Blended Coaching: Supporting the Development and Supervision of School Leaders

Harness the power of coaching to support professional educators.

How can we construct professional development and supervision models that best serve the needs of adult learners? Building on the groundbreaking model outlined in the bestselling first edition of Blended Coaching, authors Bloom and Wilson outline a powerful set of strategies that can serve as a foundation for effective supervision.

With a significant new focus on coaching leaders through issues of equity, this revised second edition provides a fresh approach to the professional development and supervision of education professionals, including:

• Explicit basic coaching strategies
• Elaboration of the Blended Coaching model, which addresses issues of professional practice, and social and emotional dispositions and skills
• An overview of coaching-based systems, pipelines, and tools for the development of school leaders
• Alignment to current professional standards for educational leaders
• Professional development resources for the development and implementation of Blended Coaching and Coaching-Based Supervision

Exploding the myth that supervisors can’t coach, this book provides the foundation of effective professional supervision by presenting a range of approaches that can be applied to the individual learning needs of education leaders.

Gary Bloom is the lead author of Blended Coaching: Supporting the Development and Supervision of School Leaders. Gary has 40 years of K–12 education experience, having served as a bilingual teacher, principal, director of curriculum, and assistant superintendent. He served as the superintendent of the Aromas-San Juan Unified School District, known for its innovative programs, such as graduation exhibitions, a teacher-led high school, and teacher peer review. More recently he served as superintendent of Santa Cruz City Schools. He was a founder and Associate Director of the New Teacher Center at the University of California Santa Cruz. Gary is a Kellogg National Fellow, was adjunct faculty to San Jose State University’s Educational Administration graduate program, and has consulted, trained, and presented on a variety of topics throughout the United States and in Latin America. He is the primary author of a number of professional development programs for leadership coaches and school principals. He has published articles in a variety of journals, most recently on the topics of teacher leadership, principal development, professional learning communities, new teacher support, and the appropriate use of technology. He authored, with his friend Marty Krovetz, the book Powerful Partnerships, a guide for the development of assistant principals in collaboration with their supervising principals available from Corwin Press. Gary currently consults with school districts around the United States, provides executive coaching to superintendents and principal supervisors, does volunteer work in California and Central America.

Jacquelyn Wilson has been an educator for 48 years. She has 30 years of experience in PK-12 education including teaching, literacy specialist, assistant principal and principal for the Indian River School District in Delaware. She was named Delaware’s National Distinguished Elementary School Principal (NAESP 2002) and a USDOE National Blue Ribbon School Principal (2001). She served as the Director of Professional Accountability at the Delaware Department of Education, responsible for licensure and certification, quality of preparation programs for teachers and school leaders, professional development and school leadership.  After retiring from the public school system, Jackie served as Program Coordinator for Southern Delaware at Wilmington  University for several years. Dr. Wilson is currently an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of Education where she teaches and advises graduate students in the EDD and MED programs. She has served as the Director of the Delaware Academy for School Leadership (DASL), a professional development, research and policy center in the College of Education and Human Development at the University from 2010-2022. In 2015-2017 she led the merger of three professional development centers and designed a comprehensive model of professional development that includes content and leadership coaching and professional learning for teachers and principals. In her role at DASL,  Dr. Wilson led a team of leadership specialists providing professional development and coaching support to education leaders in Delaware and school districts across the United States.  Notable accomplishments include the development and funding of the Delaware’s Governor’s Institute for School Leadership;  the design and approval of an alternative route state approved principal preparation program; serving as the lead consultant to NASSP for their School Leaders Academy focused on using design thinking for school improvement; and creating a principal pipeline model for school leaders that includes ASPIRE for teacher leaders, STEP-UP for Assistant Principals, and Design Thinking for Advanced Principals., Dr. Wilson is the Executive Director of the National Policy Board for Educational Leadership. NPBEA is a national alliance of major membership organizations committed to the advancement of school and school-system leadership. Member organizations represent the educational administration profession and collaborate to improve the preparation and practice of educational leaders at all levels. She co-chaired the national standards redesign committee that developed the Professional Standards for School Leadership and has been engaged nationally in the redesign of principal preparation programs aligned to the PSEL/NELP standards.