Judith Sachs chooses an intriguing process to explore in this title. The focus on professional renewal seems significant because of its distinctively different connotations than ‘professional development’ or ‘professional learning’. ‘Professional renewal’ hints at a process that is more personal, less transactional (or not transactional at all). It suggests a process that changes the person as well as the professional and there is a suggestion that with that change also comes renewed energy, motivation and purpose. Perhaps most interestingly, it seems to inherently accept that teaching, as in the industry rather than the act, can lead teachers to a point where they become disconnected from the purpose of their actions. This is something that resonates with my own professional experience. Despite the regular, (but frankly, generic) insistence that being reflective is how you become a brilliant teacher, little guidance has ever been given to me about precisely how to be reflective or what the conditions to allow me to be so might look like.
These two points: how am I to be reflective? And, ‘how could the conditions for my reflection be facilitated?’ sit at the heart of an approach to teacher development called cognitive coaching. My continual reflections on the approach have led me to draw a comparison between it and teacher research in that it can be seen as a form of research into one’s professional self and the thought processes and proceeding actions that characterise our practice. In Cognitive coaching, the coach’s first job is to become aware of their own mental model of what the teacher is doing and why. To do this, they map their mental model of what they are watching; the perceived goal, the actions that are taken, the decision drivers that seem to be underpinning the actions taken and the problems, as they perceive them to be.
Then, in the coaching session, the coach asks questions and provides insight to help surface the mental model of the teacher so that they can become self-aware of it. This enables the coach and the teacher to ‘become aware of what teachers regard as important and relevant and why’, (Yeatman and Sachs, 1995, p.58). The term ‘insight’ needs defining here. My use of the term is admittedly broad and refers to the knowledge that a coach can bring to a coaching situation. This knowledge could be domain, subject or situation specific. For example, they may hold some insight about the importance of pushing students to think just hard enough about a concept that the retrieval of prior knowledge is highly effortful but attainable. This would be domain knowledge. They may also have some knowledge related to the subject such as the importance of reading aloud with appropriate tone, rhythm and intonation to communicate the tacit understanding of prosody to students. Finally, following an observation, they may use the fact that, as the coach, they were not subjected to the same complexities as the teacher in the moment of the teaching. This means that their situational awareness is likely to be wider (although not necessarily deeper) than that of the teacher. This provides another type of knowledge that they can offer the teacher.
Once the mental model of the teacher has been surfaced, it can be compared with that of the coach and the two, in partnership, analyse the relationship between each of the elements: goal, decision driver, action, effects of actions and learning problems. This brings the teacher to a position of understanding their own thought processes, by which I mean: what they did, why they did it, what brought them to choose that ‘why’ over other available ‘whys’ and what the effects of those decisions were. We know that this is useful because as Gary Klein, (1991) reminds us, in complex situations, humans do not evaluate options and make choices as a result of consciously rejecting alternatives.
Much of the decision making we do in a classroom is automated and reliant on our experience and the cues we pick up from our environment. There is something incredibly hard wired and habitual about that. Habits are good. Without them, at best, we would be mentally drained and at worst, probably sectioned. However, habits can also lead us to do the same thing over and over even though when we ask ourselves why we chose to take those actions, we can’t always see a clear reason. I think here of the years I spent signaling to my class that I wanted them to be quiet by announcing, ‘Yeaaaaar 6! I’m sorry. I don’t know why I am having to stop you’. It feels like an eye (or ear) sore now when I read it back or imagine it happening but at the time, it didn’t feel much better but I did just get to the point where I accepted that it was a habit and ‘we all have them’. But helplessly continuing with habits like this, day after day becomes draining and that quickly builds to professional exhaustion. This is perhaps the situation that Judith Sachs was writing about in her title. We feel we could do with professionally renewing.
Habits are not just the actions. Although these are the observable manifestations of them, habits are, for the most part, thought processes. I pick up on a cue, I connect that cue with the associated actions I usually take, I (hopefully) filter through the lens of any contextual variance (for example, that particular student is likely to explode if I use my usual routine here), and then I act. The action is a small part of the habit even though it is the part that causes the effects on the students. This is why I never argue that coaching for decision making is akin to replacing actions with thought processes in the order of importance. Instead, the argument is that the actions are logical products of the thought processes. Therefore, it is not a case of thought processes being more important than actions, it is that the best way to sustainably change the actions so that they don’t have to be consciously performed every time, is to change the thought processes that lead to them.
