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Coach recruitment and the messages we send…

Writer's picture: Adam KohlbeckAdam Kohlbeck

Instructional coaching is widely recognised as an effective method of teacher development. Sam Sims, (2018) went as far as to say that it is ‘The best-evidenced form of professional development we have’. During the proceeding six years, the approach has only increased in popularity. With the increasing interest in instructional coaching, there has also been increasing debate about exactly what it is and what it isn’t. It is absolutely true to say that there are different models of instructional coaching and that they have significant differences. For example, Bambrick-Santoyo, (2018) proposed a six-stage model of coaching that placed an important emphasis on rehearsal. By contrast, Knight (2017) did not include rehearsal in his ‘impact cycle’ model. With so any strong opinions around what coaching is and what it isn’t, you could be forgiven for thinking that once you have decided what model you want to use, it should be a case of plug and play but implementation is where the fun and the challenge really begins. 


I have personally made all of the most common implementation mistakes with Instructional coaching and have spent days thinking over how to avoid the next one with my own implementation plans. In this blog, I want to focus on one particular implementation decision that leaders have to make: how to recruit coaches. The reason this is worth our thinking time is, I believe, because of the powerful cultural messages that are sent to staff teams depending with each different approach to coach recruitment. Coaching leads need to be aware of this so that they can make sure they deliberately align with the message they want to send or so that they can pre-empt likely cultural impacts of their recruitment strategy. I will outline four different coach recruitment strategies and the cultural messages they might send before then offering my own view on what makes effective coach recruitment. I will also mention some of the more practical reasons why each recruitment strategy might have hidden challenges. These ideas draw heavily on a talk from the brilliant Ania Townsend at the Steplab Certificate in Coaching Leadership Module 2 launch day I attended earlier this month. 


Of course, these are only views and school culture is dependent on context, meaning that the cultural messages I propose may not feel that they apply in your setting. If this is the case, I would love to hear your thoughts and critique. 


Middle leaders as coaches

Some schools decide to have middle leaders as their coaches. This can feel like a logical move because it gives greater leadership responsibility to the engine room of the school and can feel like effective delegation. They are one step removed from the senior leadership team and so there isn’t quite the same worry around judgement because the role of the middle leaders is rarely to evaluate effectiveness of teaching across the school. On a practical level, middle leaders are often the most time poor people in a school and so there is a risk in only using them as your coaches that coaching might not happen or that it will be crammed into an already packed to do list and will therefore have to be shortened or compromised in terms of quality. In terms of the cultural message this approach sends, the role of middle leaders is often around monitoring and that is certainly not what Instructional coaching should be for. If teachers feel that coaching is there as an additional monitoring tool, they are highly unlikely to engage with it. Recruiting only middle leaders risks sending the cultural message that coaching is a monitoring activity that needs to ‘get done’ and this is contrary to the message that we would want to send about coaching being there to genuinely support the development of each individual teacher.  


Senior Leadership team as coaches 

Some schools choose to use only Senior leaders as their coaches. The cultural implication here can be a step up from the monitoring message of using middle leaders and can communicate that coaching is about judgement – a veiled reincarnation of formal lesson observation with RAG rated evaluation of teaching. Of course, there will be schools who use senior leaders as coaches and have it working perfectly with not a hint of judgement. These schools are nailing a developmental culture in a broader sense than just their PD programmes and should be celebrated. However, in the context of the current era of performativity we find ourselves in, senior leaders are often being asked to evaluate the quality of teaching in their school and inadvertently believe that this role could be fulfilled by evaluating each teacher in turn. Even if this is not the belief of the senior leadership team, if teachers perceive that SLT’s role is to evaluate the quality of teaching then they are likely to feel that this is what is happening every time their SLT member coach steps into their classroom. 


The other cultural message that is sent when using SLT as coaches is that coaching is for struggling teachers. SLT time is stretched and so they can’t coach everyone and it is logical therefore, to assume that their time will be spent where it can have the most impact – with those most in need of development. Pairing them up with a certain teacher could send the message that this teacher is struggling. 


Experienced teachers as coaches 

Some schools choose to use their most experienced teachers as coaches. The cultural message we risk sending with this blanket approach is that expertise comes only from experience. This can be quite a daunting message for a new teacher to receive. Furthermore, coaching is there to accelerate expertise through helping teachers to get better faster. Therefore, the idea that you can only be expert enough to be a coach once you have taught for a certain number of years could actually undermine the central message of coaching which is about accelerating development. 


There is also the question of whether a given experienced teacher wants to be a coach. They may well do and I personally believe that we should be looking for every opportunity for experienced teachers to distill and pass on experience to newer teachers. However, not everyone wants to coach other teachers and unlike middle leaders, some experienced teachers do not have leadership responsibilities that compel them to accept that they need to contribute to school improvement in this way. Asking someone to be a coach who really doesn’t want to be will only result in a coaching model in practice that is far removed from the ideal of the PD lead. 


Those with the most timetable capacity as coaches 

Some schools choose to use those who have the most timetable capacity as their coaches. The simple cultural message that this sends is that coaching is something that just needs to ‘get done’. If we want coaching to be something that people invest in, yes of course, we need to make time for it to happen (another implementation challenge) but the way to do this is unlikely to be selecting those with the most available time on paper. This approach risks saying to people that so long as coaching happens, we’re happy and this does not communicate that coaching is something that is valued in a school community. 

On a practical level, those staff with the most timetabled capacity are also those most likely to be used for cover and therefore, needing to cancel their coaching at late notice. This means that coaching is never certain to actually happen. 


Who should we be aiming to recruit as coaches? 

