Better Conversations: Reflection Guide
Jim Knight, Jennifer Ryschon Knight, Clinton Carlson
This book will help you solidify in your mind the beliefs and habits of
and then guide you as you begin to coach yourself individually or with a team toward mastery of these Better Conversation habits.
Purchase the Book:
“Effective communication is an essential skill for a fulfilled life, and we can’t teach it to students if we don’t know how to do it ourselves.”
– Jim Knight
Start Having Better Conversations
01
Getting Started
Goal Setting
Using the Improvement Cycle
How to Use the Book
02
Better Conversations Beliefs
In this section, readers are introduced to the six foundational beliefs about communication. Readers are provided with prompts, questions, and activities to guide them as they thoughtfully decide what ideas drive the way they communicate.
03
Better Conversations Habits
Better Conversations is about helping us become aware of our ineffective communication habits so we can replace them with effective habits. This section is intended to help you coach yourself in the practice of these new habits until they become automatic.
Dramatically Change Your Communication Practice for the Better
Expand Your Learning
Explore our other resources to learn more about Instructional Coaching. We offer a variety of workshops, PDFs, informational videos and more.
This one day workshop introduces 6 beliefs and 10 habits to communicate messages clearly, promote healthy and productive relationships, and maneuver emotionally complex situations with truth.
This on demand course is a great place to begin your exploration of Better Conversations or support your learning if you’ve already taken the workshop. The course includes short lessons where Jim explains some of the key concepts from Better Conversations, to make it easy for you to explore how to have better conversations.
Think about how many times you’ve walked away from school conversations, sensing they could be more productive, but at a loss for how to improve them. Better Conversations honors our capacity for improving our schools by improving our communication. Asserting that our schools are only as good as the conversations within them, Jim Knight shows us how to adopt the habits essential to transforming the quality of our dialogues.
These appendices contain standards, rubrics, feedback forms, self-evaluation forms, administrator forms, Impact Cycle checklist, and a candidate evaluation form intended to support the learning in the book and workshop.
A one hour webinar based on the book Better Conversations.
Communication is Central to School Improvement
Better conversations stand at the heart of professional learning in schools. Instructional coaches who learn to be better at listening, questioning, building emotional connections, and fostering dialogue become more effective. Communication is the lifeblood of coaching, and the more effectively coaches communicate, the more effectively everyone learns.
Read About Other Success Factors
Our research has helped us identify seven success factors that are essential for developing and sustaining a great coaching program. Success Factor #2 is Communication. View Jim Knight’s collection of books to learn about his research and other success factors.
