My work with schools and colleges – across the UK and in a range of international schools – has helped me develop my understanding of how coaching can work as a part of a professional development programme. It feels like a continual field study, matching concepts and principles to implementation realities.
Coaching needs a series of interactions sustained over time if it’s going to lead to a teacher teaching more effectively. A lack of structure and/or time can kill all good intentions stone dead. Where coaching is working, coaches have time, there’s a reasonable frequency to the interactions and people think of it as a process, not an event. You can have one-off coaching sessions but they are unlikely to make much difference unless the teacher is engaged in a wider cycle of iterative reflection and feedback. If you want coaching to be part of your school improvement process, give it the time it needs and create a structure for it that withstands the random forces that knock things around in day to day school life. There are lots of ways to lock in the time if you give it enough status in your priority list.
From what I’ve seen, coaching is a process that can happen successfully with a range of group sizes: it does not have to be individual, a 1 to 1. To some extent I feel that in most schools, well-established team processes can translate into coaching processes reasonably easily and given the typical capacity for this kind of work, is more likely to succeed than going straight into an individualised coaching process. A team or small group process helps to weave in curriculum thinking but mainly it harnesses the power of collective endeavour. A good team process has a strong motivational aspect – that sense of all being in it together with shared problems and a pool of ideas to draw from.
