Answering the Questioning of Coaching...

Last week, Adam Boxer posted an excellent blog which he called ‘Questioning Coaching’. It’s important for me to note from the outset of this response that Adam wasn’t saying that schools shouldn’t use Instructional coaching. In fact, he said: ‘Enthusiasm for Instructional Coaching is, in my opinion, well-grounded and completely reasonable’. He advised readers that there is also good reason for leaders to be ‘hesitant’ before diving into implementing coaching. Hesitation, pausing one’s enthusiasm, allows time to conduct a pre-mortem. Think of all the potential barriers to the success or value of the change you are thinking of making. It’s sound advice. Adam then set out 8 reasons why schools should be hesitant before jumping in. I thought it may be helpful to set out responses to each of these 8 points, not by way of opposition to what Adam has said, but rather in acknowledgment that getting Instructional coaching to work well is hard. Where Adam has set out some of the barriers, I’ll try to explain how I have worked to overcome them in the work I have done in this area. I have paired some of Adam’s challenges together because I think they are cases of two birds with one stone in terms of solutions.

There’s also a bonus barrier that the excellent Adam Robbins offered on Sarah Cottinghatt and I’s Coaching cuts Substack. I’ll try to answer that one too.

So, here goes…

Challenge 1: It is psychologically fraught

Challenge 6: Which teachers become coaches?

Adam sets out what is, in my opinion, the most important of his challenges first. It is really hard for staff to believe that coaching is about all staff getting better all of the time regardless of starting point when there are a group of appointed ‘coaches’ and essentially, a group of ‘not coaches’ (the rest of the staff). One ways around this is for everyone in the school to be a coach for a colleague and at the same time to be coached by another colleague. This is incredibly hard to co-ordinate and can end up with some people who simply don’t want to be coaches, having to do so in the name of ‘everyone’s a coach’. I think one possible answer to this first challenge actually arises from this reality that not everyone wants to coach a colleague.

When schools decide to start using Instructional coaching, they need to think carefully about who their coaches are. Usually, they use one of the following criteria to select their coaches:

1.      SLT will be coaches

2.      Experienced or ‘expert’ teachers will be coaches

3.      Staff with timetable capacity will be coaches

The problem with number 1 is that staff can justifiably feel that SLT are targeting weaker teachers under ‘better branding’ as Adam puts it. This isn’t always the case but it can be so. The problem with number 2 is that it creates the two or three tier system that Adam talks about. The problem with number 3 is that it doesn’t really communicate any value being placed in coaching. Instead, it appears to be about ticking the box of ‘doing’ coaching while minimising the degree of commitment to it. So, is there a better way of choosing coaches?

I think there is. I think senior leadership teams need to consider what makes a really good coach, not in terms of career or job profile but personal profile. Coaches need to be ‘good eggs’ as Sufian Sadiq says. They need to care about doing a good job for their colleagues. They can’t see coaching as an opportunity to laud their expertise over another teacher. They have to have high levels of humility and see the opportunity to help their colleague develop as a privilege. Above all, they need to have belief in the ability of their colleague to improve their teaching, regardless of career stage or present circumstances. I once had a conversation with a ‘coach’ at a previous school about a teacher they were coaching and they told me ‘They’re just never going to be up to it. I’ve tried everything and they just don’t get it’. Bad coach. That teacher is now a Middle leader and an asset to the profession. So, when leaders are choosing coaches, I think they need to run a round of recruitment. A simple internal advert explaining why they want to introduce coaching, what the responsibilities of the role are and what the characteristics of a good coach are.

Of course, they need to be good teachers but I don’t agree that they need to be the best teachers and I don’t agree that you can’t coach someone who is a better teacher than you. The reason for this is because ‘better’ is context specific. I think here about a coachee of mine called Liam (he knows he is being named). If we both had to teach a group of kids that we had never met before, I think I would probably do a better job. I have more experience, I’ve invest more of my time in thinking hard about teaching due my obsession with it and I’ve got more confidence in the transferability of some of my core routines because part of my job has been teaching across different year groups and classes. However, if we both had to teach his Year 4 class tomorrow, he would undoubtedly do a better job. That’s because of all the rich contextual knowledge that he has about his class that I simply don’t have. And, happily, when I coach him, I’m coaching him on his teaching of his class, which means that he brings expertise to that relationship. I do too, of course. Sarah Cottinghatt and I wrote about this in the Coaching Walkthrus book that Matt Stone authored. When coaches and coaches work together, the coach has a wider lens of expertise in that they see more of what is happening because they don’t have to do any of the teaching. The teacher has a narrower lens because they are focused on only the most important details of the situation, but it is a much richer lens. The point of coaching isn’t for the coach to tell the teacher what to do better, it’s primarily for coach and teacher to come to a shared understanding of what is actually happening in the classroom. I think by combining the two lenses, this can be achieved.

