Talking to school leaders and coaches in the UK and the US in recent weeks has reinforced my sense that we really need to get a lot of things lined up for a coaching-orientated professional learning process to be really effective. Sometimes school leaders or coaches focus on just one aspect and, because the other two weren’t given enough attention, progress is slow or negligible.

The three elements are represented here:

The coaching process is about the nature of a coaching conversation; the debate about making it facilitative, dialogic or directive; the discussion about trust, power dynamics, authority and autonomy; the discussion about structures like the (excellent) Bambrick Santoyo praise- probe-plan feedback approach, the Impact Cycle, or the GROW model – or whatever. It includes debates about the use of platforms and scripts to guide the process; the ethics and logistics or recording on video and storing the documents. All of that! Sometimes this takes up all the air time and, to be fair, there’s a whole lot to discuss.

It seems to me that in some contexts insufficient attention is given to the training needs of coaches so that, if and when they are sat with a teacher or observing them teach, the nature of their interactions leads to positive change in their practice over time. Coaches aren’t therapists or counsellors – they are there to improve teaching to improve learning and, in the absence of well understood, shared approaches, you can just get mushy-but-kind affirmation or overly directive non-dialogic feedback – neither of which get you very far.

But even if we get this right for a given context it’s just a process…. we still need the substance.

The coaching content is about the actual substance of a coaching discussion: Teaching! There’s an imperative to cut to the chase in so many situations – to get into the details of why and how teaching habits, routines or techniques can be adopted, adapted or improved on. What are we talking about in our coaching? It’s ineffective and inefficient for each teacher-coach pair to be reinventing and reconfiguring well-understood problems and solutions across a school. And there are so many great frameworks to build shared understanding and shared language around:

Rosenshine’s principles, Teach Like a Champion, Make Every Lesson Count, The Great Teaching Toolkit, Marzano’s strategies, Wiliam’s formative assessment, Toets Revolutie’s formative action, Walkthrus… or something home grown and bespoke that combines elements of all this and more into a school or district specific framework for teaching. Without this – how do teachers exchange ideas in a coherent manner that allows ideas to have shared meaning? We don’t have time to reinvent teaching every time we talk about it – and luckily we don’t have to.

However, even if a coaching process and the coaching content are established.. it all still fall down if the system around it doesn’t allow it all to happen:

The coaching/CPD system is where any coaching conversation sits in an organisation structurally and in a calendar of activities. Coaching needs a time and place, it needs people with the time, it needs iteration.. multiple exchanges over time. You can’t coach if you don’t have time for it or if there are too many people involved for it to be meaningful. Coaching around known techniques is more effective if the whole system delivers strong training on the techniques at team, school or district level from experts so that the coaches can focus on implementation and adaption to the context. It’s hard enough to support habit change through a coaching process without also having to be the PD provider too.

Sometimes school/building leaders underestimate the time needed for a coach to support their caseload or routinely hijack or interrupt the flow of coaching cycles by making more demands on everyone involved than the time allocation can support. Sometimes the coaching agenda for a teacher is treated as something running on a totally separate groove to the team agenda or whole-school agenda rather than seeking alignment. It doesn’t help.

So… to conclude... this is a three-legged stool situation. You need all three of these elements to work or you don’t really have an effective coaching approach at all.