Over the last six months, I have been working with the brilliant Sarah Cottinghatt on a coaching tool that we think could help teachers make better decisions in the ill-structured environment of the classroom. Anything useful I write or say about mapping mental models in coaching sessions is due to her expert thinking, coaching and guidance in applying these ideas. The approach is covered in Sarah’s substack and we spoke about it to some extent at the brilliant TDAE London event hosted by Kieran Mackle. We have an episode of the Coaching Unpacked podcast that provides an example of how it might be used and Chris Passey does his usual brilliant job of asking a lot of the questions that people want to know the answers to whenever we talk about mapping. In this blog, I want to outline three core ways that I am currently using mapping in my coaching and why I think it could be a game-changer for Instructional coaching.
To contextualise each of the methods of using mapping, I will describe a fictional lesson situation, imagining that this lesson is being taught by a teacher who I am coaching and that I am watching them teach.
In the portion of the lesson that I am watching, the teacher is teaching children in Year 3 to write a paragraph describing an evil character. They model writing the beginning of a sentence ‘With a shimmer in his eye, the evil man moved towards his victim.’ The teacher then asks, ‘What might I want to change about this sentence?’ They pause for ten seconds, pointing at their temple to signal to students that they are expected to think about the question and they scan the room deliberately during this time to make it obvious that they are checking for any signs that students might not be thinking. After the ten seconds, the teacher says, ‘Tracking Henrieta’ and all the students turn to face Henrieta while she proposes her answer, which is ‘The start of the sentence when you say that the character’s eye is shimmering could be changed’. The teacher fires back with ‘OK, tell me why’ and two or three other students turn away, seemingly accepting that this exchange is now only between the teacher and Henrieta. Henrieta replies and the teacher follows up with ‘and how else could I describe the character’s eye to really capture the fact that they are evil?’ Again, Henrieta gives a well-considered response, displaying a secure understanding of the purpose of the piece of writing but as she does this, a further eight students look away. The teacher then continues to model and shows the students how they are making the conscious choice to change ‘shimmering’ to ‘evil glint’. The teacher then outs up another sentence they have written about the same evil character and how they move across the room with gentle steps. They ask the students to re-write this sentence on their mini white boards so that it better meets the purpose of the piece of writing. I head straight to the 8 children who had looked away during the exchange between the teacher and Henrieta and I notice that 6 out of the 8 have not changed ‘gentle steps’.
Mapping the situation mental model:
When I am watching a lesson, my aim is to understand what the teacher is doing, why the teacher is doing what they are doing and what impact this might be having on learning. I am not consciously making any judgements although of course, human nature dictates that I compare what is happening to what I would personally like to see. Judgement has no place in the work I am doing while watching though. I am watching to understand. While my understanding is necessarily limited by the fact I don’t have access to the answer to the second question above – why the teacher is doing what they are doing – I can capture what I think I understand so that I can use it in the coaching conversation that follows. Mapping what I think the teacher is trying to achieve, the actions they take, the things that appear to be driving those decisions and the effects those decisions have on students is, for me, more effective than only having a narrative of the lesson. I am not suggesting that a narrative is not helpful – it is. Indeed, by mapping the actions, I am able to capture that narrative. But, my mental model of why the teacher took those actions, in the way that they did, when they chose to take them, is super useful when I get to the coaching conversation.
In the lesson itself, I will map in a way that doesn’t necessarily prioritise a clearly ordered and understandable appraisal of the events but I will then use my preparation time before the coaching session to construct what we see at the situation mental model – the mental model of the situation that I currently hold.
In the lesson outlined above, my mapping of the situation mental model might look something like this:
I have mapped the goal that I think the teacher has in the circle. Importantly, this is the teacher’s goal for that particular teaching exchange, not the learning goal for the lesson. In this case, what I observed leads me to conclude that their goal was to drive thought about how to meet a specific purpose of a piece of writing. I think this because they posed questions about purpose and allowed significant thinking time for all students. They also expected all students to track the student who was sharing their answer and this suggested to me that they wanted the tracking students to think about the answer they heard.
I have also mapped the actions they took in the rounded corner rectangles and the effects that followed each of these actions in the long rectangles at the end of the dotted, diagonal lines above. Underneath the rounded corner rectangles are the decision drivers – the concerns that drove the specific decisions to be taken. For example, why did the teacher use Pose, Pause, Track in service of their goal instead of a different technique to serve that same goal? Finally, I have mapped the problem, as I see it at the top, in the long rectangle. At this stage, all of this is being held lightly because it is my mental model of what happened and I need to know what the teacher’s mental model is.
Mapping the situation mental model of the teacher:
During the coaching session, one central job I feel I have is to bring together my mental model (above) and the teacher’s mental model (as yet unsurfaced). The reason this is so important is because we can’t decide on a solution together if we don’t agree on what was trying to be achieved, what the teacher did, what drove those actions, what the effects of those actions were and what the learning problem is.