All this doesn’t answer the challenge around how to choose which teachers have coaching. I once heard Alex Gingell say that it’s too much for teachers to be expected to have coaching constantly for the whole year, every week. I tend to agree with him. In most cases, there are so many other demands on teachers that a break from coaching to let what has been worked on during coaching embed is a really good idea. This means that teachers have coaching in cycles. Perhaps a group of 8 teachers have coaching for 6 weeks, then another group take their places. How these teachers are grouped can be dependent on context – subjects, phases, shared development aims, etc. They should never be grouped by perceived teaching ability. This would be catastrophic to the ethos of the coaching programme. With this approach, coaching becomes something that everyone has at some point. When I have done this in the past, my biggest challenge has been that teachers often want their coaching to carry on, especially less experienced teachers because they see the difference to their practice in a more pronounced way and they want more of it.

So, in response to challenge 1, I recommend:

-        Schools run open application processes for coaching positions, with competent teaching being a minimum entry requirement (allowing almost all and in some cases, all teachers to apply) and focusing on personal characteristics or the willingness to develop those personal characteristics.

-        Frame coaching as being about first developing a clearer shared reality of what is happening in the classroom between coach and teacher so they develop a genuine sense of co-construction.

-        Run coaching for teachers in blocks so that every teacher gets to have some coaching and those who want to have more of it can, if capacity allows.

Challenge 2: Nobody knows what it is

Adam raises a really interesting point that there are lots of different definitions of coaching and finds that teachers need to have a precise meaning of it. I agree that a shared understanding is vital. My push on this point would be the grain size at which this shared understanding is important. I would suggest that the mechanics and stages of a coaching conversation do not have to be the same in two different instances for them both to be effective examples of coaching.

Adam gives the example of one training provider asking him to deliver coaching whereby he focuses on a pre-organised curriculum of focus areas like ‘Questioning’ and then constructs action steps himself. Another training provider asks him to choose the area of focus himself and then choose the action step from a prescribed bank. While these approaches are different, I don’t think that is, in itself, problematic.

In another part of my life, In my role at Chiltern Learning Trust as Director of Teacher Quality, we are currently engaged in a project working with a group of teachers with an interest in the decisions they make in the classroom. We have chosen to spend time listening to their thoughts and ideas and then extracting themes from what they have said. This is an Inductive approach to data collection. We start with the data and create themes from there. In other projects I have run, we started with a set of themes and a hypothesis and then collected data from the work of teachers to test this hypothesis out. This is a deductive approach to data collection. Both are valid and the key is to match the approach to the research. I think, ideally, the same applies to coaching.

The approach of starting with a prescribed curriculum is often well suited to a trainee teacher or someone with a weaker mental model of what teaching is. Taking this approach allows them, not only to develop different techniques but also to develop their understanding of the ‘shape’ of what teaching is as they go through this process. The approach whereby the coach and teacher set the focus and then choose from a prescribed set of action steps is perhaps better suited to a teacher who has a sound mental model of what teaching is but would benefit from a more concrete understanding of what this might look like. For example, a teacher may understand that part of their job is to secure student attention (Goodrich, 2024) but not be able to articulate how to do that. By naming a technique ‘Active listening routines’ (Steplab) they have something tangible to hang their awareness onto.

