Mindset matters – how mapping mental models can drive whole staff PD

Overview of mapping

Over the last year, Sarah Cottinghatt and I have been developing our approach to one to one instructional coaching. We have spoken frequently about the importance of coaching to improve decision making and not only action. With the brilliant Dr. Haili Hughes, we have a new book: Coaching for adaptive expertise coming out in 2026 and we are excited to share our thoughts there about decision making.

One tool that we write about in the book and that Sarah and I have run webinars on over the last year is mapping what we think is the teacher’s mental model of a teaching situation that we, as the coach, observe. We think that this can be a helpful approach to take while observing the teacher but that it can also be super powerful to help create moments of insight in the coaching session itself. Our working definition (and there are other, equally credible ones) is that a mental model is our individual internal representation of how a system or situation works. This is closely aligned with a definition from Borders, et al (2024).

In the coaching conversations I have in school, I map four aspects of the teacher’s mental model with them in the stage of the conversation where I want to probe into a potential area to work on. Together, we map the teacher’s goal, the actions they took in service of that goal, the effects of those actions and the decision drivers for those actions. By mapping these elements visually, we are able to discuss them in more detail without having to try to hold it in our heads. It is through this extended reflection that teachers often have moments of insight where they spot a mismatch between two or more of the goal, their actions and their decision drivers. Once they spot this mismatch, we have genuine agreement on where we should work to improve.

You can see some mapping in action in this post from our substack, which drops into subscribers’ inboxes every Sunday. A big shout out to Steplab whose excellent Steplab Lens tool, I used to create meaningful lesson footage to share with my coachee, Olly, in this session.

Mapping has clear benefits for one to one coaching but I also think it has the potential to be extremely powerful for developing expertise at a whole staff professional development level. First, let’s dig into the nature of expertise.

Two types of expertise

Hatano and Inagaki, (1986) proposed two types of expertise – routine and adaptive. Routine expertise is the automatic performance of a well-practiced procedure in familiar situations. As complex as the classroom environment is, it can also be described as familiar and so routine expertise holds enormous value to us as teachers and leaders. Adaptive expertise pairs this automatic performance with intricate perception of the situation that leads to the triggering of modifications or inventions of new actions to best fit the shifting nature of the situation as it becomes increasingly novel.

It is important to say here that routine expertise is not less important than adaptive expertise, (even though we often talk about adaptive expertise as being the goal). I think there are two main reasons for this:

1. You need to have something to adapt from. Quite simply, if we aren’t adapting from a routine, we are making it up on the fly and great outcomes, with that approach, are not sustainable.

2. The routine being automatic means that teachers have greater cognitive resources available to sense the often hard to spot cues that tell them that things aren’t as predicted and therefore a deviation from the usual routine is needed.

   
   

This second point is a really key one and when you see it happening, it’s an absolute joy. I was recently watching a Year 1 teacher at my school. She had rehearsed a call and response routine with the class for a book they were about to do some shared reading of. She had done this in the same way that I had seen her do it before dozens of times. As she opened her palms to signal the students’ turn in the call and response, her left hand lowered and touched a child on the shoulder, instantly drawing their wandering attention back to her. She then asked a child on the back row to offer the call and have everyone else respond to them. As she set this part of the routine up, she beckoned to another child on the other side of the group to come to her. The child was upset about something. I hadn’t even noticed. This teacher had, even though she had also noticed the child in front of her with wandering attention and had directed the next stage of the routine to a child right at the back row. When I spoke to her, she hadn’t even realised that she had done all of this because she had just been cued by tiny little clues that told her something was a little off.

How does mindset contribute to adaptive expertise?

Adaptive expertise positions the teacher as decision maker. It requires them to size up the situation, choose the right goal and take actions in service of that goal. The complexity of the classroom means that we can’t have a hard and fast routine for every situation. We need to give teachers a license to make decisions, using a shared framework, in the best interests of learning when faced with such complexity. This is where agency comes in. If agency requires both the knowledge of how to act and the conditions to act with psychological safety, schools need to get really good at fostering both. I think mapping mental models in whole staff PD can be a supercharger for this. First, lets’ dig into the importance of mindset.

