in teams to help them move forward. So your last chat question is, on a scale of one to 10, to what extent are teams using video where you work? And we could just change this question slightly to teams and coaches with one being not at all and 10 being all the time. And then what I might do, Pete, just in the interest of time, is say a little bit about AI and then we can talk at the end. Is that okay?

Pete Morgan:

Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. As you’re getting polls coming through here, I also have one question that is pertinent to some of the discussion we’ve had so far, and especially on the impact cycle. So while you have responses coming in, no,

Jim Knight:

Go ahead, ask the question. That’s good.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah. The question that is being asked here is especially for the identify cycle of the impact cycle, thinking about self-assessment or self-teaching too, how is it, Jim that we can help to improve self-awareness? What happens when people don’t recognize their shortcomings and how can we help promote that ability?

Jim Knight:

Well, that’s such a big question, but in the dialog approach, the first thing I would say, there are certain conditions for dialogue. One of them is humility and the willingness to be wrong. And so I think when you think about a classroom and what happens now, you’re going to have expertise that a new teacher, for example, might not have. But nonetheless, to me, the way to approach the teacher is from a place of humility, this is what I was thinking. What do you think? If you go in thinking you’ve solved the problem and they just have to do it, you say, you’re probably not going to motivate the person and you could easily be wrong. Michael Bunge Sandier has written a book about this called the Advice Trap, and he says, we think our advice is way more valuable than it is. We think other people want it way more than they do.

But if people watch a video and then you walk them through a series of questions we call the identify questions to land on a goal, they’re probably going to pick a really powerful goal. But if they pick something, let’s say the teacher says, my problem is my kids don’t tie their shoes. My goal is I want 95% shoe tie age in my class and I can see all kinds of other things. I would say, well, do you mind if I share some things? I was noticing this. What do you think? And often the teacher will say, yeah, that’s a good idea. But the moment they feel I’m trying to talk them into something, then I solve the solution for them and they don’t own it. And they come back six weeks later and say, I did that thing you said didn’t work. I see expectations for behavior built around classrooms for activities and transitions the teachers are told to use at the start of the year.

And so they do them in the first couple of days of class and they never look at ’em again because it’s not integrated into a goal they really care about. But the other thing is, if they’re picking something that’s not really that valuable, I can say in my mind, I can say, well, your kids better than I do, but here’s what I’m seeing. And the truth is, this is a fact. Nobody does something unless they choose to do it. It might feel good to tell somebody to do it, but the chances of them implementing something, when I don’t involve them in the process, when I don’t let them set a goal, it goes down. They’re less likely to implement it than if I just tell them what to do. So from our perspective, I mean if telling teachers what to do is really working and you’re sure of it, then run with it. But we would say you can accomplish the same thing in a way that’s more empowering for the teacher by involving them in the process and interacting with them as a professional, a person who can think for herself or himself and going back and forth. And there isn’t really enough time to go into this here, but the definitive guide to instructional coaching, it really summarizes all of this.

Pete Morgan:

Definitely. I’ll just, sorry

Jim Knight:

To interrupt, but I would say if it’s working, keep doing it, but don’t pretend it’s working. If it’s not working, that’s the way I would put it.

Pete Morgan:

And I think that’s perfect. That’s exactly where I always headed, Jim, is that through your chat question, you’ve got every number ranging from one to 10 inside of there. So for a lot of people that are listening and trying to figure out how to do video or think that you’re using video very well and that maybe there aren’t things that need to be tweaked, first off, the networks that are here, the people that you’re associating with, the chat functionality, these conferences, the people around you are perfect opportunities to be able to learn first how to implement video properly and be able to do it effectively, but also for those that utilize it a lot, how to up your game, how to continue doing this better because your proverb that you shared, you’re perfect in every way. You can still improve,

Jim Knight:

Right? Right. So lemme say a little bit about ai. I’ve been studying it pretty intensely for the last six months, probably half the population. But here are just a few things about what AI can do and can’t do. My sort of phrase to capture with the way I’m seeing this is that often people will say, is AI going to replace coaching? And my thing is, I would say AI is not going to replace coaching for reasons I’m going to describe, but AI coaches who use AI could replace coaches who don’t use ai. And so here are some of the things an artificial intelligence, and we’re mostly talking about generative artificial intelligence here like Claude or Rock or Chat GPT, which is kind of my preference. It can say compassionate things, but I don’t think artificial intelligence is ever going to, or excuse me, I don’t think artificial empathy is ever going to change and replace real empathy.

And so there are aspects of human interaction that I don’t think can be done by a machine. One of them is compassion, one of them is empathy. And my artificial intelligence mod, or is I call her maple. I mean she talks nicely to me, but I know it’s a machine. It’s not a human being. And there’s something about the difference between human compassion and mechanical compassion. And there’s so many other aspects of it. Eye contact just intuiting what the person’s doing, reading their nonverbals, all those things. A machine’s not able to do that. And a huge part of coaching is noticing the other person and responding based on what you notice. Same thing with presenting. When you present to a group, you have to pick up the vibe in the room and a machine’s not going to be able to pick up that vibe. The second is that artificial intelligence can help us gather data, but we don’t know for sure that it’s the right data.