Of course, in Adam’s example, both of the teachers are trainees and so it is likely that one of the two approaches is more likely to be impactful than the other. I don’t disagree on this point but what I would say is that there is a high chance that both approaches are likely to be more impactful than other forms of PD for those trainee teachers. I would also say that I’m not sure there is a problem, or even inaccuracy in calling both of these approaches ‘Instructional coaching’. So long as both cases have a coach who is aware of the stages of the coaching process they are using, they are in a position to critique its effectiveness. For me, Instructional coaching is one teacher working with another to get a bit better at teaching continuously. I took this definition from Josh Goodrich. I think if coaches have an approach that satisfies this, I don’t see a problem in them calling it instructional coaching. I think there could be a problem is two people are talking about instructional coaching and assuming they are doing the same things when really they aren’t but I also think that any conversation along these lines that is useful to its participants should be getting to the crux of what is actually happening in coaching sessions, in which case, they will soon discover that they are using different approaches.

There are differences between how I coach and how my colleague Matt coaches. I use the mapping of mental models that you can read about in the upcoming book I co-authored with Sarah Cottinghatt and Haili Hughes. Matt doesn’t use this method. He is still doing Instructional coaching and is still helping teachers get better at teaching. I often create my own action steps. He usually uses action steps from Steplab’s library. Again, we’re both helping teachers get better at teaching and both approaches are correctly called Instructional coaching.

So, in response to Challenge 2, I think:

-        It doesn’t matter that much if two seemingly different approaches are both calling themselves instructional coaching.

-        Coaches need to be clear on the coaching process they are following and why it is well matched to the context of the person they are coaching.

-        Conversations about instructional coaching should usually include the approach being taken.

Challenge 3: It is expensive

This is another excellent point and important consideration. Adam makes the point about the costs of running Instructional coaching and I think what it most important about those costs is that they are up front costs. Releasing a teacher to be trained as a coach, to run a coaching observation and to deliver a coaching session are all costs that hit you right now.

Having said that, I think in the long-term, these costs are excellent investments. When leaders look at their budgets, of course they need to remain focused on avoiding in-year deficits but they also need to be strategic over a three-to-five-year period. When I was acting Head, this shift from short term financial security to sustained financial improvement was something that I was particularly proud of. I think Instructional coaching has an important role to play. Here’s why.

Instructional coaching, can, if done well (more on that later) help teachers to achieve agency. There is good evidence that this adds to job satisfaction and that this reduces attrition. Here’s what I think gets missed when schools think about the cost of implementing Instructional coaching.

The average cost of recruiting a new teacher just by advertising on TES being about £1,000. Then you have to factor in about two day’s work for the business manager in setting up the advert, responding to enquiry emails and arranging tours. Let’s ignore the cost of the Head or another senior leader actually taking candidates on tours because the length of time those tours take and the number of candidates you take at once is so variable. That business manager’s two days work is around £500. So far, it’s not looking too bad but then we factor in the shortlisting and interview days. That is often a day’s work on each for business manager and two senior leaders. This comes to about £1,700. Still not breaking the bank and comes in at a total of around £3,200.

The real costs come from who you recruit. Let’s assume that you get a teacher with 7 years of experience. They are on UPS1 in Inner London. This is £57,632.

Kraft, et al (2018) conducted a meta-analysis of over 60 studies into the effects of Instructional coaching. They presented their findings on its impact in terms of standard deviations. For those interested in this, you can find a reference to the study at the bottom of this blog. They found that a 0.49 standard deviation improvement in instructional practice is roughly equivalent to the amount of improvement a teacher typically gains over about seven years of classroom experience, based on observed rates of improvement in teacher quality.  Of course, this doesn’t mean that Instructional coaching replaces experience and for gains like this, it has to be very good instructional coaching over a sustained period. But, let’s assume that’s the case.

A teacher with 7 years of experience, usually costs £57,632. With on-costs, that’s £80,684. A second-year teacher costs about £42,234. With on-costs, that’s £52,904. If that teacher gets good Instructional coaching, the evidence from Kraft, et al, suggests that they could be as effective as the 7-year experienced teacher but… they are £27,780 cheaper.

In his blog, Adam proposes a situation in which 20 coaches are coaching 40 teachers across a school and calculates that this costs about £86,700 per year. If I add on costs to that, we get about £112,710.

But, if we subtract the difference in the cost of 5 of those 40 teachers improving their teaching by the equivalent of 7 years, that’s worth £138,900. So, a school who does not invest in Instructional coaching could potentially be paying £138,900 more that a school that does invest in it just to have 5 teachers teaching to the same quality.