Dreyfus and Dreyfus, (1986) is an often-cited paper on expertise development. The paper breaks the development of expertise down into five levels. The first of these levels is ‘Novice’. Most of the explanation about this stage focuses on the following of context agnostic rules and procedures. This can be erroneously read as saying that for novices, adaptation doesn’t matter, just follow the rules. However, writing in 2004, Stuart Dreyfus said ‘merely following rules will produce poor performance in the real world’ (p. 177) and went on to say, ‘The student needs not only the facts but also an understanding of the context in which that information makes sense.’ (p. 177). I think this is really key. If we start categorising teachers into those who are just using routines and those who are ready to adapt, we aren’t preparing those who we deem ‘unready’ for reality. Whether we think they are ready or not – they’re going to have to do some adapting! So while we might want those less experienced teachers to focus on routines and the vital work of automating them, we also need them to do so, safe in the knowledge that these routines won’t always do the trick alone. This is the importance of an adaptive mindset.

Let me clear – I am all for teachers spending time nailing routine execution of techniques. If they don’t do this, they miss the opportunity to automate those techniques way faster than they otherwise would. However, the danger is when teachers get the message that the routine is all they need. It’s dangerous for two big reasons.

1. It’s wrong. Teachers need to adapt and the more sensitive they become to the need to adapt, the greater their chance of building expertise.

2. It establishes an unrealistic expectation. Suddenly, teachers get to years 3 and 4 of their career and we start talking about how they’re ready to adapt their practice now. The belief in the universal effectiveness of their hard-earned routine is shattered and they end up feeling deflated and burned out as a result.

   
   

Why do teachers sometimes feel they can’t adapt? I think that as leaders, there is a risk that in the name of consistency we focus on seeing the same routine done in the same way in every classroom. This kind of approach might minimise poor teacher judgement but it has little to no chance of developing expert judgement. Essentially, we don’t cultivate the mindset that teachers need to be able to act agentically and adapt when the situation requires it.

How can mapping mental models in whole staff professional development help?

So we know that all teachers need to adapt and we know that the best can adapt in ways that are more closely matched to the needs of the moment because they are more sensitive to situational cues as a result of their experience and expertise. We also know that the often undefined parameters of adaptation can be a barrier for teachers. They might fear adapting in a way that leaders don’t like and being told they had taken their adaptation too far. I have lost count of the number of times teachers say that they ‘just want to do it right’. I usually ask ‘right for who?’ and they usually say: ‘the students’ but with a little digging it becomes clear that they really mean ‘the leaders’.

I don’t want to sound like our schools are full of leaders who are going round admonishing people for using cold call instead of mini white boards. I think the overwhelming majority of leaders genuinely want teachers to adapt and make decisions in he best interests of learning in the moment. I also think, in fact, I know, that the inspectional pull of visual consistency is strong and hard to resist. Recently, I was asked by someone who had come to do a quality assurance visit, ‘How do you know that teaching is having an impact if teachers aren’t all doing the same things that you know have impact?’ My reply is beyond the scope of my self-imposed word limit.

The key to adaptive expertise is having an agreed framework to adapt from. The trouble is that we usually don’t spend long enough establishing that framework or when we do, we end up sending the message that the framework is what we want to see in every lesson. Even though we know that’s not the message we want to send as leaders, the balance is so hard to strike. This is where mapping mental models can be a real help.

As part of PD cycles at my school, we do a lot of whole staff rehearsal of routines. We do this following professional learning and thinking about specific learning problems. Most recently, we have been focusing on securing and maintaining attention. The routines we have spent time rehearsing are self-interrupt and our active listening routine, centring on a 3,2,1 countdown for attention. We rehearse in pairs and give feedback in-between rehearsal rounds. To make the routines really clear, we have a shared mental model for each core routine mapped out in our teaching and learning handbook. These look like this:

The circle shows the teaching goal. The two boxes at the top show the actions to be taken and the predicted effect and the box along the bottom shows the decision driver for that action. The success criteria allow for a shared framework for giving feedback to each other.

We might do two or three rounds of rehearsal each and then the really fun part starts. We spend time thinking – not writing – independently about times when we might need to adapt this routine. Then, we each annotate our maps with those adaptations. Then, we share those adaptations with a partner and critique their adaptations and allow them to critique ours. Then, we discuss the adaptations people have written down as a whole staff team and I annotate a central map with all the adaptations put forward.

