A journey in the leadership of Instructional Coaching
Since taking on the role of Assistant Principal for Teaching and Learning, I have had to get grips with Instructional Coaching as it forms a key part of my role. I had no prior experience with this form of coaching in my previous schools, and now all of a sudden I was in charge of it!
It was fair to say that the experience of my school with IC was pretty chequered upon taking up the post, so we had a bit of task to get this working in a sustainable way. We are only part way through this journey, but I thought I’d talk through the approach we adopted in my current school if it’s useful to people in a similar position.
The state of play at the time of my appointment
My school delivers coaching through the Steplab platform. Staff in my school had used Powerful Action Steps, the predecessor platform to Steplab, and had some experience of a reciprocal coaching model whereby staff coached each other in a pair. However, this had not quite taken flight for various reasons with compliance percentages very low. Staff absence was a major barrier, as I think was the staff viewpoint on coaching and uncertainty as to how helpful it really was for them. At my school we have a lot of highly experienced staff who have seen a lot of change come and go, weathered some tricky periods and who can handle some really challenging students that we sometimes have in my school, which serves one of the most deprived areas of Bradford in West Yorkshire. There was also, I think, the sense that this was a top down initiative that was perceived to have been imposed by our trust without necessarily it having the ‘consent’ of the staff body. Perhaps, too, staff experience and knowledge of what high quality IC looked like was a problem. Time, also, was a big issue — not giving staff the time to do coaching makes it a lot harder to hold them to account when they don’t!
At the time of my appointment, we’d moved away from full reciprocal coaching to a small scale model where 8 staff were coached by 8 more senior (but not SLT) staff as a pilot model. That had really helped one or two teachers but the consistency wasn’t there — again compliance was very patchy and I think some of the coaches and coachees perhaps didn’t really *get* the rationale behind the Steplab sequence and the idea that apparently easy steps actually take some time to really practice and master. I also think in hindsight perhaps the right coach and coachee weren’t necessarily paired together in all cases and this led to a reduction in the possible effectiveness of this strategy.
Early steps
While this was going on I was on a crash course of getting my head round coaching, the Steplab platform, how to monitor it and so on. I was getting my feet wet with using Drop-ins which seemed like an easier way into this platform and was a good way of helping me to give rapid feedback to staff on what I was seeing in lessons, which I felt was essential as a new appointee to leadership trying to build relationships and trust with my new colleagues. I’d been in that position before of having people come into my lesson from leadership or even outside the school and never being offered any feedback and always found that quite annoying so was determined that would not happen this time.
To build further knowledge we sent three of our teachers to the Steplab Conference in London in July (which annoyingly I had to miss because of a prior appointment although I caught up on some of the sessions via Youtube), and appointed two ‘lead coaches’ to support the implementation of whatever our model was going to look like in the Autumn Term of 2022, something which we also needed to decide. We had to reconcile a tension between our own instincts that a slow, gentle and gradual approach was needed, whereas others wanted us to proceed more rapidly in being compliant. In the end, we agreed on a graduated approach to building coaching which I think in hindsight has so far shown to be the right move, and is supported by for example, Goodrich and Boguslav’s essay on the Steplab website which suggests that time needs to be taken to build ‘a culture of openness to feedback’ and to ‘recruit a team of skilled and knowledgeable coaches’ before diving in head-first.
Our approach has been to take a three stage approach. As I write this we are about to begin stage 3.
Stage 1 — Paired drop-ins
In the autumn term, we wanted to get everybody used to the idea of giving and receiving feedback and so we put each member of staff with a partner and asked them to drop-in on them once a fortnight, and then catch up with their partner during that time period. The rationale here was to break the walls down and generate more conversations about teaching. In our school, where the management of behaviour has been a key priority for so long, focusing the conversation more towards pedagogy (while ensuring we don’t take our eye off the behaviour ‘ball’ so to speak) has been a challenge over a long period of time.
We deliberately put people together who we thought got on or would work well together, to ensure they had a mutual stake in ensuring they met the basic expectation we had of drop-in completion which I then monitored and reported on. Overall this was quite successful and popular — the drop-ins are a lot easier to do than the coaching and I think we got off to a good start.
We also used our coaching leads to present on the ‘Shout outs’ in our whole staff meetings, to share good practice identified and also begin to model the idea of taking on board feedback and trying new ideas out to improve practice. This was helpful in ensuring that we heard more of the voice of the teachers rather than just the leaders in those meetings.
After a while and some external feedback we began to adopt a more consistent format for drop-ins using a ‘PMI’ (Plus, Minus, Interesting) format which has been used in our school in a number of contexts over the years. While a ‘Minus’ might seem a bit negative on the face of it, it is commonly understood in our school as an area for development, a constructive bit of feedback and it is not meant to be harsh or unkind or anything like that. This made the drop-ins a little easier for me to analyse to identify emerging strengths and areas of need across the whole staff. To give you an example of what this looks like, see below a PMI done of my Year 10 lesson from before Easter.
Stage 1b — Voluntary Coaching Group
We also established a voluntary coaching group where interested staff could turn their pair into a full coaching arrangement. Unfortunately for various reasons this did not work as well as I would have liked and we had very patchy levels of compliance. At this stage we probably didn’t yet have the staff knowledge of the coaching process on Steplab in place yet to make this work effectively and the time wasn’t properly built into the system. It was worth a try, but I’d do that differently I think if I had my time again.