Of course, there are various holes you could poke in my calculations and theory. For one, I have assumed that teachers at the beginnings of their careers are all equally effective which is of course, not the case. My point is that leaders could be put off by an annual cost of £112,710 but in reality, they need to see this, as with all PD, as an investment. What better thing to invest in than the current best-evidenced form of PD (Sims, 2018). Even if we want to make it about the financials, we can’t ignore the financial returns that Instructional coaching potentially has.

In response to challenge 3, I think leaders need to consider:

-        Teacher quality has a cost. Experience is usually correlated with quality. If we can have the same quality with less experience, that’s a financial saving.

-        Schools need to spend their money on improving teaching. They should spend on things that are sustainable. Coaching improves teachers and it provides agency which feeds job satisfaction and there impacts positively on retention.

-        When it comes to costing, we need to frame the conversation around investment. Instructional coaching remains an excellent investment.

 

Challenge 4: It relies on people being radiologists

Challenge 5: Most schools and teachers lack a shared understanding of what good looks like

I want to address these two challenges together because I think they absolutely go hand in hand.

Adam says that ‘coaches need to be a highly skilled observer of teaching’ and he’s right. The most common issue I see when coaches are not skilled observers is that they focus on personal preference related to how the teacher teaches rather than what is most effective. This is a significant challenge and one that needs to be tackled before any coaching begins in my opinion.

The way to tackle this is to spend however long it takes before coaching begins, securing a shared understanding across your staff team around how learning takes place and what great teaching is. If we fundamentally all understand principles of cognitive architecture such as the limitations of working memory and the role that forgetting plays in learning, we can start to develop practice that is aligned with these principles.

Not only does this help the coach focus their observation on something that is tightly linked to how students learn, it also means that the teacher knows the lenses through which the observation is taking place. In my last school, we spent a year setting the scene for coaching in this way. We developed a really sound and deep understanding of what our shared model of the learning process was and then of what our shared model of the purposes of teaching are. We invested time in people having this discussion, feeding into the wider group and iterating continually until we had something we were happy with. Only at the end of this first year did we start coaching and when we did, there was little to no anxiety around what coaches were looking at because everyone knew we shared a mental model of the process.

Not only does investing this time improve coach’s understanding of how to observe and help the cultural scene setting of coaching, it also really helps leaders see what kind of understanding each teacher has of the frameworks of how learning and teaching happen. This is invaluable when they come to recruit coaches and could even form part of the application process and person specification in the best cases.

The other important point to make here is that training coaches takes time as well. Furthermore, training coaches is not a case of one-and-done training. It needs to be ongoing and it needs to provide structured points of reflection and challenge. This is part of why the Steplab Certificate in Coaching Leadership is such an effective course in terms of helping teachers become good coaches. However, it isn’t the only way. Schools can also do their own ongoing coach training. Of course, there is a cost to this but it’s also an investment. When coaches improve, the teachers improve and as explained above, there is a return on that investment to be acknowledged too.  

Adam is right that coaches need to be skilful observers. I think spending time making sure they are, and that everyone in school knows how they are observing is vitally important.

In response to challenges 4 and 5, I recommend:

-        When schools decide they want to use Instructional coaching, they should lay the ground work for this by developing a shared model or framework of how learning takes place and what great teaching is.

-        When schools recruit coaches, they should openly say that they are looking for staff members who can show a particularly strong understanding of what this shared framework is.

-        If schools have coaches who have a strong understanding of the shared framework and observe through this lens, this not only leads to better coaching but to a more transparent culture around coaching.

Challenge 7: It's not for everyone

Adam points out that Instructional coaching is easier with less experienced colleagues. I think, on the whole, I would agree with this. But, I do think it can be super effective with more experienced and expert teachers too. Adam’s commentary on his own teaching is a great example of this.

Adam skilfully diagnoses an opportunity where he could have maximised a learning opportunity in his lesson. He explains why it would have been beneficial and clearly has a commitment to changing it when he is next in that situation.