The language we use for proposing adaptations is ‘If, then…’ which I have used ever since hearing Sarah Cottinghatt and Neil Gilbride talk about it at ResearchED National conference in 2024. Some examples from our most recent PD session are listed below:

-        If I want to bring students back together from group work, then I will leave longer gaps between each of the numbers

-        If I am bringing student attention back to me from silent independent work, then I won’t use ‘1 silent mouths’, I’ll just use two steps.

-        If I don’t have full attention after narrating positively, I’ll name the student I am still waiting for.

-        (Reception teacher) If children are spread across inside and outside areas, then I’ll do my call for attention in the doorway.

-        If students are younger, then I will use gestures for them to copy at each number.

-        If students are still in Phonics, then we will use 1,2,3 to mirror the routine we use in that lesson.

What is really interesting about this process is it begins to sensitise everyone to the multitude of situations in which adaption is absolutely necessary. It also builds a shared understanding of the parameters of the routine. With the example above, it became clear very quickly that 99% of the adaptations teachers wanted to make fell very much within the parameters of the shared mental model of the technique. Every now and then, you get a suggestion that falls outside of it but when this happens, we reason it out together using our shared model of the learning process to test out the suitability of the suggested adaptation.

The approach has three hugely interesting benefits.

First, it allows experienced teachers to gain validation of their expertise. We examine the most detailed maps and celebrate the attention to tiny detail, marveling at our colleague’s intuition. This is often a really powerful experience for experienced colleagues who would otherwise be unaware of their own brilliance. 

Second, it lifts the pressure of the unknown. Teachers get a sense or the fact that they are trusted to make these adaptations in their classroom and gradually, that builds psychological safety. One member of staff recently told me that they literally feel safe when I come into their class. There is no risk of judgement when we are all just trying to work towards an increasingly expert shared understanding.

Third, less experienced teachers get to see the mental models of experienced colleagues. This is way more powerful than just going to watch them do their magic in their class without actually understanding the brilliance that underpins their seamless practice. It also allows the less experienced teachers to develop that adaptive mindset.

Below are two annotated mental model maps. One of a more experienced teacher and one of a less experienced teacher. The less experienced teacher has less adaptations on theirs which is obviously to be expected but the key is that they have some. They are, in their first year of teaching, already seeing that there are times when they need to adapt the core routine and that adaptive mindset is the thing that will lead them to eventually having the intricately developed mental model of their experienced colleague.

(less experienced teacher)

(more experienced teacher)

Closing thoughts

Mapping mental models as part of whole staff PD has five major benefits:

1. It makes your shared routines absolutely clear. Everyone knows what they are adapting from.

2. It normalises adaptation. When everyone gets to add their adaptations, specific to their context and practice to the mental model maps, it makes adaptation normal, not blind following of a routine divorced from context.

3. It improves psychological safety. When teachers know that we all understand the importance of adaptation and scope of what we mean by that, they also know they are within those shared expectations when they adapt.

4. It allows experienced colleagues to learn. So much of what the most expert teachers do is tacit. By mapping it out, we help them understand what makes them so expert and in turn, how they can help others reach that point.

5. It allows less experienced teachers to develop an adaptive mindset. Even if they can juts note one adaptation that might be needed, this sews the seeds for an adaptive mindset that lets them flourish for years to come.

   
   

What underpins all of this though is a shared model of how learning happens. Without that, there is no basis for suggesting and critiquing specific adaptations. We need to have a shared understanding of how learning happens to be able to test our theories of what the effects of teaching actions are most likely to be. We are speculating – we know that – but we are speculating together, from a shared base of evidence and from that, we get consistency, but the kind of consistency that drives improvement not uniformity.

Mapping mental models as part of whole staff PD has been a game changer for culture, mindset and practice in my school. If you want to learn more about it, feel free to reach out.

References

Borders, J., Klein, G. and Besuijen, R. (2024) ‘Mental model Matrix: Implications for System Design and Training’. Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making. 18(2). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/15553434231226317

Dreyfus, H.L. and Dreyfus, S.E., (1986) Mind over machine: The power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer. New York: Free Press.

Hatano, G. and Inagaki, K., (1986) ‘Two courses of expertise’. In: H. Stevenson, H. Azuma and K. Hakuta, eds. Child development and education in Japan. New York: W.H. Freeman, pp.262–272.