I have a choice as to how I go about bringing together our mental models. I could:
Present my mental model (as above) to the teacher bit by bit and invite them to respond to it and tell me where they think I have gone wrong. For example, have I actually misunderstood their goal?
Use my existing mental model to support me in leading a con-construction of a shared mental model of what happened in the lesson. This will involve me asking the teacher about their goal and decision drivers and mapping this as we go and probably offering insight into the actions that were taken and the effects I observed. The teacher can absolutely add to this part of the discussion too but it is likely that I will have seen more than they did and that they will not have a particularly clear recollection of what they did and in what order. This is to be expected because, they are often on autopilot in the classroom due to the highly complex nature of the environment which means that the coach’s lens of awareness about what is actually happening is necessarily wider than that of the teacher.
Whether I choose option 1 or 2 largely depends on time. If we are limited, I will go for option 1 but if we have more time available (up to 45 minutes usually), I will go for option 2 because co-construction, is, I believe, one of the most powerful cultural tools in coaching. It positions the coach as curious and this really helps to amplify the teacher’s contextual expertise. It’s not that this can’t be done with option 1, just that I feel it is more naturally done with option 2.
The most interesting parts of a coaching conversation come when there is disagreement about the goal or decision drivers. I have personally been in a situation where I have been certain that I understood what had driven the decisions a teacher took in a lesson only to discover that I had misinterpreted their goal and therefore the actions they took were suddenly reframed in my mind under different drivers. Reaching a shared understanding of the situation mental model allows coach and teacher to move forward to a solution together. It ceases to be about what the teacher did and instead becomes about the problem that emerged and the decisions a teacher will take to start solving it.
The solution mental model
Once there is shared understanding of the situation mental model, we move onto constructing the solution model. This is a highly dialogic space where the teacher usually takes the lead in terms of the kind of solution they are looking for. In the example above, the teacher might say something like: ‘So I need to do something with that follow up action because that’s where the problem stemmed from’. The coach will usually then begin to either suggest or ask for options that the teacher has available to them. If there are several options (there usually are), as the coach, I will guide the teacher to consider the goal and which action best aligns with it. I will tap into the decision drivers here to really help the teacher consider which is the best solution rather than making them feel that there is a correct one. It isn’t about them agreeing with me, it is about them understanding why a particular solution is the right one for the situation.
In the example above, the solution mental model might look something like this:
We have decided that the goal and first decision driver are powerful. The teacher has already taught the concept of purpose earlier in the writing unit and so it seems appropriate that they would then want students to be thinking hard about it and providing thinking time before asking all students to track and answerer is driven by a concern for a well developed answer and for visual attention.
We have decided to change the second action – tracking a different student – because we decided that this was where the problem started from. We have tightened up this action so that it serves the goal more robustly and have then made a prediction about what will happen as a result. This is useful because we can then check back to make sure that the predicted effect meets the goal. If it doesn’t, we know we need to go back!
We have also outlined some success criteria that will enable the identified technique to be effective. These are the active ingredients of the success of the technique and so will be the things to focus feedback on during modelling and rehearsal. There isn’t space for a detailed dive into modelling and rehearsal here but for what it is worth, I am a big fan, in summary because teaching is such a highly complex environment and so teachers are usually on autopilot. This means that the more practice they have had at making the right decision, cued by the right thing at the right time, the more likely it is that this decision will become habit and that is when we achieve genuine change to practice.
As part of rehearsal, I will usually ask what the most likely thing to go wrong will be. This normalises things not going to plan but it also starts to build an adaptive mindset in the teacher – the understanding that routines are essential but that we often need to adapt from them because of unexpected events. In the example above, the teacher has said that an under-developed understanding of purpose is the most likely thing to go wrong and so we have mapped their response to that. We would then do another two or three rounds of rehearsal and put that in so that they get practice at responding to that ‘unexpected’ situational cue.
Closing thoughts
Mapping mental models has been a real game changer for my coaching. It has helped me make coaching a more collaborative experience, has helped me ensure that the teacher I am coaching and I have a shared understanding of what happened, of the problem we are trying to solve and of what we will do to try to solve it. Building, sharing and co-constructing mental models isn’t only done through mapping. Conversation, modelling and rehearsal all help to build a teacher’s mental model. Mapping makes this process explicit though and crucially, it outsources working memory in that we don’t need to hold the whole map in our heads while we are talking about it. I have found that by having it physically mapped out, we are able to talk about each aspect in greater depth because we don’t need to hold the other aspects in working memory at the same time.
We are far from finished in our work on mental model mapping and plan to do much more with it in the future. If you are interested in coming with us on this journey, you can tune into the Coaching Unpacked podcast here… and follow Sarah’s substack here…
Happy mapping!
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