Armed with an understanding of my theoretical viewpoint, I now return to those two questions:
How am I to be reflective?
How could the conditions for my reflection be facilitated?
To answer both of these questions, I position teacher development as the product of the process of teacher research. However, I am suggesting that cognitive coaching is a form of teacher research in that it is a close examination of one’s own thought processes, cues, decision drivers and goals and the interaction between each of those elements. In effect, it is research of one’s professional self.
How am I to be reflective?
Hubermann, (1996), felt that understanding events when one is a participant in them is excruciatingly difficult, if not impossible, thus negating the possibility of the teacher operating as a researcher in their own classroom. On first glance, this seems damning for my argument for reflective practice being the route to Sachs’s professional renewal but in fact, I applaud the boldness of the statement. My belief is that the experience of being told to ‘be reflective’ resonates with a lot of teachers and that the feelings of frustration that I felt when faced with that instruction based on the fact that it was all I could do to manage each situation without also being expected to step ‘out of myself’ and analyse the effects of the actions I was taking either during or after the event. Certainly, at the start of my career, my lessons were not exchanges that I could think back on with clarity and unpack, they were experiences that I survived and negotiated in the same way that I imagine I would negotiate running a gauntlet; heavily reliant on my instincts. The difficulty of ‘being reflective’ means that we would benefit from another person taking some of the considerable cognitive load of the process away from us. This is where I believe a coach can come in. We don’t need to remember every detail of a lesson and what followed what, if we have another person in there doing that part of the ‘reflection’ work for us.
Cochran-Smith and Lytle, (1998) argue that teacher research has the potential to act as a considerable source of teacher professional renewal and development because learning stands at its centre. This is a sentence that most people would agree with in an ideological sense but what exactly is it that we want teachers to ‘learn’ and how can cognitive coaching support that? My position is that we want teachers to learn how to make better decisions in the classroom because it is these decisions that lead to the actions that have the affect on the students. Much like trying to improve a backhand on the tennis court by playing lots of tennis matches, coaching on actions alone might feel logical but we are neglecting the process in favour of practicing the outcome. Return to the part of the cognitive coaching model where the coach is surfacing the mental model of the teacher. The aim of this is to help the teacher to learn what the current reality is and why it is that way. By helping them learn this by asking them about their goals, decision drivers and actions as well as the effects of those actions, coaches can ensure that the process of learning is reflective.
Little and Cochran-Smith, (1994) said that school-based teacher inquiry could be seen as a way for teacher to know their own knowledge. In the context of cognitive coaching, this is central to how the approach aims to drive teacher development. A decision driver is a concern that a teacher has, something they have noticed as important or something that they want, that acts as the cue for a particular action. It is the reason they act in the way that they do in service of their goal. By connecting teachers to their decision drivers and making them aware of them, we can help them to consider how well aligned they were with their goal. If there is misalignment and they are happy that their goal was powerful, it becomes obvious that the decision driver needs to be reconsidered and to consider a different decision driver requires the application of situational knowledge.
Carter and Halsall, (1998), identified teacher inquiry as including ‘the support of a critical friend’ and ‘clarifying aspects of that activity’. Both of these criteria also ring true for cognitive coaching. Furthermore, they wrote that teachers ‘come to know the epistemological bases of their practice’, essentially meaning that they come to understand what knowledge, both theoretical and situational, they are drawing on to make their decisions. This means that teachers can become aware of that which would otherwise have remained frustratingly out of reach – their habits of thought, which are the reasons and explanations for their habits of action.
Sachs, (1999), writes about a successful teacher research project she was involved in and makes the point that ‘it is collaborative in its application because the teacher-researcher has not been working alone in this kind of work’. This reinforces the point that if we believe that reflection is important for professional renewal then we have to ensure that the central role of those working closely with teachers is to facilitate this reflection through collaboration. My position is that the term ‘collaboration’ is too stretchy to not require clear context specific parameters and in the context of teacher development, collaboration can be understood as coaching, and if we want it to prompt reflection, cognitive coaching.
How could the conditions for my reflection be facilitated?