The word ‘instructional’ in Instructional coaching is not an adjective. It doesn’t describe the coaching. It literally means coaching of instruction, as in teaching. I am not suggesting that Adam isn’t aware of this. He clearly is. But, lots of teachers and indeed coaches aren’t aware of it and I think it leads to some people believing that Instructional coaching needs to involve the coach directing the improvement focus or they aren’t ‘doing their part’. This is an important misconception.

All teachers are able to watch their own teaching and identify parts that they want to improve. For less experienced teachers, they often go too broad and need help to zoom in on precisely what it is. For example, a teacher I was coaching recently said they really felt they wanted to work on ‘Students understanding what they need to do at every stage of solving a problem because often the same 4 or 5 kids get stuck after I’ve modelled it’. We managed to zoom in on the fact that this was a case of needing to chunk their modelling and we developed her use of split modelling to aid this. So, in this case, we have taken the broad issue and refined it down.

Often, with expert teachers, they identify something very actionable and precise that they want to have done differently, just like Adam did in his example. The trick there for the coach is to firstly, allow the teacher the space and the role within the relationship to pick their own development point. So long as it makes plausible sense for that to be the next thing to work on, there’s no need to feel you need to take control as the coach. Then, I think the coach needs to help the expert teacher zoom out by understanding why they chose to do what they did in that moment. Experts automate so much of their decision making that it becomes almost entirely tacit. They aren’t aware of why they did what they did but there will always be a reason. Let’s look at an example.

In a lesson I observed last year, the teacher, who is, in my view, an expert, asked a question, allowed think time and then picked a student to answer without taking hands up, asking all other students to ‘track’ the child answering. All good so far, that’s top-class accountable questioning. As the student answered, the teacher walked towards them. When they did that, 12 others students stopped tracking the student answering and looked down at their books instead. The teacher then asked another student to follow up on the first students’ response. They weren’t able to.

In the coaching conversation, I asked the teacher about this particular moment and how they felt. They told me they felt ‘frustrated’ and when I asked why they told me that they had done everything ‘right’ in terms of accountable questioning by pushing all students to do the thinking, leaving the wait time, skilfully scanning the room during this period and asking all students to track the student answering the question yet still, some had clearly not paid attention to the answer. We watched the clip of the lesson back (if we didn’t have the clip available I would have explained in detail what had happened and actually re-enacted walking towards the student after naming them). The teacher immediately spotted that the attention was lost when they walked towards the student. ‘Aha! So I need to make sure I stand back next time’. He was right. He does need to make sure he did that. But couldn’t I have just told him that in an email? Yes, I could. But my job as the coach hadn’t finished at the point of telling him what he should have done instead. I had two other jobs to do:

1.      Raise awareness around why he made the decision he did

2.      Set that decision against the context of other decisions driven by the same concerns

The conversation continued like this:

Coach: ‘What drove you to walk towards that student?’

(After a fair bit of thinking and reflection)

Teacher: Because I just really want every child to feel valued. I want them to feel that their voice matters and that I’m interested. It’s their moment and I want them to know I care what they say.

Coach: Do you think they did feel valued?

Teacher: yes

Coach: So why is it a problem? Surely, mission accomplished.

Teacher: Because other students switched off.

Coach: Is that a trade-off you’re willing to make?

Teacher: No.

Coach: Do you think that’s a trade-off you make in other points of your teaching too?

(Lots of thinking)

Teacher: Yes, actually, I can get really drawn into back-and-forth conversations with just one student whereas I think I should probably be bouncing around to different students to keep everyone thinking.

In this example, I had raised the teacher’s awareness of why something they had done was potentially problematic for learning. They already knew it was problematic but by raising their awareness of why, they were able to transfer this understanding to another context. In Adam’s blog, he makes the point, correctly, that ‘It’s unlikely that a similar scenario will arise in the next lesson or any point soon’. But I think that ‘similar scenario’, especially for expert teachers is actually much broader than we realise.

Expert teachers make their decisions driven by their mental model of how learning happens but also by their own value set (I would say this is central aspect of their professional identity). So, if we are looking at transferring learning from one teaching situation to another, for an expert teacher, we need to understand ‘similarity’ to be a case of a scenario where you are driven by a similar value or learning based concern. In this case, the concern to make sure all students feel valued. Unlike less experienced teachers, where we are usually trying to hone their focus down, with expert teachers we are trying to push them to broaden their focus out before focusing it back down again. The conversation continued:

Coach: OK. So let’s think about a upcoming lesson where you are likely to be driving a while class discussion in the way you just described.

