Assuring Great Coaching [1]
As a Science teacher, I always put that first and forefront of my weekly priority list. PSHE of which I was less interested always came after, and honestly, was normally last-minute as the students entered the room. This is the nature of how teachers must negotiate their workdays. What is most important today? And the rest follows if we can.
Now as a leader of science, the same sort of process happens, but the priority, is ensuring the whole team of teachers put the teaching of science first. Ask me to coach people and I will, because of course, it matters. But in the busy and dark depths of mid-term, it will not be my priority and there were times here too I rocked up without a plan.
We know from growing evidence that Instructional Coaching is a model for Professional Learning which can quickly and profoundly transform teaching and therefore learning for students. But only if it is done well.
As an instructional coach (no longer a teacher), I can prioritise that above all else. It is my belief that employing professionals to be instructional coaches is the sustainable and truly impactful way forward. Yet with strained budgets, if you haven’t got a teaching timetable, you’re first out- understandable but in my opinion based on a flawed understanding of the full gamut of what an instructional coach brings to the party. I digress.
Let’s focus instead here on a programme model which uses leaders in a school to be the instructional coaches for others. I would argue it is still a far better model than the historic CPD – ‘Spray It’ model for teacher development.
Rolling out the programme
So, you’ve made your decisions about which type of instructional coaching model to employ, you’ve decided on who will coach whom over what period; you’ve unpacked what great teaching looks like in your school and repacked it so that everyone knows how to align their teaching with the school’s priorities and has access to an Instructional Playbook for getting ever better themselves.
You’ve sent your coaches for training, and you’ve topped it up with interval training yourselves. You’ve ensured people have time to meet and that the systems are as fool proof and easy to use as possible. You present the programme to everyone in the school and off we go!
I’d like to warn you at the outset that it will not be quite how you imagine it to look. Like all the best things it will take time for your programme to be effective and for your coaches to be confident and effective too. Far more time than you would expect. It will take endless persistence, and surprising emotional restraint from you; it will require endless positive, focussed questioning and problem-solving; it will take an iron hand in a velvet glove: “This programme is the priority. How can we make it work effectively for coach, teacher, and students?”
It isn’t that your people are not committed, but that their priority today and this week is not necessarily the same as the school’s- unless there is a true partnership that weaves it all together. This is hard and will take much re-working.
First Next Steps
From the evidence, I am going to make some assumptions:
· that if the quality of coaching is good, it will impact positively on teaching, and
· the more quickly that coaches become confident and effective, the quicker the improvements to student outcomes and experiences.
Now according to Jim Knight, “billions of dollars has been spent studying what effective instruction looks like”, yet though there is plenty of research on instructional coaching, there are few coaching rubrics available to structure conversations about ‘what makes a great coach’. Hence, though there is research methodology embedded in various theses, how to evidence the quality of coaching in a school is less obvious.
Implementing Knight’s model, Seven Success Factors, I have started a rubric I am using with a school in Bolton. They are using a Six Steps model of coaching. My structure is around the stages followed by instructional coaches. My experience suggests that the first step is in developing the ‘Planning for feedback’ to a proficient level, then ‘Observing’ to a proficient level, then ‘Implementing Feedback’ to a proficient level; then cycling back to develop and embed this, all in the first year. ‘Contracting’ and ‘Coaching Behaviours’ come later. Because of this my first draft of the rubric I am sharing today is the ‘Planning’ element.
And this is when I notice my first typo! Draft and draft again.
If it’s useful, please trial it and share your thoughts with me. I’ll be doing my own work in schools with it too.
Knight, J, retrieved September 15 2022, https://youtu.be/6vXqqz2sqXE