Ongoing Training in Cognitive Coaching for Teachers and Administrators

To enhance its mentoring program, encourage sharing and peer collaboration, promote communication, develop more effective communication skills and, generally, foment a strong sense of community throughout the school, ASF is continuing in its effort to provide ongoing training in Cognitive Coaching for teachers and administrators.

What is Cognitive Coaching?

Cognitive Coaching is a supervisory/peer coaching model that capitalizes upon and enhances the cognitive processes.  Art Costa and Bob Garmston, the founders of Cognitive Coaching, define it as a set of strategies, a way of thinking and a way of working that invites self and others to shape and reshape their thinking and problem solving capacities.  In other words, Cognitive Coaching enables people to modify their capacity to modify themselves.  The metaphor of a stagecoach is one used to understand what a coach does— convey a value person from where she or he is to where he or she wants to be.

It is based on the following four major assumptions:

    1.  Thought and perception produce all behavior.

    2.  Teaching is constant decision-making.

    3.  To learn something new requires engagement and alteration in thought.

    4.  Humans continue to grow cognitively.

At the heart of Cognitive Coaching is the concept that each of us has the resources that enable us to grow and change from within. Costa and Garmston call these resources “States of Mind.”  It is the States of Mind that the coach mediates, using the person to use her/his inner resources more effectively. There are five States of Mind: consciousness, efficacy, flexibility, craftsmanship and interdependence.

ASF has embarked on a campaign to train faculty and administrators in Cognitive Coaching to enhance the mentoring program, encourage sharing and peer collaboration, promote communication, develop more effective communication skills and, generally, foment a stronger sense of community throughout the school.  Training in Cognitive Coaching began during the past academic year and will continue during the 2003-2004 school year.  Three, two-day sessions are being offered during November and December.