Consolidate + Reveal
Pulling back the curtain.
Paul + Matt
In the fall of 2000, I was a novice teacher— fresh out of school with just a modest amount of student teaching under my belt. It showed— on my watch, seventh grade got off to a rough start. The students I taught were ready, and most had come from the excellent, veteran sixth grade teacher’s class across the hall. But once in my classroom we were, collectively, lost. Too many lessons had no discernible point. The classroom lacked a sense of routine or orderly flow. Too many minor disruptions got too much of the wrong attention and spiraled out of control. I entered each day not with a sense of self or a plan, but a sense of confusion about what was about to happen; I suspect the students did, too.
So they sent in Paul.
Paul was my mentor, meaning he was an experienced former teacher and principal who now coached and guided novice teachers in the work of trying to define and refine their classroom practice. We called him The Wolf, after the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction who solved problems. In coming to my classroom, I now think he felt he just had to start somewhere, the way a host looks the enormous mess of dishes after Thanksgiving, and wonders where to begin the clean up.
The first time Paul came to my classroom, he came to report what happened, not to solve any problems. Rather than come in and offer advice or critique right away, he started by just noting all the little interactions, and built rapport with me by describing what he saw and asking me to reflect on it. Once we agreed on a description, only then did he try to label it in a way that offered me a new way of thinking about classroom interactions.
For the first time in my life, I was regularly struggling with what I was trying to do. Each day felt like drowning all over again. His early feedback used labeling to help me reframe my challenges. That early labeling process went something like this: “You asked student A to do something, and they did not do it. That’s not chaos, that an adolescent being an adolescent. Let’s talk about how to communicate that without blowing it out of proportion.”
When we saw something promising, he pointed that out as well: “When Student B asked to go to the bathroom when you were giving directions, you simply responded “We have a policy,” and you continued on (the policy was, hear the directions and then go the bathroom so you can get to work when you get back and are not lost and the teacher doesn’t need to repeat the directions). That shows that you have done a decent job of starting to communicate a sense of common understanding of how things will work in your class.”
Paul’s descriptions of specific interactions and how to label them helped to build our connection. He established the sense that these problems were specific things that could be addressed, that I was capable of addressing them, and that he was there to help me be the best version of myself I could be. Each time he came in, he gave feedback on how to think of the challenges the way a more experienced professional would. More importantly, he made clear that he saw in me the potential to be good at something at I cared a great deal about.
After a couple of sessions, he revealed to me one aspect of what we were doing: We were using an approach he called semantic coaching1.
Semantic coaching was a technique defined by the researcher Fernando Flores, and it involves analysis of others’ language as well as a reflection on, and clear defining of, your own choice of words. Is something a fact or an opinion? Are you telling me something or asking me a question? Are you making a request? How do I want to label our interaction and what does that mean about how to respond? Paul used the techniques of labeling and language to help educators deal with what otherwise would be stressful situations.
In working with me, Paul was explicit: You don’t need to treat everything as a new emergency. Otherwise, teachers would face thousands of emergencies and never get through the week. Instead, you need to use your language to make clear what you are doing or communicating at any given time. You need to avoid framing challenging situations in narrow, personal ways.
He reminded me that I needed a few, consistent responses to otherwise minor situations common in seventh grades everywhere, not to treat each like it was a new catastrophe. Pretty quickly, I felt like I had a handle on what had been a series of chaotic days.
Semantic coaching was a technique that Paul had discovered and used himself in all sorts of difficult communications, from teaching students to dealing with parents as a principal. It was a way for Paul to embody some of the composure that novice teachers wish they had. He learned to use it to help the people they are interacting with to get on the same page about what a given interaction is, including the respective roles that both parties are trying to play. When he was a principal, an irate parent came into his office to argue about a disciplinary decision. The parent responded to a student’s suspension by telling Paul he could shove one of the objects on his desk in his rear end. Paul thanked the parent for feedback on his management style.
In using semantic coaching with novice teachers, Paul was explicitly trying to show me something that only experienced practitioners know (and many discover over time only by trial and error).
He was pulling back the curtain, or showing me a kind of backstage area known only to successful, experienced practitioners. One thing that a strong mentor can do for mentees is help them to see and name what more experienced practitioners are doing, and then describe how they do it. This knowledge might be otherwise invisible to a novice.
Paul, incidentally, would not say he was a mentor, but rather a coach, because he would say he was focused on performance, not directly supporting me as a person. I saw him as helping me at a time I really needed him. I was experiencing a disorienting dilemma, and Paul was teaching me something that I needed to understand both at work and at home. He was giving me a sense of self, he was just doing it through a focus on performance—learning to see the difference between an absolute truth and our current interpretation of a situation. Good mentors need to know how to coach mentees on the skills of their shared profession or task.
This starts with mentors reflecting to understand what it is they know. Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia’s book on the nature of expertise highlights what they call the “hidden knowledge of experts,” which includes not just formal knowledge, but also the informal knowledge, subjective impressions, and sense of self that experts may see as common sense, but may be a mystery to a novice or mentee2. Good mentors can at least model this kind of knowledge, and great mentors can instruct in it explicitly, “pulling back the curtain” on their expertise and helping mentees accelerate their growth.
Great mentors know what they know, as well as how to convey that in clear principles. The late early childhood educator and scholar of early childhood education, Ruby Takanishi, called this being an “articulate practitioner,” or someone who is skilled at both their trade and can talk about it in a clear way with less experienced colleagues3. They don’t just model, but they are explicit in articulating and instructing in what they believe have been the keys to their success.
This is especially true for novices who may be different from their mentors. In their book, Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women, Naval Academy Professors Brad Johnson and Capt David Smith4 write how it is important for mentors to “find tactful and appropriate ways to give your mentee the inside scoop about the critical history and hidden politics of the organization.” They cite the concept of the gouge from the Navy and the Naval Academy, where upper class midshipmen pass along knowledge and advice to younger plebes on how to succeed—and how to stay out of trouble. This is often hard-won knowledge about life at the Academy that mentees might never learn or, at the very least, might not learn without a lot of headaches. Their book focuses on men mentoring women in majority-male organizations, where mentors must make sure mentees get access to the key knowledge at all.
Paul did not look at me and see someone who was not capable, or someone that needed to be built from the ground up. Paul looked at me as someone who was capable, but who was getting in his own way because I did not understand a fundamental thing that more experienced practitioners knew. And so he found a clear, effective way to convey what he had learned through many years of experience, inviting me into the hidden, backstage area of experts.
Caccia, P. F. (1996). USING SEMANTIC COACHING TO IMPROVE TEACHER PERFORMANCE. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 53(3), 333–347. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42577748
Bereiter, C., Scardamalia, M., (1993). Surpassing ourselves: An inquiry into the nature and implications of expertise. Chicago, IL: Open Court
Takanishi, R. (1981). Early Childhood Education and Research: The Changing Relationship. Theory Into Practice, 20(2), 86–92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1476295
Johnson, W.B. & Smith, D. G. (2016). Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press.