Encouraging Deeper Thinking In Teacher Coaching Conversations
By Pete Foster
Coaching can make the difference between a good teacher and a great teacher, but only if the teacher participates in the right way. Pete Foster Explains…
You’re having a conversation with a teacher about the lesson they taught and you watched. As a coach, that’s your role. You spent about twenty minutes in the lesson, taking notes, talking to children and watching the teacher in action. An inevitable avalanche of stuff happened between that lesson and this moment at the end of the day.
You try to reach back into your notes, into your memory, and into somewhere less well-defined, your ability to coach well. A nagging doubt lingers: What am I actually trying to achieve in this conversation? In a way, the answer is obvious: Better teaching and changed behaviour.
If coaching exists in a school to change behaviour then all it needs is some defined behaviours and the space to practice. Problems can be identified with those pre-defined behaviours offered as solutions. An overreliance on hands-up questioning prompts the need to practice cold call. Targeted steps can then be practised in the coaching conversation until they are ready for the classroom.
There’s a neatness about the efficiency here. A behaviour is identified. It is practised. It is embedded. Not necessarily an easy process but a straightforward one.
What perhaps we miss with this approach is that there are even more efficient ways to change a large group of teachers’ behaviour, particularly when we’re starting out. If you want to get seventy teachers to start using cold call, coaching isn’t the most direct route. A group can practise in the school hall. Briefings can push a message and celebrate success. Departments and phases can shape the technique to fit their needs.
Coaching can refine these behaviours once in use, tackling the specific problems individuals face. But it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a delivery system for behaviours that leaders have already decided on before entering the lesson. Coaching should identify barriers to learning and then unpick them looking for the solution that just fits with what’s happening in this classroom.
If we return, then, to that coaching conversation, Better teaching and Changed behaviour are the aims. But we can have a subtly different conversation, one where we aim to equip the teacher to solve problems when the coach is not in the room.
Let’s look at four ways we can do that.
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Investigate, don’t assume
It’s easy to observe for the absence of the behaviours we expect and hope to see: a teacher misses an opportunity to cold call and we inwardly cheer that we’ve found them a next step so quickly. Investigation, as a coach, isn’t simply about watching the teaching and ticking or crossing the strategies used. Before we consider strategies, we should make sure we have a full and rich understanding of the lesson.
We might judge a teacher model to be unclear; go and read the paragraphs produced in response. We might hear instructions and feel confused about what students should do; ask students if they understand. We might feel a check for understanding is missing; go and ask students about their understanding.
A coach’s notes should be full of teacher actions and phrases as well as student responses, including things they’ve said and work they’ve produced. Pictures, audio and video all help to capture something here.
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Define problems before deciding on solutions
Rather than seeing certain behaviours or strategies as inherently good, we should consider what problems they solve. To be able to do this, we need to spend time pondering the biggest barriers to learning the teacher and the class face.
In conversation, we share the fruit of that investigation and explore what problems our evidence might suggest. We know we’ve seen a small part of that teacher’s day so I ask about the evidence we’ve collected. These paragraphs don’t match the model you wrote – what problems might that lead to? Students explained the task like this… Where might that confusion have come from?
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Invite input
A conversation can be very short indeed when only one person is talking. It is possible for ‘coaching’ to become ‘transmission’ all too quickly.
Invite input at every phase of the conversation. When we’re praising effective practice, we can ask how or why the teacher implemented said behaviour. When we’re defining problems, we can ask if this chimes with a teacher’s experience when we’re not in the room or with other classes. When we’re suggesting next steps, we can invite the teacher to say whether and how they think the next step we offer will solve the problem defined together.
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Dissect the next step
A next step written on page or said out loud only hints at the action a teacher will take. A conversation breathes life into a next step when we spend time thinking deeply about what it will look like and how circumstance might shape it.
Videos can exemplify the step or demonstrate the gap between the current reality and the desired state. Scripts can be written and re-written, rehearsed and improved. Our step can be made more versatile, more adaptable if we discuss how the circumstances of its use may vary depending on the students or the content. Ultimately, our conversation engineers action by focusing on the practical barriers to introducing the step, the necessary reminders and changes to routine that make a new behaviour possible.
I’m not suggesting these ideas are non-existent in coaching programmes currently. Many will include them. But the pull towards efficiency can be the pull away from rich and full conversations that help teachers to improve.
Each of these ideas has the potential to slow a conversation down. Don’t do this for the sake of it or just for some woolly sense of ‘giving the teacher a voice’. Do it because we want the teacher to have interacted with the feedback we’re sharing. We want them to have gone with us to the heart of the problem. We want deep understanding of where to go next for every teacher we work with. We want better teaching and we’re willing to spend time on it.
You can read more articles by Pete Foster here.
