13 minute read
GETTING STARTED wITh INSTRUCTIONAL COAChING
ProvIDE PrECISE PrAISE
The idea is to avoid the language of judgement or to reinforce the nebulous idea that practice is general and nonspecifi c.
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‘The way you engaged Michael, getting him to respond well to your modelling of the writing task, worked well’. It’s very specifi c.
ProbE
Probing questions focus a teacher’s attention on the key area of their practice. “How you think Jennifer was doing with those harder problems?” We avoid more open questions ( ‘How do you think the lesson went?’) because that widens out the scope for the evaluation when we’re trying to foster a more focused approach.
IDEnTIfy ProblEM AnD ConCrETE ACTIon STEP
This is the central part of the process. In a directive or consultative style appropriate for the teacher, specifi c action steps must be identifi ed linked to specifi c issues. These are the agreed actions that will be followed up on.
PrACTISE
bambrick Santoyo suggests “Great teaching is not learned through discussion. It’s learned by doing… by practicing doing things well. The implication is that, as part of the instructional coaching/ feedback process the coach and teacher explore how the action step should be taken in detail, using modelling and practice activities.
PlAn AHEAD
The action steps need to be recorded for future reference. Did you do the things you said you were going to do? Ideally the teacher should own their own professional journey and the record of it – but their teacher coach should have access to it for reasons of communication and transparency.
SET TIMElInE
The fi nal step in the feedback discussion is to agree a timescale. by next week? (In some cases). four weeks? (More likely). Three months? (Too long.) Teachers and their coaches have lots of very light, lean, short interactions rather than a few heavy-duty interactions.
With these two frameworks in mind, schools then need to plan a process leading them towards implementing a full instructional coaching system over a sensible timeframe. It takes a school 2-3 years to get a good system fully up and running and even then you’ll be tweaking and refining it continually. My five-step plan to establishing a coaching culture is as follows:
DITCH THE JUDGEMEnT CUlTUrE
We need to think in terms of solving a teacher’s challenges – helping them to craft strategies, working alongside them. Accountability driven judgement has to stop before coaching has a chance to take hold.
ESTAblISH A frAMEWorK for TEACHInG AnD lEArnInG
It’s so important for teachers and coaches have a commonly understood reference point that lists and describes the available options when considering actions steps. Jim Knight calls this the ‘playbook’. our Walkthrus books are basically playbooks for coaching – and there are lots of other examples.
DEvEloP ITErATIvE CPD CyClES AnD STrUCTUrES
It’s important to have strong whole-school and team level CPD processes working where people meet at frequent intervals to plan and discuss common themes – for example around curriculum. Coaching works best within a system where team-level CPD time is highly valued and has a similar iterative feeling, each meeting reflecting on progress since the previous one.
GroW AnD DEvEloP A CoACHInG TEAM
The team of coaches needs to be selected and developed over time. begin with a pioneer team who engage in training around coaching, developing their knowledge and communication skills, before a whole-school rollout is considered. An interim stage is a group coaching structure where several people are coached together. This is more time efficient and can be very productive in generating momentum.
TrAnSfEr oWnErSHIP To TEACHErS
Ultimately, with a good coaching system under way, teachers should be trusted and empowered to drive it. They own the documentation; they make their own record of reflections and action steps and this feeds into their coaching discussions. This is the opposite to when teachers are just on the receiving end of reports and feedback someone else writes. At first, it can seem like a big change with lots of structural demands and the need for a team of quite skilful coaches. However, with small steps and a good long-term approach, a great many schools are moving in this direction with great success. There’s something liberating about the whole philosophy around instructional coaching that seems to motivate people whilst simultaneously delivering those incremental changes to teachers’ habits that have an impact on students week in week out.
If you’re interested in finding more about it, grab hold of Jim Knight’s collection of books or take a look at our walkthrus books and materials via www.walkthrus. co.uk or the superb work done by Josh Goodridge and his colleages at https:// powerfulactionsteps.education
FEATURE
COLLEAGUES
Chronic illness a ects so many teachers in ways nobody else would truly understand. Tabitha McIntosh highlights some vital areas we should all be mindful of, when working with colleagues su ering from chronic illnesses.
