I’m starting to think that, even if time was unlimited and not a constraint, with two or three people in a team to coach, I would prefer to coach them all together than one by one. I don’t know if any research has been done to compare these configurations and, to coaching purists this might seem heretical, but I would argue that the advantages of teaching in pairs or threes might outweigh the downsides. Here’s why….

First of all, let me clarify the system this would operate under.

The coach meets the teachers together for the coaching conversation but will still see them teach individually or set up an alternative so that each teacher is observed.

Why might this work better than coaching them one-to-one?

The shared agenda: Teachers have so much in common and it is powerful for them to have his reinforced. We don’t need to frame coaching as a critique of individual performance – it is about solving the common problems we all experience. This is evident in any typical learning walk – you see the same issues arise all the time, especially where teachers are in the same subject or year team and it makes total sense to explore shared issues in a collective manner.

The pool of experience and ideas: When you sit down to discuss the shared problems – you can share ideas and experiences. One teacher hears the other express their sense of the challenge and offer up options. There are more experts in the room; the coach can draw out ideas from the teachers and share their own in a more organic collective manner. It’s a problem shared; not a teacher weakness.

Depersonalisation: When a teacher is sitting one-to-one with a coach it still risks falling into the old rituals and power dynamics of observer/judge vs teacher/recipient. Or it can deviate into a mentoring/personal therapy session! With two people there, you are much more explicitly focused on the technical aspects of the teaching challenge. You frame any perceived weaknesses as common challenges…. there is solidarity in being coached alongside a colleague. Teachers feel less vulnerable. You also immediately get away from any sense of a teacher being singled out for coaching; it’s explicit that this is a process for everyone. Defences come down.

Modelling the coaching approach: With two more people, it’s like you have an audience to your exchanges with any individual. This fosters a kind of discipline – a more conscious attempt to honour the principles of coaching where we seek to foster teacher’s capacity for situation assessment, to offer solutions and set goals. You know that whatever you say is being heard and that discipline (I find) makes you do it better. You are more precise with the language. You are also therefore modelling the nature of a coaching dialogue to everyone present – which can and does support those teachers to continue that type of dialogue beyond the coaching session.

The follow-up, ongoing conversations: Possibly the biggest benefit is that the paired coaching conversation can continue between the sessions. You set the ball rolling as coach but the teachers continue talking and sharing multiple times in their organic exchanges over the intervening weeks, knowing exactly what each other’s goals and action steps are.

The public commitment to action: Another strong feature is that when teachers state their action steps for the next cycle, it’s not a private commitment to their coach; it’s a public statement of intent shared to at least one other colleague. Doing this helps to secure commitment to the change and sharpens the process of defining the step because you want to commit to something you are actually going to do. Hearing how other people express their steps is really helpful. Plus you can also agreed to the same steps for reasons of solidarity or consistency in the team.

The opportunity to practise. Practising techniques outside the classroom with just teacher and coach is, frankly, quite weird. You talk things through but do you feel comfortable standing up and practising? Rarely. But in a pair or three, you can run mini-rehearsals; you can run through some scripts for different scenarios or test out your feedback ideas. It’s more likely to happen in paired coaching than 1;1 – in my experience.

Time efficiency . To some, this would be reason enough. It’s not a trivial point. If you can coach two people at once, you have half the meetings so set up. So, if not only do you get all the benefits listed above, you save precious time… it’s got to be worth considering.

What are the drawbacks?

You lose personalisation: I know for some this would be the killer concern – coaching for some is intrinsically personal. So, yes, if you talk two or more people at once, you can’t get too personal – unless, the people involved invite and allow that. That suits me fine – I prefer a more technical approach anyway – but you do need be aware that , with pairs, some areas of conversation are going to be off limits. It makes the process more a professional dialogue, more formal and business like (again, all good for me) but you can’t really talk about a teacher’s personal struggles as easily.

It’s hard if teachers are at very different stages or have very different teaching goals. Paired coaching really relies on the teachers having similar challenges and goals so that you can talk about the same issues. It’s not just a case of having two separate conversations in parallel in the same meeting. So, if your pairs deviate or start from very different points, or are really interested in totally different areas of their practice – perhaps because their students have very different learning needs – then this won’t work so well. Personally I find group structures work superbly when the curriculum is a unifying factor so if your teachers are teaching very different subject content, the pair dynamic is probably less helpful than if they have the subject or age group in common.

You can avoid being direct with individuals. Another pitfall with paired coaching is that, for reasons of sensitivity and awkwardness in the peer dynamics, you can find you pull back from exploring some specific and obvious challenges in a direct manner – unless they apply to everyone. Sometimes you have to supplement your mainstay of a paired coaching process with occasional private one-to-ones for these reasons. I know one school where this is actually built in. They alternate or flex their coached triad sessions: some are held together (for all advantages above) and some are held one-to-one. It gives the best of both worlds.

You lose confidentiality and rely on trust. Of course you need protocols that cover any teacher’s concerns about trust and confidentiality. I’ve met some teachers where they refused to be coached with a specific other person. You might want to say ‘come on let’s all be grown-ups’ but that just denies the reality that interpersonal trust and respect can’t merely be asserted or assumed.

So – it’s a case of weighing things up. For sure, I’d like to argue that paired coaching with all its intrinsic benefits and time saving advantages should be elevated in the discourse. It can be game changer – shifting from a situation where coaching for all is logistically unrealistic to one where it is entirely doable.