Working with schools around the world, a strongly consistent pattern I encounter is that it’s always the effectiveness of teams and team leaders that lies at the heart of establishing the standards – high standards and low standards.  Where you encounter strong practice across several classes in a year group or subject area, you will always find a team or a team leader who is responsible – either very overtly or perhaps acting more behind the scenes.   Sometimes a team of peers has a certain dynamic – a culture- that fosters mutual challenge and support, driving them forward. Sometimes it’s the leader specifically who drives their team on.  

Where team dynamics or the team leader’s capacity or capabilities are such that they do not drive standards, my view is that no amount of one-to-one instructional coaching can compensate.  Why? It’s a question of proportionate impact.  Teams and their leaders set the curriculum and plan the resources, they interact on an ongoing day-to-day basis, with multiple set meetings and many more informal interactions. A coaching process conducted outside the team, can only support what is already happening, it can’t compensate for what’s not happening. 

Here are five ways to capitalise fully on the power of teams and their leaders: 

Prioritise time for curriculum teams. 

It seems obvious enough but it’s not always the case that these core engines of improvement are given the time they need. There’s a huge range – some schools have made this step and set subject team meetings every fortnight; in others it’s just once a half-term.  Sometimes pastoral meetings are given equal time, which, to me, isn’t  a good choice, because the outcomes of those discussions don’t drive standards nearly enough.  I always recommend getting the calendar out at the early planning stage and marking up curriculum team time as often as is possible- fortnightly or at least every three weeks.  In a primary school, it’s a case of defining certain meetings to focus on teaching and coaching, highlighting them in the calendar and protecting them from ever being cancelled. 

Enable teams to develop a teaching agenda for their stage/subject

One of the central concepts in our WalkThrus work is that any generic technique must be adapted so that it can be applied in the context of a subject and particular class.  It’s really sensible and very powerful for a school to promote a certain set of core techniques – because teachers have so many common challenges – but these always have to end up making sense in each class: in reception, Year 6, history, PE, maths or drama.  

Of course, in parallel, there will be teaching approaches that stem from the curriculum itself; subject traditions and age-appropriate pedagogies that might not have any place in any other subject or phase.  It’s important to foster ownership of the total agenda – setting the culture and expectation whereby teams and their leaders, blend whole-school and team agendas to formulate something that they feel is theirs, not imposed from outside. 

This isn’t some kind of soft accountability; it’s actually more demanding of people. Ask teams to state their agenda – blending team and whole school needs – and then say ‘ok, great, do that then’. Asking people to do what they say they’re going to do is fair and demanding at the same time! You don’t need to get people to follow your directives; just ask them to stick to their own.

Develop Leaders as coaches

‘Leader-as-coach’ is a role I think needs far greater prominence in our discourse and practice around leadership development. I’ve found that where team leaders adopt a coaching disposition and use it to run their team sessions, things can move along with real drive and energy.  It’s like having a player-coach in sport – someone who is there with you on the ground, doing the hard work day to day but then also provides direction, motivational drive and uses their expertise to support your development.  I’m thinking of a Head of Maths I know – and a Head of English, a KS2 lead – who have this characteristic: they motivate their teams to move forward using the same coaching protocol that is used in the school’s one-to-one coaching, to great effect.  

Sometimes this role can be taken by someone in the team other than the official team leader – who might have a lot of great knowledge and skills but are not best placed to be the coach.  

Build in Learning Walks

For team meetings to be informed by a good, honest evaluation of what’s really happening in lesson, you can’t rely on self-reporting – you need eyes on the practice from a different perspective.  The most obvious and simple way to achieve this is for the leader to undertake routine learning walks – keeping close to what happens in the lessons within their domain and then using what they observe to run the feedback sessions.  This can be as simple as taking an hour a week to drop in on four lessons, 10-15 minutes each.  Leaders who don’t feel they have time for this need support– because why would they not!  It should be one of the things they look forward to the most – spending time in their colleague’s lessons, so they can plan how to support them. 

There are other forms of reality check such as paired observation within the team, all of which need to be planned in.  Saying ‘I have an open door’ or ‘I encourage my colleagues to visit each other’s lessons’ – is hopeful and well intentioned,  but hopeless as a system. You need to make it happen. 

Use an agreed feedback protocol.

Finally, it’s powerful if everyone knows the agreed protocol for running the feedback. This informs planning, enacting techniques, observation and formulating feedback in the meetings.  If you use the Bambrick-Santoyo Five 5Ps process (praise, probe, problem, practise, plan), you can’t go too far wrong.   Each meeting ends with teachers feeling motivated whilst also having a clear, focused plan of action that they’ve talked through within the meeting.  Feedback to a team focuses on highlighting good practices under precise praise and the central ‘probe’ section helps to flush out all the issues, concerns and bits of resistance.  It’s not a critique session; it’s a problem solving session. 

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