Having explored some of the cultural risks of blanket approaches to coach recruitment based on role and responsibility, we are left with the question of who should be recruited as coaches? The first part of this answer is that, as far as possible, coaches should want to coach other teachers. If they don’t, it is highly unlikely that they will do a good job. The implication here is to ask teachers to apply to be part of the coaching team. This sends the cultural message that coaching is about supporting the development of individuals but it also gives an opportunity for you to communicate to everyone, not just those who apply, what coaching is all about. The personal qualities your advert lists as important will send important messages about what you want coaching to feel like for teachers who are being coached. Consider these two examples and the messages they send:


Example 1

Are you comfortable with challenge? Do you like the idea of helping a colleague improve their teaching bit by bit until they become the teacher you know they can be? If so, apply below. 


Example 2

Are you someone who is passionate about teachers having the opportunity to think regularly about their practice? Are you motivated by the idea of walking with a colleague as they take their next important improvement step as a teacher? Do you believe you have insight to offer that could be of use to your colleagues? If so, apply below. 


When we unpack example 1, there may not be much there that we actually disagree with. Challenge can be a really powerful tool in coaching relationships and anyone who has coached a colleague for any length of time will know that you absolutely do develop an idea of what the teacher you are coaching could become as you get to know them, their strengths and their challenges. However, the crucial aspect here is the concept of coaching as a relationship. At the outset of the relationship, challenge is probably not what the teacher is looking for. They are finding their feet within the coaching relationship, building trust and developing an idea of how the conversations will typically go. They also probably have their own idea of how they want to develop as a teacher and this is something that coaches should go to great lengths to understand if indeed it does exist. 


So, what qualities do I think should be emphasised when you are recruiting coaches? The first one is being comfortable with vulnerability. Having someone watch you teach regularly is a vulnerable space for any teacher to enter and so it is vitally important, in my opinion that they are not alone in this vulnerability.


Coaches should hold ideas about they are seeing in lessons lightly, being understanding of the fact that they cannot know (without asking) why teachers decided to take certain actions and what it was they were aiming to achieve. This lack of certainty should come across in coaching conversations as the coach strives to co-construct a mental model of what happened and why with the teacher. Coaches shouldn’t feel that they need to know what happened and why and in fact, going into a conversation wanting to form their understanding is a powerful cultural tool. A coach who models being wrong about what they had initially thought is one who makes it safe for a teacher to assume that same position. Being wrong is only a problem when being right is the aim. I suggest that in coaching, the first aim is to understand. Coming up with the most effective way forward follows and of course, there are better or worse ways forward from any starting point but this is, in my experience, not where teachers feel the most vulnerable. Their vulnerability is most acutely felt when discussing what has already happened, what can’t be retrospectively changed. 


Alongside being comfortable with vulnerability, coaches must also have a steadfast belief in the right of all teachers to continue to get better at their craft as they move through their career and in their own responsibility to help facilitate that. A coach who sees every coaching session as a genuine opportunity to experience the joy of getting a little bit better at a certain technique is one who I would personally want coaching me. I have weekly coaching myself and have each of our coaching team coaching me on a rota. The thing that I am always most conscious of in our sessions is the extent to which the coach is able to make me feel excited about trying out the technique for real. The times when I feel this the most is when the coach really clearly believes that this technique will improve my teaching and really clearly believes in my ability to put it into practice. When the coach is excited for me to try something, I become more motivated to try it. 


The third quality I think PD leads should look for in a coach is curiosity. I believe that coaching should change decision making as well as behavior because in the hectic environment of the classroom, teachers rely on their instinctive decision making, cued by important features of the environment, rather than the conscious execution of pre-determined strategies (another reason why rehearsal is so important…) Helping someone to improve their decision making begins with understanding why they made the decision they did in the first place. There can be a temptation for coaches to either focus on the effect of the decision (the impact on students) or assume that they know the reason behind the decision the teacher took. In my experience, discussion around the effect of a decision is most powerful when we have a shared understanding of why the decision was taken. I have also personally experienced occasions where I was almost certain that I knew why the teacher had taken a particular action only to find that when I asked them, it was actually driven by something completely different. Coaches who begin conversations with curiosity and maintain it throughout, are likely to help the teacher and themselves get to a point of a shared understanding of the purpose behind the observed decisions and can use this as a starting point to improve those decisions. This, in y experience, is more likely to lead to sustained change to practice, which is the thing that has the impact on students. 


Closing thoughts

Recruiting coaches is a crucial part of the implementation of Instructional coaching and is something that has the potential to send powerful cultural messages. PD leads should consider their strategy, and the associated messages, carefully, choosing deliberately what they want to communicate to their school communities. When it comes to what makes a good coach, it is rarely a blanket case of capacity, experience or leadership responsibility. Although each of these can be hugely useful assets for a coach to draw on, as a blanket approach to coach recruitment, they neglect the central feature of coaching, the thing that makes it magic – relationships. We need to focus coach recruitment on the qualities that make for excellent professional relationships. I have proposed three – vulnerability, responsibility and curiosity. You may agree or disagree with these suggestions and if you do disagree, I would love to hear from you about the qualities you look for in a coach. What is important is an understanding that these qualities sit at the heart of the relationship between a coach and a teacher, not the role, level of experience or timetable capacity. Coaching done well is a human, collaborative relationship and PD leads should have this at the heart of their recruitment strategy. 


References

Sims, S. (2018). ‘Four reasons instructional coaching is currently the best-evidenced form of CPD’. Sam Sims Quantitative Education Research. Available at: https://samsims.education/2019/02/19/247/ (Accessed: 26 January 2025).


Bambrick-Santoyo, P. (2018) Leverage Leadership 2.0: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools. NJ: Jossey-Bass.


Knight, J. (2017) The Impact Cycle: What Instructional Coaches Should Do to Foster Powerful Improvements in Teaching. CA: Corwin.


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