Flowers are blooming, temperatures are rising, and school calendars are ticking toward closure. Although this means many things for schools, it also means one significantly noneducational thing in particular: it’s wedding season. My husband and I were in our prime “wedding season” time almost a decade ago, but still, each summer, we look forward to celebrating the nuptials of friends and family members. The ceremonies are lovely, of course, but we particularly look forward to cutting loose at the receptions. After the buffets are clear and the speeches are concluded, I know there’s one thing I can count on: our signature moves. Drink in hand, I can count on my husband to do some finger snapping and hip swiveling. Every. Single. Time. My signature move, on the other hand, is to make a dash back to the table as soon as the cake plates are set out. Nobody gets between this girl and a slice of chocolate.
So, because I’ve always thought about signature moves in the context of our predictable wedding moves—or less frequently, in the context of athletics—I was taken a little off guard one afternoon when the concept of a signature move came up in a meeting with my coaching colleagues.
Evaluations, year-end reports, and program feedback were on our brains. With all of our data in our minds, we had each been reflecting, hard, on our goals for professional improvement. Our director, Hazel, asked us to start by considering our signature moves.
When people see us coming down the hall, what might they think of right away? Lucille said people see her as a reader; whenever they see her, they know Lucille is good for a book recommendation or three. Karla’s self-identified signature move is that she’s the “why” person; whenever she’s in a conversation with someone, they expect that at some point, Karla will ask a probing question around rationale.
I thought as long and hard as the conversation would allow. What was my signature move? What would people say they expect from me?
It was easier to think about in my personal life. Just that morning, I had made a last-minute grocery run, and, as the clerk scanned my Tylenol, I found myself caught up in an extended conversation with her about her child care woes. I’ve realized that I frequently find myself in remarkably candid conversations, often with strangers (a bizarre realization for this introvert). “People tell me things,” I’ve told my husband, incredulously, on more than one occasion.
In that moment, I decided that that was probably my professional signature move: if people see me walking down the hall, they expect that I will ask how they’re doing, listen attentively, and react with empathy. It’s served me well in building relationships and gaining trust. I was proud of those successes.
But then, Hazel asked us to think about the flip side of our signature moves.
Oh, Hazel. What possibly could be a flip side of being approachable and empathetic? But I also knew that Hazel was a very purposeful questioner. She let the question hang, and it nagged at me for days.
With Hazel’s question in the back of my mind, I revisited my coaching log and notebooks. I realized in reflection that my heavy focus on empathy meant that I might be focusing too much on the teachers and not as much on the students. Diane Sweeney calls this relationship-driven coaching, as opposed to student-centered coaching.
For example, a teacher would tell me that her students are really struggling to stay on task; my first reaction might be to empathize with the teacher’s frustration, and then I would move deeper into analysis. Although the empathy has value, I wondered what the effect on student learning would be if my signature move shifted to this: “When I’m with Gretchen, I expect that she’ll say, ‘Let’s watch’ or ‘Let’s listen.’” This move still communicates empathy and safety; let’s is a key word that communicates shared learning, and the focus on students takes the heat off the teacher. The student focus accelerates the pace of change and also builds teachers’ observations of responsiveness to their learners. I continue to reflect on my effectiveness with this question as my lens.
