Dear WA colleagues,
The Long-term Impact of Coaching on School Culture
By Ruhina Cockar
As we come to the close of our latest round of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) I wanted to highlight the importance of coaching in various aspects of our life at Westminster Academy to encourage you to continue the coaching culture beyond the PLCs.
We approach our PLCs from a coaching perspective - its objective is to use coaching to gain a better understanding of our professional learning target for performance management, including the challenges and options we have to improve and develop it.
It challenges you to ‘Start with Heart’ to ensure that you consistently return to what is important or fulfilling for you about your target. What are the values behind wanting to improve, and wanting to improve on this particular target? Working on a target that is linked to your professional passions are clear drivers to motivating you to implement change.
The PLCs then challenges you to consider the options, ideas and strategies you have to pursue this target - how creative do you want to be? How creative can you be? This is the ‘Head’ part of the coaching model and is your chance to read that piece of research you’ve been meaning to read, ask that teacher friend about that great pedagogical strategy they used that made impact and aligns with your goal, have a go at learning how to implement something you observed another teacher do effectively for your authentic teaching style, read more about implementing group work more systematically as an authentic assessment tool (even though you might have an element of fear of this failing, “praiseworthy failure” is an important part of growth - see here).
What next? Time to plan your route. This is the “Step” part of the model - what strategy are you going to commit to implementing to explore your target, by when and how will you assess its impact. There is a clear sense of purpose that comes from action planning your goal from point A (today, where the ‘Heart’ is beating strong) to point B (at some point in the future, the goal).
How can these principles be used outside of the PLC, in your approach to improving your ways of working collaboratively or improving your ways of communicating with students or improving your curriculum design?
Let’s hear from Sophia Evans about her experience of taking coaching outside of the PLC and into her role as a Curriculum Designer for Maths:
“Coaching has been very impactful to my personal development as a curriculum designer. In particular, having the opportunity to be guided through the heart, head, step process allows me to think through in depth about what I want to do, why and how to go about it. Before my coaching meetings I can often feel scattered, lost and even sometimes overwhelmed, but the structure (and sometimes looseness) of a coaching conversation always brings me to consider next steps.
An example of this would be Y10 maths assessments this term. As we didn’t have a KS4 coordinator last year, these were inconsistent and poor quality. Through coaching with Bec Dennis I was able to talk through strategies for getting the team involved with producing these, in order to get them fully tailored to our current Y10 students. Delegation has always been an area for development for myself, so this was at the centre of our conversation. We discussed why it was important to me for us to involve all team members with the assessment process, anticipate who would have the buy-in and who wouldn’t, consider different approaches to delegating making the assessments, and set steps as actions for the week ahead. I feel that this process comes with much more ease now that I’ve been coached through it, and represents just a small example of the impact coaching can have on a middle leader.”
And from David Madden about using coaching to build metacognitive talk in his lessons:
“I have been coaching my Year 12s to think more metacognitively. I am currently completing an NPQ in Leading Teacher Development and the implementation project I am developing is ‘What is the impact of high quality teacher education on metacognitive practices with ECTs’. I plan to ‘coach’ the ECTs on metacognitive thinking during one of their forthcoming CPS sessions and I am also coaching my Year 12 AISL class to think more metacognitively as they problem solve in their Maths lessons. For example, as the Year 12s are completing their Do Now, I have been asking them to complete a short form to get them to think more about the process and thinking they need to do: Problem Solving using Metacognitive Techniques”
In our Anatomy coaching course we discuss the practice of being “coach-like” in as many aspects of our day-to-day life - this is the act of being genuinely curious about the topic in front of you, the problem in hand or the person you are speaking to through asking Effective Questions, really listening and always going back to the Heart. This is the mindset of stepping away from advice giving or seeking advice/solutions from others. This is the mindset that you are the expert of yourself and your topic/problem. This is the mindset where you might respond with an observation in place of advice - “I noticed..”, “I wonder if…”, “It sounds like…”. When you feel stuck, ask yourself the question: What benefit can approaching this from a coaching perspective bring?
I’d love to see and hear more coach-like conversations around Westminster Academy!
What’s the next opportunity for using coaching or being coached for you?
If you’d like to be coached in a more formal way, please get in touch with Ruhina Cockar for a match up!
Further Reading:
For the Anatomy trained coaches: Being Coach-Like in Your Life
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