Transcending the Classroom | Coaching Services

Coaching Services

At its core, coaching is about helping clients improve their lives. It can be especially impactful during times of transition or pronounced stress, when looking for clarity or to establish more effective professional or personal skills, or while undertaking a significant project.

When work or school identities and obligations overshadow the needs of your physical and mental wellness, household, relationships, and spirit, it's easy to feel one-dimensional. But you are so much more dynamic than that! You are complex and whole, and have personal and professional lives that impact one another. With Transcending the Classroom you can incorporate the totality of life’s adventures into a concept of “success” that’s unique to you, leading to creation of a deeply resonant and authentic life.

The foundational practice used is known as Life Coaching, and various Transcending the Classroom subspecialties concentrate on particular client needs:

Career Coaching: for preK-12 teachers and academics wishing to focus on professional life issues and/or a career change, and others on the job market.
Academic Coaching: for prospective and current students in the process of choosing, applying for, or navigating degree programs.
Writing Coaching: for authors working on scholarship or other text-based professional materials, and/or to establish or enhance writing practices.
Instructional Coaching: for educators at all levels seeking to invigorate their teaching and improve student learning.

The coaching relationship provides opportunities to learn and practice new personal and professional skills, increasingly empowering you to:

effectively attend to work/life balance
connect with and nourish sources of joy
reignite your professional passions
advance your teaching or writing practice
prioritize a sense of purpose
cultivate contentment that pervades all areas of life and endures over time.

Structured growth is accomplished through:

honest questioning and reflection
macro and micro goal setting
making space for your one-of-a-kind journeying
identifying and moving through areas of discomfort
sharing of expertise individualized to your specific conditions and needs
accountability
unwavering encouragement.

Coaching services include:

Regular 50-minute 1:1 Zoom sessions (multiple frequency options available)
Ongoing support and check-ins between sessions via email and/or text
Individually designed tasks to inform the coaching process, and to move clients toward goals in specific, targeted ways

Because coaching is so personalized, duration of client-coach relationships vary. Depending on your needs and goals (which may change over time), you may find working with a coach anywhere from a few months to more than a year beneficial. Some also find a return to coaching useful after a period of time away, or a change of circumstances. My goal is always to help clients move through whatever situation brought them to coaching, and facilitate their readiness to independently manage similar situations in the future.

Below you can explore which coaching services might best suit your needs. Services are always customized in response to your unique circumstances and objectives.

Services designed for

Recent years have seen a mass exodus of teachers from classrooms, and those who remain have to manage daily challenges like overcrowded schedules, growing class sizes, and shortages of support staff and subs. The social, political, and economic circumstances of educational institutions and organizations are increasingly complex and demanding, with health and safety issues, bureaucratic teacher evaluation processes, and public scrutiny of content and materials further compounding pressures. Early career teachers struggle to get their bearings without the mentorship or guidance of a cooperating teacher or university supervisor, and experienced teachers grapple with new challenges and norms of post-pandemic schooling. Instructional effectiveness can suffer under these conditions. It's also easy to lose track of your own needs, especially because caring for others at the expense of self care is often normalized for teachers. Coaching will be valuable if:

you are new to the teaching profession and uncertain whether (or how) you'll stay,
you are a long-tenured teacher struggling to stay motivated,
you have left teaching for a job in another field and are having difficulty making sense of your professional identity, holding onto your confidence, or knowing how to apply or frame your skills in a new context,
you have difficulty managing the many responsibilities of teaching with other aspects of your life,
your instructional practice would benefit from collaborative examination and expert suggestions about how to level up approaches suited to your classroom context, and/or
having a pedagogically experienced thought partner would help disrupt problematic patterns and refresh your capabilities as an inspiring and connected facilitator of student learning.

