Instructional coaching and teacher development more broadly are hotly debated topics at present and rightly so. The single biggest thing we can do to improve learning is to improve teaching (not because it isn’t already good enough but because it can always get better). Will we ever get to a definitive answer on what makes the best type of teacher coaching? We might do but what I think is as important as that final destination is the debate that sparks the thinking along the way. This week alone I have had four lengthy conversations with different people about coaching and each one has left me questioning my own assumptions and existing beliefs and that process is the part of the debate I enjoy. In a recent EduPulse podcast, we spoke to Jim Knight and I shared that something I remind myself to do a lot is to question that of which I am most certain. The coaching debate is something that always helps me to do that and this blog is intended to be a contribution to the ever-expanding thinking of the sector on this subject that I have taken so much from myself. Of course, this is just current thinking and is very much open to change and challenge.
Rehearsal is a term that means something to just about everyone, even those who aren’t currently using Instructional coaching. Its uses in the worlds of sport and the performing arts mean that when we do encounter the word in a coaching context, we have our own ideas of what to expect or, in the case of coaches, what to aim for. I think that what this can result in is a blanket application of one form of rehearsal in all contexts which inevitably means that there are times when it feels that it has been shoe-horned in. Because of this hunch, I have spent some time thinking about the different forms of rehearsal that I use in coaching sessions and the different aims I have tried to meet with each one. As with most things in teaching and learning, my ideas are inseparably tied up in my own beliefs, experiences and interpretations of what I have read and listened to. I also often find myself questioning the extent to which I show fidelity to a particular idea because for any form of practice I use, there are a great number of contextual variations that change the practice from one situation to the next. For this reason, I think to get a real understanding of why we are choosing to do whatever we are choosing to do in a coaching session, we need to start broad and strategic with our thinking – what is the broad aim of coaching?
Fundamentally, I think coaching should be as much about helping teachers to think clearly and make well-informed decisions in the moment of teaching as it is about the execution of those decisions. Here’s my first caveat – I have worked in schools (and led in them) where approaches to teaching are highly prescriptive, from content to lessons structures and everything in between and I would argue that while this probably shouldn’t be the long-term aim, it is a necessary stage of development for some schools in certain circumstances. Because I think teacher agency is so important, I also think that coaching should facilitate this and a major part of the idea of agency (for me) is thinking about your classroom decisions because you see yourself as the decision maker. In terms of the coaching process and the place rehearsal holds within it, I see it as a tool to direct the attention of the teacher rather than only a practise of execution of a strategy (although often, this is a good use of rehearsal time!) And, I think that the form the rehearsal takes should be dependent on where we want the teacher’s attention to be. In what remains here, I will try to exemplify some of the key uses and flexibilities that rehearsal has and how I use it in my coaching. I am certain to have missed some and of course, in the spirit of broadening the conversation, I’d love to hear of any other ways that people use and consider rehearsal.
The headline is that I see two broad types of rehearsal:
Rehearsing action
Rehearsing thinking
Both are extremely important and there are times when one will take greater precedence than the other. The most powerful coaching seems to be when the two are integrated.
Rehearsal to ensure teachers attend to the specific mechanics of a strategy execution
This typically involves the teacher and I settling on a particular strategy that we think will significantly improve teaching in a given moment. We will script out mini steps that build towards full execution and then I will model it while the teacher refers to our mini steps. We will then talk about the effectiveness of each mini step before the teacher has a go at rehearsing. When I use rehearsal in this way, I want to create space for the teacher to think hard about the mechanics of the strategy. To use an analogy from sports coaching here (and I am not a huge fan of many sports coaching analogies in the context of teaching), as a young, aspiring tennis player, I would practise hundreds of repetitions of each mini step in the execution of a forehand or backhand if I was trying to improve it. From the amount of bend in my knees at the point of pushing off to the ball to the sycronisation of turning my hips and taking back my racket to the precise number of shuffle steps I would take to decelerate, each mini step would be planned out and practiced, at first deliberately and slowly, if needed, and then within increasing fluidity with the other mini steps. This is similar to how I use rehearsal in this way with teachers, some of the time. If I want their attention to be on the precise mechanics of this strategy, I will use it in this way.
2. Rehearsal as an opportunity to discuss contextual cues
This usually involves the teacher and I discussing what cues we should be looking for to trigger the use of a strategy or a variation of it. For example, if we had been working on a feedback strategy that involved providing pupils with more actionable feedback during independent work, we might discuss a range of common misconceptions and then rehearse some verbal feedback scripts together. For example, ‘Have another go at question 2 and remember that when adding fractions, we have to find the lowest common multiple of the two denominators.’ We might then discuss what contextual features might change the feedback that we give. For example, if a pupil has made a mistake that appears to be a calculation error, the feedback might be less precise in terms of the action the teacher wants the pupil to take. Something like: ‘Remember to check your calculations for errors’. I find that this kind of discussion to precede rehearsal can really help to engage teachers in why they are taking a particular action over another and that self-justification can really help with confidence.
3. Discussion situational response and variation
This usually involves me narrating two situations to the teacher that are closely related but have a significant variation. This feels very similar to using interleaving with pupils. The pre-rehearsal discussion centres on the variation between the two scenarios and the influence of this on the strategy that would be best for each situation. We then run rehearsal of each situation and follow up by talking again about the contextual variance. This usually leads to further conversations about other contextual variations. This feels helpful because it provides the teacher with two reference points to refer to in the moment of teaching that they can use to select the strategy that most closely fits the demands of the moment.