Stage 2 — ML/SLT coaching
The second stage of our coaching development was to engage middle and senior leaders in full coaching of each other beginning in January. We sourced our NLP for Pedagogy within our trust to present on refreshing knowledge of coaching in December as a bit of a launch, ensured people were familiar again with the system, and then got going with this next phase.
A key change however was to make some timetable changes to ensure that everyone now had a weekly coaching period allocated within the timetable. We knew that we had to build time in to the timetable for staff to make this happen. It was a bit of a fiddle to do, but was linked to other decisions about how we wanted to allocate timetabling resources and meant that each pair had a weekly mutual free.
The idea would be that staff would only need that mutual free once a fortnight (we have a one week timetable in our school), but that the hour in the other week could be given over to doing the observation in another free for no more than 15 minutes. So the idea is that staff would do the observation in week 1, and then use the coaching period to do the mutual feedback on each other in week 2.
At this stage the main aim was compliance moreso than quality. We wanted to build staff knowledge of coaching at the middle and senior level, get them familiar with the Steplab library and ensure they had those conversations. I was not, and still am not, too fussed about whether the coaching is having a dramatic impact on improving teaching. The goal is to get the culture right first, normalise coaching as a thing that we do at my school as standard, and then we can nudge the quality forward after that.
We also decided to avoid forcing staff to focus on a set area, deciding that it would get more buy-in if staff could select from all aspects of the Steplab Library.
How successful have we been? Well, we’ve had five fortnightly cycles and our compliance percentages are as follows:
· Cycle 1: 62%
· Cycle 2: 73%
· Cycle 3: 36%
· Cycle 4: 25%
· Cycle 5: 68%
My goal is to hit 70% each cycle, clearly we have only done that once out of five times so far, but we’ve come close a couple other times. The first cycle we had some issues where staff hadn’t clicked that they needed to complete both the ‘observation’ and ‘feedback’ sections which was easily corrected in future sessions. Cycle 3 and 4 were heavily disrupted by the NEU industrial action, staff absence (interviews and illness) and snow disruption. We also had that patchy voluntary group mentioned in Stage 1b also messing up the figures a little bit. So not terrible when that mitigation is taken into account, but not perfect by any means.
Stage 3: Full Coaching for all staff
We’re now about to kick off full coaching for pretty much all staff (exemptions in place for those involved in the ECT process). My pairs have been set up on Steplab and were communicated before the holidays. We also reintroduced the full coaching process via Steplab in our final staff meeting before the break and gave staff the chance to have a play about with the coaching simulator. We also asked staff to evaluate themselves against the 11 areas of the Steplab library to try generate some data (even if it’s of questionable validity) that we could use to understand how staff perceived themselves at the current time pedagogically.
Our trust has made a big, evidence-informed bet on coaching as a level for school improvement and its vital that as a school we fully engage in that process. We have taken our time a little bit, for what I think have been sensible reasons, but I do think we’ve made significant progress in ensuring coaching becomes successful and sustainable in my school, but there’s still work to do.
As I mentioned earlier, I am still not too fussed about the coaching quality at this stage, just that it happens (pleasingly listening to Peps Mccrea’s recent podcast with Craig Barton made me feel pretty good about that position as Peps made a similar type of comment if I recall correctly). When we’ve got some success in terms of compliance behind us, and more familiarity with the system, I think that in Autumn 2023 we can be in a place to evaluate the impact of coaching and improving its’ quality to have that long-term impact on pupil outcomes that is, ultimately, what we are all attempting to drive forward.
We have also had to be clear that coaching is not performance management (other than, it is part of PM that staff engage in the coaching process because we do think it’s right that people try their hardest to get just a little bit better, but that is all). Coaching is a form of CPD which is there to help all of us improve and work on aspects of our practice. It is there to benefit all teachers no matter what stage of their career or performance level they are at. Yes, we might look at putting our stronger coaches with those colleagues who may be in need of a boost for whatever reason, but that is something that is done very much with consent rather than coercion.
Next steps
· Monitoring of the coaching pairs and the prodding and nagging to ensure compliance is high.
· QA of the coaching period by dropping in on coaching conversations and offering feedback on how these can be more effective (Autumn Term 2023 onwards) in terms of selecting the right step, improving the deliberate practice aspect, and so on.
· More specialist training for the stronger coaches to enable them to support newer staff or those who are perhaps struggling a bit for whatever reason.
· Develop the role of the Lead Coaches to ensure they can drive the process from a middle leadership level so that it is slightly more of a democratic process than an authoritarian, senior leader driven process.
I ought to be clear I’m under no illusions. Despite the progress we’ve made on implementing coaching, I don’t think teaching has been massively transformed or anything just yet. That is going to take quite a long time and depends on some other factors as well like the effective maintenance and development of our behaviour systems. I’m also live to the issues that a more generic model like coaching might have when it comes to resolving the subject specific challenges highlighted by the likes of Jonnie Grande. Does it help us resolve one of our other big challenges of adapting a hard, academic centrally resourced curriculum to our school which has significantly higher than average numbers of EAL, Low Prior Attaining and SEND student? I’m not sure right now that it does. So I feel realistic than IC can help us raise the floor of our teaching (which doesn’t sound glamorous but I actually think is really important), while understanding we have quite a few other things to work on too.
Ultimately my goal is to have a situation where staff lead their own coaching. It’d be great if staff could say, ‘oh I’m really wanting to work on this aspect of my practice, can I get this person to coach me who I know is really good at that’. This might take some time but is where I’d like to get to.