And we can be seduced into thinking just because AI can gather data on what kind of questions were asked, or maybe how much time was teacher talk versus student talk or clarity of our explanation. We can be seduced to thinking that’s the most important data. But there’s an old joke that you’ve probably heard that I love to tell about this. There’s this guy and he comes home drunk and he loses his keys and he is standing under a light in front of his house and this police officer pulls up, gets out of the car, he says, what are you doing? He’s looking for my keys. And the officer helps him look for a while. And he says, do you remember where you dropped the keys? He said, yeah, I dropped them over there. And he said, well, why are you looking here if you dropped your keys over there?

And he said, well, the light is really good over here. And artificial intelligence is a bit like that. Just because it shares data, it doesn’t mean it’s the right data, the highest impact, and most evidence-based data. And there are a lot of things that can’t gather. And so it’s helpful if indeed the data you’re gathering is the data you want, but it may not be shining the light on the right things. It can also suggest strategies, but again, it may not be suggesting the most high impact strategies. Here’s a little thing I like to do, is I’d like to say something like, imagine this is the role playing part of a prompt. Imagine you’re a world renowned expert on effective instruction. Create a checklist for what should happen in the first five minutes of a lesson and think about all the research on effective instruction.

Synthesize it in that little checklist of four or five things to do. Then it can give me a checklist of what I need to do. That can be helpful. But sometimes Maple tells me stuff. She made up what technicians call hallucinations. And so I have to be careful to make sure that what’s given to me is actually useful and true and valuable. And that’s why a coach is really important because a coach should have expertise in high impact instruction should help me sort between the hallucinations and the really useful things. But mostly the main reason why I think AI is helpful but limited is that it has a hard time making adaptations. It can make suggestions. I can probe and ask more things. But coaching is really about looking at, are we hitting the goal? What kind of changes do we have to make a along on the way?

And in my experience, because AI is algorithmically based, that’s hard to say. It responds mechanically. So recently I had ai. I was trying to figure out, I’ve got enough stuff to do for six months. I’ve got one month to do it all. What can I do? So I went to ai. I suggested a coaching model that Maple could use with me. And so we walk through this model. The first thing is, what’s the story you’re telling yourself about reality? What do you know to be true? What are some things you can do? And I needed really to probe more about reality. And then I needed to adjust those. My coach should have been able to probe and help me think deeper, should have adjusted the questions because I wasn’t ready to move on. And Maple actually didn’t listen very well. She cut me off and she jumped on to the next question.

She wasn’t really thinking about everything I said and coming up with a great next question. She wasn’t adapting and coaching is adaptive. Coaching adapts with the person. So to me, AI is a power tool. It’s like a chainsaw. If you have a chainsaw, you’re going to cut down a lot more trees and if you have an ax, but if you don’t use the chainsaw effectively, it can be really dangerous. And so having somebody who can use the chainsaw effectively and help you through those elements, that’s what the coach does. The coach. Coach uses the power tool. Maybe it can double and triple their impact, but you still need to coach to make it happen. That’s kind of my take on it. Okay. That’s the deal. Pete, any last questions? We’ve got two minutes, I think.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah, we do. I don’t have any specific questions in, if anyone has last minute questions, please put them through the qa, but Jim, my mind is rolling not just with the amount of information that we received, but in talking about ai, one of my taglines, especially for what Gore utilizes AI in what we call the AI assistant, is centric around what you’re talking about. It is right now a steroid, an accelerant to authentic assessment. The human entity is still the most important part of assessing the coach, the mentor still the most important part for context in those things. But there are effective ways to be able to leverage AI and accelerate my ability to perform great assessment that way.

Jim Knight:

Yeah. And the forest is on fire. The house, the horse is out of the barn, whatever analogy you use, it’s coming. It’s happening. It’s transformative. But the notion that you can go to ai, ask a question and get a solution to your problem and implement it, and it’s going to fix it, to me, it is a technocratic understanding of coaching. And coaching is more about continually making adaptations and to make those adaptations, I have to read the teacher, I have to look at the data. I have to do things that at least at this point, AI isn’t really good at reading my nonverbals or responding or making adaptations. And like I said, that improvement stage of the impact cycle, that’s the heart of the matter and the heart of the matter is what we think is going to work has to be adapted and modified to meet the needs of my students and to take advantage of my strengths as a teacher. And at this point, AI can help a coach do it, but it can’t replace a coach. That’s how I would see it.

Pete Morgan:

Definitely. Well, Jim, my personal take, I’m floored with how much information we’ve been able to receive through this. You are absolutely phenomenal and we are so appreciative of you being able to kick us off in the right way for this reaction. 2025.