Finding your footing as a skilled instructor in addition to content area expert, establishing yourself in a new position, faculty reviews, tenure dossier preparation, deadlines and committee obligations, interpersonal tensions, handling student issues, the specter of underemployment or needing to relocate—the pressures of academia are numerous. Your largely independent work schedule can also be isolating, and asking for assistance or advice often feels uncomfortably vulnerable. Systems of support are not embedded, leaving even the "best and brightest" with self-doubts and the need for an impartial sounding board. Having a knowledgeable, non-judgmental coach to help navigate the exciting but arduous terrain of higher education can be invaluable in:

dispelling imposter syndrome,
achieving and maintaining peace of mind,
balancing professional responsibilities with other aspects of your life,
increasing focus and productivity,
approaching interactions with students and colleagues with a consistent temperament,
considering new organizational or administrative practices,
implementing innovative, evidence-based pedagogical approaches in response to collaborative examination of your current instructional methods,
enhancing your capabilities as an inspiring and connected facilitator of student learning and discovery, and/or
making sense of your professional identity, holding onto your confidence, and knowing how to apply or frame your skills in a new context if you have exited academia for a job in another field.

Figuring out your career options and how to navigate the early stages of a professional path are tricky, confusing, and consequential endeavors. There's so much to manage:

choosing a degree program and educational institution that suit you,
learning and practicing how to independently structure your time,
sustaining motivation to complete your educational program, and
considering long-term ramifications of how you handle any difficulties and choices encountered along the way.

Work with an experienced coach who knows how to provide various forms of student support, understands the landscape of college, graduate school, and early career employment across fields and areas of interest, and can help you understand roles that make sense for you in those contexts. Whether a currently-enrolled student, prospective student, or recent graduate:

receive personalized academic advisement on your program of study,
get assistance with applications,
identify your dreams and discover possibilities available to you,
gain clarity on—and confidence in—your qualifications, skills, and professional readiness,
engage in post-graduation planning, and
make informed determinations to identify a specific, meaningful direction forward for you.

The "publish or perish" paradigm is strenuous, with both creativity and organization required to meet demands for scholarly output. In educational positions at all levels you are also expected to regularly compose other written materials including reports, handbooks, content for websites, grant or course proposals, and documents to support job or graduate school applications and promotions on behalf of yourself and others. These endeavors are individually and collectively time-consuming, and can become overwhelming if not intentionally managed. Lack of sufficient preparation during a graduate program often makes it imperative to learn "on the job" how to engage in and sustain production of high quality, high impact publications, presentations, and other materials. Working with a coach can facilitate the process of generating, crafting, and disseminating scholarship and other projects—from brainstorming and ideation, to design and implementation, to writing and editing, to public presentation and publication. Quality and quantity are within your reach! The support of a coach can benefit burgeoning or seasoned authors through:

enhancement of your writing strategy, process, and product,
facilitation of a steady, productive publication pipeline,
identification and pursuit of inspiring lines of inquiry,
assistance meeting word count parameters for publications, or time allotments of presentations,
consideration of how to skillfully respond to peer reviewer, faculty advisor/committee, editor, or publisher comments or administrative instructions,
writing assistance when English is not the author's primary language, and/or
quieting of the hypercritical voice inside that can sabotage your work.

Are you ready for a change of institution, district, or educational level? Or interested in supplementing your current work with an additional part-time position in schools or academia? Do you need help evaluating how your dreams and values align with your skills in order to position yourself for a move into administration or transition out of the educational domain? If you're a preK-12 teacher or educator at the college/university level, working with a coach well-versed in the nuances of job search processes in educational systems can be the key to securing employment and even getting multiple, competing offers. Implement job search strategies with a coach to:

identify positions well-suited to you that meet your employment criteria
proceed knowledgeably through each step of the application process
prepare for virtual and in-person interviews that convey poise, expertise, and congeniality
present yourself confidently and consistently in written and spoken communications, and through professional documents, multimedia files, and visual materials
be prepared to wow hiring committees with teaching demonstrations, research or performance presentations, and other interactive activities unique to educational job searches
learn and practice negotiation skills so you get what you're worth
secure the position that's right for you!

Add-on services include impeccably crafted and edited application materials, multimedia file curation, review of professional websites/portfolios and social media profiles, and more.

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