Teacher: I’m teaching RE on Thursday and it’s a lesson where we are asking the question: What is God?

Coach: Why that lesson?

Teacher: I know there will be lots of different views and actually all really personal views so I know I could easily get sucked into wanting students to feel their view is valued and so could end up letting it become a 1:1 conversation again!

Coach: OK, so how will you remind yourself to keep bouncing the questions around the room?

Teacher: I think I’ll remember to do it because this conversation has really made me realise it.

There is a difference between teachers Understanding what to do, being able to do it, deciding to do it and continually working on doing it when the coach isn’t there. In our upcoming book Coaching for Adaptive Expertise, Sarah Cottingahtt, Haili Hughes and I capture this in our adaptive expertise framework: understand, do, decide, improve.

In this example, the teacher understands and I have no doubt they can ‘do’ what we have discussed. But, in the moment, the chances of them deciding to keep the conversation moving around the room to keep all students engaged are still fairly low. That’s because their values, and in this case, the value of wanting every student to feel that they really care what they have to say is still there (and that’s a good thing) and will likely take over in the moment. So, this is how we continued the conversation:

Coach: If we were to get to the end of that lesson and you hadn’t done it, what would have been the reason for that?

Teacher: I guess my habit is currently to walk towards the students so that habit not breaking.

Coach: What makes it especially hard to change habits in a school?

Teacher: Haha… school! I mean, there’s so much going on, I guess I can’t guarantee that right before that lesson, something wouldn’t have happened that takes my attention and then I would probably then revert back to existing habit.

Coach: So, what could we do to override that and make sure you aren’t relying on your won conscious head space at that point to actually put this into practice?

Teacher: I could plan a question string and have it printed off ready to go.

Coach: How will that help?

Teacher: It will just mean I’m not having to think of questions to build on wat the previous student has said.

Coach: OK, so it’d be helpful to plan those questions?

Teacher: Yeah, it would be.

Coach: Shall we do it now?

Teacher: Sure.

Later in the conversation the teacher also had the idea of putting an X on his carpet so that he remembered to step back to that point rather than towards students when he asked the questions.

This example shows that Instructional coaching can work well for expert teachers. It can increase the likelihood that they change habits that are deeply ingrained, partly due to their success as teachers. This also goes back to my earlier point that not all Instructional coaching needs to follow exactly the same format. We didn’t pick an action step from a bank in this example. We didn’t include any ‘on your feet rehearsal’ but we did plan out questions, accepting that this circumnavigates the potential barriers to building this new habit. It can be seductive to believe that expert teachers can change practice based on what they know but I would suggest that if this was enough, they’d never need PD at all because their knowledge would be enough for them to make the best decision in every situation. This just isn’t the case.

Of course, Adam’s point about coaching needing to be really good to have the impact that the conversation above demonstrates is important to consider here. I consider myself a coaching obsessive and so thinking about coaching all the time obviously helps to develop practice. But, the reality is, if we wait for coaches to be excellent before they start coaching, they’ll never start. It is probably a good idea for coaches to start coaching less experienced colleagues first because it is easier to improve their practice. But, we have to accept that everyone needs to start somewhere and that means that teachers might get less than excellent coaching to begin with but over time, it will continue to improve with practice and continued training. This is exactly the view we take with trainee teachers and I don’t think it should be any different for coaching.

In response to Challenge 7, I recommend:

-        Coaching for experts takes place but allows the expert teacher greater control over the area they work on

-        Coaching for expert teachers aims to broaden their focus before then refining it down again.

-        Coaching for expert teachers needs to really unpack what drove the decisions they took because it is these drivers that are influencing other decisions they make

-        Coaching for experts can be more useful to them if it focuses on developing their decision making by understanding where their decision making plays out in various different actions

-        Coaching won’t be expert to begin with but if it never starts, it never will be expert at any point. Everyone has to start somewhere

Challenge 8: It often makes the proxy the measure

Adam makes the point that often, coaching happening or happening a certain amount is the measure of how successful it is. This is really common and probably because the numerical data of how many drop-ins and coaching conversations have happened is seductively appealing for showing how much work is going into the initiative.