By Tabitha McIntosh
Number 1. We don’t necessarily look ill at all
See that teacher striding purposefully towards the medical room? The one with the ridiculous boots who’s still laughing at the joke a passing Year 11 just made? She looks fi ne, doesn’t she? That’s me last Thursday. And I am not fi ne at all. I’m Type 1 diabetic and my blood glucose alarm has just gone o . In fi ve minutes I have to teach ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to a rowdy nurture group of 13 year olds, but my blood glucose is 3.1 and dropping rapidly and I have somehow forgotten to pack sugar tablets. You don’t know what that means. Almost no one I have ever worked with or taught will understand what that means. But it’s bad. Really bad. You’ll have to trust me. Which brings us to:
Number 2. We are worried that you think we’re imposters
No one understands a chronic illness better than the person who has it. If your line manager doesn’t take the time to learn about your condition and how it a ects you, a chronically ill person is left in a position where they have to explain their physical symptoms over and over again in ways that invade their privacy and violate their dignity. That’s one thing for someone like me whose illness is comparatively stigmafree, but another thing entirely for teachers with a stoma, or Crohn’s Disease or Irritable Bowel syndrome or any other condition that makes emergency toileting a regular feature of work. They should never be put into a situation where they need to explain intimate aspects of their physical health to sta or students. And doing so would violate employment law, because:
Number 3. We’re classed as disabled under the Equality Act 2010
Not all of us think of ourselves as disabled. Some of us reject the label altogether. But the law says we are. And therefore you are required to make reasonable accommodations for us wherever possible – the kind we routinely make for students but fi nd much harder to make for sta . How do we know you could be doing more to keep us in the classroom? Because:
Number 4. The Covid pandemic showed us that you could have accommodated us all along
Schools are infl exible institutions in many ways: there’s no getting around the demands of the timetable, no matter how tired, punch drunk from hypoglycaemia, or brain-fogged you may be feeling. But Covid teaching demonstrated that the accommodations and adaptations that were too di cult to make for us were… not too di cult after all. Because schools made them seamlessly when able bodied people needed them. Parent’s evenings that people like me struggle to manage and recover from? They went virtual instead. Occasionally having to work from home? Isolating teachers across the country streamed into their classes and taught live lessons. After school meetings and briefi ngs? They were broadcast and recorded so everyone could access them when and how they were able to. Which is why the most important thing you should know about your chronically ill colleagues is:
Number 5. The Covid pandemic has left us vulnerable, scared and angry
Not all risk is equal. When it comes to Covid, some people in schools are very much more equal than others. When in-person teaching resumed in Autumn 2020, my school, like so many others, went out of its way to protect me. Black and yellow caution tape was put around my desk to visually mark the two metre line of ‘safety.’ All of my students volunteered to wear masks in lessons, even though the government was advising against it. But as cases mounted across the country, I have never been more acutely aware of my body as a liability and my job as an existential risk. Type 1 diabetics are 3.5 times more likely to die from Covid than our non-diabetic peers, and su er serious disease complications at much higher rates. Every day felt like Russian Roulette. And as immunity starts to wane and the booster shot programme grinds slowly into action, that feeling is returning. We’re scared.
But there’s more than that. We saw people’s relief when the daily death tolls were qualifi ed with a note about the number of victims with ‘underlying conditions.’ That’s me. That’s us. We are the people with underlying conditions. We are your friends, your colleagues, your partners, the lady in ridiculous boots that you passed while she was striding to the medical room just before Period 5. Our lives matter too. Don’t forget that.
“NOT ALL TREASURE IS SILVER AND GOLD.”
Financial incentives for teachers might not be the panacea they seem. Headteacher Sam Strickland explains why we should be wary of the latest Government plan to recruit teachers in Science, Maths and Computing for challenging schools.
By Sam Strickland
At the Conservative Party Conference held in Manchester during October 2021 the Prime Minister made a commitment pledge. He offered teachers in the early phase of their careers a salary boost of up to £3000 tax free to teach Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Computing in challenging/ difficult schools. These payments are set to be in place for the first five years of any given teacher’s career, with a view to both recruiting and retaining specialist teachers in schools and areas that need them the most. In total this approach will cost the government £60 million. Political critics of this policy approach argue that this is nothing more than a recycling of a previously similar and failed policy that offered teachers in the same subject areas up to £7500 in bonus payments.
At face value this sounds like a generous commitment pledge. To those outside the profession it will seem like another example of gold plated contracts for teachers who only work 9am to 3pm and receive 13 weeks off a year. However, at face value it is very easy to ignore what is potentially a ‘Fool’s Gold.’ This commitment pledge misses so many of the deeper, systemic and system-wide issues that make working in a challenging/ difficult school all the less inviting. It also makes a number of critical assumptions, which I feel we need to challenge.
Fundamentally, this is why I have cited numerous times that any given Secretary of State should engage in meaningful dialogue with the profession and with school leaders. As a leader myself I have no desire to see our education system fall apart and I have no desire to offer bogus advice. My MO, like that of so many of my colleagues in this profession, is to do the right thing by our schools and by the children we serve. So there are a number of issues I would like to present, as follows:
Firstly, where is the supply chain of teachers specialising in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Computing? Take Physics, for example, where only one in four of all secondary schools nationally have a Physics specialist. In taking a Physics teacher from one school to position them into another we are in actual fact robbing Peter to pay Paul. I work in Northamptonshire and I can very safely and sadly state that Maths and Computing teachers are like gold dust. There isn’t a huge fishing pool of these people. Of those that are available and willing to move schools there is also a quality issue. Not all Maths and Computing teachers are cut from the same cloth. Some will require far more significant levels of professional development, training and support than others. This presents a huge challenge to schools in an Ofsted category, as they simply do not have the luxury of time to upskill staff.
Then there is the challenge of moving school, namely of establishing yourself in a new school, of learning the new school’s systems, processes and procedures. Having moved schools many times myself I would argue that it takes a good term to establish yourself in a new setting and a year to actually truly learn the school. Again, schools in a category do not have the luxury of this time.
Secondly, there is a pay issue. I have personally cited multiple times that teacher wages are not high enough. At present the starting salary of a teacher is £25,714, with the average salary £41,900. The average sounds significant but it takes, on average, 9 years to hit the top end of the pay scale as a UPS3 teacher following four years of degree and teacher training preparation. So, arguably, it takes 13 years to reach this dizzy height.
When you compare this salary to an engineer whose average salary is £48,000, with a senior engineer earning roughly £72,000 and at the highest, a salary in excess of £150,000 then suddenly teaching is on a back foot. Added on top of this is the small matter of an annual bonus that can range from £1,000 to £30,800 per year. The financial remuneration a teacher, especially with a Maths, Physics, Chemistry or Computing background can command, dwarfs into insignificance by comparison. Whilst it is an uncomfortable truth, and those of us in education want to cite that teaching is like a calling, the hard reality is that there is a huge issue at the sourcing level.
In short, just how attractive and lucrative