Being reflective is about being supported to examine your own mental model of a situation and comparing it with a colleague’s / coach’s. This doesn’t take us far enough though because it doesn’t take us to the point of change and it is through change that we genuinely believe will improve our sense of purpose that we achieve professional renewal. Sachs, (1999) also points out that when teaching colleagues work together, ‘each providing different kinds of expertise and insight to the research project’. In the context of the coaching relationship, there is sense of equal value to this that in fundamental to creating the conditions for true reflection. Considering the effects of your own actions and the validity of the decisions drivers that informed them is a vulnerable task and so it is vital that teachers feel that their perspective is as expert as that of the coach, but in a different way. As we have already explained, the coach has a level of awareness that is wide because of the fact they are not having to deal with the complexities of teaching the lesson. However, the teacher’s awareness is deep. They know all of the students in intricate detail, they know how they are likely to respond, they are able to pick up on cues that would not even register for a visitor. They know what has been taught last and what is to be taught next. Overall, they have a kind of situational context that the coach could not hope to have. Being explicit about this as the coach is one way that you can create the conditions for reflection because by genuinely valuing the teacher’s unique perspective, you can provide a net of safety around the vulnerability they inevitably need to embrace.
Another key condition for reflection is comparison. Soltis, (1994), writing about teacher inquiry projects, said that they allow teachers to develop ‘multiple conceptual frameworks for exploring and reflecting on what happens in class’. This reference to comparison is key. Reflecting on one’s own practice without an alternative model of practice is challenging. Reflecting on one’s thought processes without an alternative process model is more challenging. Therefore, the stage of the cognitive coaching process whereby the coach provides their mental model to the teacher is vital for crating the reflective condition. At this point, the coach and teacher do not have their only their own mental models any more, they also have the other’s mental model as well. With human being analysis machines, the critical comparison of both models in light of the other begins immediately. Because there is an alternative, presented as just that, alternative, rather than superior, it ceases to be a case of defending one’s own existing model and considering which aspects of each seem to be the most plausible and reliable. This de-personalises the mental model analysis. It is not just a case of the coach critiquing the teacher’s model, both parties are critiquing both models in light of the other. To return to my assumption that cognitive coaching is akin to teacher inquiry or research, this part of the process is, I believe accurately describable as inquiry.
I do not mean to play down the importance of the coach’s mental model and indeed, the expertise that they bring to the coaching relationship. They offer a situational theory that is highly valid given the wider lens of awareness that they have in comparison to the teacher. As Schratz and Walker, (1995, p.107) say, ‘only theory can give us access to unexpected questions and ways of changing situations from within’. However, for a coach to choose not to present their own mental model for critique, and instead, coach directly onto the mental model of the teacher, is to expect the teacher to accept the theories of the coach unquestioned. While this is an acceptance of the expertise that coach brings, it ‘denies the validity of one’s own experience-based craft knowledge’ (Elliott, (1991).
Concluding thoughts
Judith Sachs suggested that teachers need professional renewal and although her paper is now more than 25 years old, the call to action from her paper and her title feels as relevant now as it must have done then. The fact that 25 years on, we are now renewing that call, says a lot about the inherently challenging nature of the endeavor. Professional renewal requires reflection and it requires change, but reflection on what and change of what? Genuine reflection on practice needs to focus on decision making and thought processes because these are the turning cogs that produce the output that is the action. By reflecting on the action, divorced from the decision-making process, we are fighting a losing battle because eventually, patterns of thought will beat down our weary conscious minds and we will revert back to engrained habits, probably more frustrated than before due to feeling like a ‘better way’ is somehow out of reach. Cognitive coaching presents the decision making to the decision maker. It invites them to critique it, to add their insight to it and to compare it to alternatives. More than that though, it enables the teacher to know their professional selves. It allows them to connect with their goals and decision drivers and to see their actions as products of these and in so doing, allows them to see that the route to changing actions is to change processes.
Actions have an impact on students in a direct sense and so they are totally worthy of our time in terms of considering the best action and in ensuring that we understand how to execute it well and flexibly. Returning though to the challenge of change, doing an action better is of little use if the thought processes never cue the teacher to take that action in the right moment. Gary Klein’s point is worth returning to here. People operating in complex environments are not making decisions as a choice against alternatives, they are allowing experience and beliefs to cue actions. Cognitive coaching helps teachers achieve agency. They have the knowledge and the conditions to be agentic and with that, the license to examine their thought processes critically and allow new thought processes to build. In time this leads to a change in decision making and so the teacher has renewed understanding of self, renewed understanding of situation, renewed energy to make decisions for themselves and renewed responsibility and knowledge of how to spot the effects of their actions. The contrast with the technocratic view that many teachers currently have of their role, (Muller and Cook, 2024) is stark. Cognitive coaching is not just about better teaching, it is about sustainably better mindsets for teachers that are both the product of and catalyst for professional renewal.
Comments