What I would say here is that for coaching to have an impact, it obviously does need to be happening. So, I don’t have a problem with the monitoring of how much coaching is taking place. If a teacher is being coached and their coach doesn’t do that coaching, the teacher can’t improve from it. However, we must also make sure that coaching quality is monitored as well as frequency. My advice here is for coaching quality to be checked as part of coach training.

If coaches have to record their coaching once every 6 weeks and receive feedback on it from the coaching lead, this is far more impactful than only measuring whether or not coaching conversations have happened.

In response to Challenge 8, I recommend:

-        Integrating the monitoring of the quality of coaching into regular monitoring schedules

-        Ensuring that coaching does take place regularly – if it doesn’t happen, it definitely can’t be any good

A bonus challenge from Adam Robbins:

In our weekly coaching cut, Sarah Cottinghatt and I suggest that positive feedback from coaches to teachers should focus, where possible on the previous action step. Adam Robbins replied to ask what approach we recommend when you observe a teacher and they don’t use the action step you had previously worked on. To be clear, Adam was asking about situations in which it would have been inappropriate for the teacher to have used the action step in question.

The first thing to say here is that if you are coaching and the teacher feels comfortable enough to not use the action step they have been working on because they don’t think it is appropriate then you are doing a great job at making coaching psychologically safe and that is probably the hardest thing to do as a coach.  

I think, at all times, praise should be about the decision rather than the action. This is because it helps to build the teacher’s adaptive expertise. I offer the following example of how I think praise should be given in the situation Adam describes:

Coach: I noticed when you asked X question, you didn’t use show call, which was our last action step. I thought that was a really skilful and responsive decision because I know you’d have been ready and prepared to use show call there. Can you tell me why you chose not to use it?

Teacher: yes. Because I didn’t get two common answers, only one so I didn’t need to use the technique.

Coach: that’s great awareness of when the technique wouldn’t be the right one. When would you use it?

Teacher: definitely if I get two common answers from students.

Coach: and why is that the right time to use it?

….. and so on.

By praising the decision and then cueing mental simulation from the teacher to think about why it was the right decision and when they would do it again or do it differently, we send the message to the teacher that decision making is the key to great adaptive expertise.

Unsurprisingly from the title, this is exactly what we explore in Coaching for Adaptive Expertise with Sarah Cottinghatt, Haili Hughes and myself.

Instructional coaching – it’s not the silver bullet but it is a bullet

Adam Boxer’s blog of challenges related to Instructional coaching is incredibly valuable. So often, we see implementation ail because the product or the initiative is seen as the solution in itself. It never is. Only through really skilled implementation, of which a clear understanding of the challenges to be faced and the strategic approach to meeting those challenges, is a really important part, can we hope to find solutions to our school improvement problems. This is why at Chiltern Learning Trust we are really taking our time to design our approach to creating a shared framework of teaching and effective PD and Instructional coaching implementation. We are building our approaches from within rather than imposing what we see as solutions from the outside. I think this is fundamentally what sits at the heart of all good school improvement.

If you want to find out more…

If you are interested in school improvement from the perspective of a school leader, Chris Passey and I have our debut book Succeeding as a Deputy Head which you can get on the link below with the discount code: DEPUTY35.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Succeeding-Deputy-Head-Adam-Kohlbeck/dp/1801996199

If you are interested in Instructional coaching, you can follow:

@coachingunpacked on X and click the notifications bell to get notified every time Sarah Cottinghatt, Chris Passey and myself do an episode where we unpack key aspects of effective instructional coaching.

You can also subscribe to Sarah and my Substack, ‘Coaching cuts’ where we zoom in on aspects of coaching practice in weekly bite-size read on the link below:

https://cognitivecoaching.substack.com/p/coaching-cut-25-get-the-goal

If you want to read more about Instructional coaching in detail, Sarah, Haili Hughes and myself have our book Coaching for Adaptive Expertise coming out later this year so watch this space!

If you just want to talk more and find out about how you can implement instructional coaching in your school or trust, feel free to reach out on my handles below:

X: @mradamkohlbeck      @edupulse

Linkedin: @mradamkohlbeck        @edupulse