4. Rehearsal to build automation
Returning to my Tennis analogy, when I would practise endless forehands and backhands in the same pattern of play over and over, I was trying to remove the need to think about shot mechanics in the moment. I think this is similar to one helpful principle of rehearsal for teachers. If we are working on a technique or strategy, getting it to the point where it has been run enough times to be virtually automatic frees up working memory space to respond to everything else that is going on in front of you in a classroom. With less need to focus on the mechanical execution of a strategy, teachers are able to attend more closely to how well a particular strategy lands with pupils, how likely it appears that pupils are paying attention or listening or where pupils’ current understanding is. If we minimise the amount of conscious execution teachers are going through, it feels as if this might be a way of optimizing cognitive load and given that teaching is one of the most cognitively demanding things you can do, this feels like it could be useful.
5. Rehearsal to make the base level of strategy execution more consistent
There is variation in an individual teacher’s best and worst execution of any given strategy. In the same way, there was wide variation in my best and worst forehand on a tennis court. I understood that I would execute to perfection in a minimal number of cases. Roger Federer once said that he produced his best tennis 3 or 4 times per year. While I think our best teaching is probably produced more often than that, there is definitely variation in the quality of execution and so one use of rehearsal, as I see it, is not to improve the standard of the best execution but actually to make the standard of the most common level of execution higher, understanding that this is unlikely to be perfect.
6. Rehearsal to zoom in and out of decision making moments
Another way I use rehearsal is to deliberately run through options at a pace that could never be allowed in a live lesson. For example, when we are rehearsing a particular part of a lesson, I might pause the teacher and ask ‘what is our aim for this next action? What options do we have? Which ones are likely to be the most effective? Why is that? What would happen if we went for a different option? This clearly slows thinking down to a speed that is not possible in a lesson but the point is that it engages the teacher with the options that they have and with their position as the decision maker. Where I have seen the greatest gains from using this idea is when I go in to watch teachers I am coaching. In the past, when we have focused on one strategy alone and rehearsed to the point of automaticity, I have sometimes seen the strategy put into practice at an inappropriate time in their lesson, simply because I had walked in to watch. When I started to use rehearsal in the way described above, essentially to rehearse thought processes rather than just actions, I stopped seeing teachers shoe-horning an agreed strategy in to show they could do it. Instead, after observations, in conversation, I started to hear teachers explain why they had chosen to use a different strategy at a particular moment of their lesson. For me, this is a big step forward because it feels that teachers are taking back the agency that I believe is so important for them to help them achieve genuine job satisfaction. Perhaps even more importantly, they are applying their contextual expertise and making well thought out decisions. I believe that if they are engaged in this approach and I can give them the knowledge to make increasingly sensible classroom decisions, this will lead to more sustained improvement to their teaching.
Coaching is deeply personal and as such, for many of the points above, you will have experiences that make you believe that what I describe is ineffective. What I would urge if that is the case is two things. Firstly, I am very much ready to question my own thinking and I’m super happy for anyone to help me do that. Secondly, the thinking is where we can all benefit, even if we don’t agree. The differences between what you believe and what I say above will make for really powerful thought and discussion and I haven’t written this blog to gain supporters of how I currently see things (although of course, that would be nice too because no one wants to be the only one holding a particular view!) I have written it to contribute to the conversation because I think that the conversation itself and the challenge that comes from it is what moves my personal understanding on.
One final point I want to make is that sometimes I don’t use rehearsal. However, where this is the case, I am intentional about it. In a recent conversation with Sam Gibbs, she gave the example of coaching an English teacher and that when you are trying to spark conversation, dialogue, challenge and interpretive thought as a teacher, you really need to have engaged in deep thinking about your material first. In these cases, a good use of coaching time might be for coach and teacher to work on formulating the teacher’s thinking and understanding about a particular theme or concept within a piece of writing. Because the subsequent discussion with pupils is likely to be highly responsive, it would be difficult to rehearse. In this case, I would describe the value of the coaching conversation as helping teachers to prepare for the likely discussion and I think this is a great example of coaching to improve thinking. Is that a form of rehearsal? It all depends on where you place the parameters of the word and so much of that is probably influenced by a combination our pre-teaching experiences of the word and our teaching experiences of it. There are other scenarios where I might not use rehearsal. For example, if we are designing a set of questions to drive pupil thought. Again, here we are running through the teacher’s thought process related to their teaching. Is that a form of rehearsal? Maybe. Maybe not. I think what is important is that it is an intentional choice that as a coach, I am making because I am clear on the thinking I want the teacher to do as a result. I am also reflective enough to consider whether or not this was achieved afterwards.
In his recent bog, the excellent Paul Cline said: Let’s say that a teacher has identified that they are presenting too much information in one go and their action step is to use animation on their slides to allow information to be revealed one bit at a time. Does this need rehearsal with feedback? Really?
I would say that there could be a place for rehearsal around how the teacher uses explanation to integrate the next part of the model with the existing whole. I suspect that Paul might agree. The crucial thing here is what we want the teacher to be thinking about. If we want the teacher to be thinking about where to chunk up their model – the optimal points to reveal the next bit of information, we probably need to discuss the teacher’s reasoning. However, if we want the teacher’s attention to be on linking the parts of the model together in a connected way, my hunch is that rehearsal would be useful.
Overall, I think if we are guided by what we want teachers to be thinking about and attending to during a coaching session, we will, at the very least, have a rationale for our use or non-use of rehearsal. While different views are inevitable, by engaging in the thinking about whether to use rehearsal, for what purpose an in which form, we are more likely to be in a position to question these decisions in light of the views of others and therefore continue learning from them as coaches.
Comments