This week Tulsa news outlets were covering an exciting non-innovation innovation arriving in local classrooms–
real time coaching.
See, in normal coaching, a principal watches a teacher and then it is hours, or even days, before the teacher gets the feedback. But in real time coaching, the coach directs the teacher through an earpiece, presumably because the technology to simply control her body from a distance does not yet exist.
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| One more example of real time coaching about to go badly |
This piece follows poor second-year teacher Krystal Medina who goes through this process. Perhaps that teacher should talk toAmy Berard, a Massachusetts teacher who has been dragged through this particular corner of ed reform hell, as she wrote atEdushyster.
The students were also perplexed by my new earpiece accessory. “Um, Miss, what’s that in your ear?” they asked. I looked over to the three adults in the far back corner of the room for my scripted answer. “Tell them you are like Tom Brady. Tom Brady wears an earpiece to be coached remotely and so do you,” was the response. I never would have said that, and mumbled instead: “But I’m not Tom Brady. No, I’m not Tom Brady.” The students, who could hear me, but not what I was hearing through my earpiece, were more confused than ever.
The press were there to watch Remote Control Scripting in action because they had been invited there by Tulsa Public Schools and the company TPS hired to provide this program. It’s the same company that put Berard through her paces– CT3 (The Center for Transformative Teacher Training). They are partners with all the cool kids– Success Academies, Teach for America, Aspire, and many other charter schools.
CT3 has two co-founders. Co-founder Kristyn Klei Borrero is also CEO. Borrero did at least start out with an education degree from Miami (1995). Borrero was a principal at age 27 and running turnaround charter schools in Oakland and Palo Alto, California. She was also a honcho at Aspire charters in California, the charter chain set up by Don Shalvey (Gates Foundation) and Reed “Elected School Boards Suck” Hastings (Netflix). Aspire is also in the Build Your Own Teachers business.
The other co-founder’s name is familiar to most teachers Of A Certain Age. Lee Canter made a name for himself on the professional development circuit with Assertive Discipline, an approach based on taking control of your classroom. But for CT3 Cantor has also developed the No-Nonsense Nurturer program and the Real-Time Coaching model. Both NNN and RTC are registered trademarks, because there’s no point in repackaging well-worn materials with a little twist unless you can call it proprietary information. It’s a hoot, isn’t it, that Jonas Salk never patented the polio vaccine; in fact, when asked about the patent he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Nowadays that would be considered certified crazy person talk. If you develop something people need, of course you patent it and make a mint. And if you “discover” something that is not actually new, you just tweak it a little so that you can patent it. You may not yet be able to get a patent on a pig, but put lipstick on the pig, and you’ve got yourself a proprietary product. Ka-ching.
But I digress…
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