Simon Garrill, Chief Executive Officer, Education for the 21st Century
Overcoming Barriers
At the heart of our approach has been drawing on the best evidence we have about professional development, instructional coaching and change management. We chose to work with Steplab because of the strong evidence base for their coaching model and because the resources and tools they provide helped us address many of the challenges we faced. Combining the EEF model for change management, alongside support from Steplab, we were able to overcome each of our barriers and begin to embed an effective trust-wide approach to professional development:
1. Professional culture
To create a more conducive culture for effective professional development and to lay the foundations for coaching, we had to shift the focus from judgement-based lesson observations to ensuring that teachers received regular no-stakes feedback that genuinely supported their development.
To achieve this, we took a deliberate approach to changing our culture. We sought advice and models from generous trusts, such as Dixons, and we established teams to review areas like performance-related pay, lesson observation and quality assurance.
As a result, we changed our performance management policy and our pay policy to uncouple them from lesson observations. We cancelled our previous tri-yearly observations, consulted with unions, and agreed to pilot a model of drop-ins to support instructional coaching and begin building towards an open-door culture of ‘improving not proving’.
In the first year, we started with a ‘soft launch’ with a presentation from Jane Fletcher from the Aldridge Foundation who shared her expertise and experience on the power of coaching. We then developed our first team of twenty coaches, with advocates in each school, to slowly build our coaching culture through an initial light-touch approach; testing what worked and ensuring we could develop the systems we needed for our wider-scale launch.
2. Training
To improve the effectiveness of our coaching model, we needed to ensure that teachers could see its benefits. To do this, we needed to train skilled and knowledgeable coaches who could give valuable feedback to teachers that would help improve their practice. We set ourselves the target of ensuring every teacher in the trust had a skilled coach within two years. We fell slightly short of this initial target but it acted as a clear marker of our ambition and a reflection of our values.
Part of this commitment was to create extra capacity within our central team to help support schools to train their coaches and help with implementation. Of course, resources are finite and we had to make some deep changes to the central charge. The work of Dixons helped inspire us in this. We saw it as a ‘bold move’ and we needed to resource it so that we could build a strong team of coaches that could help our schools improve.
As our programme developed, we continued to build capacity, recruiting a Professional Growth Director across the trust. Throughout the year we invested in high quality training to continue to develop our coaching teams to ensure we had the capacity we needed. We also learnt quickly that unless the headteacher is the champion and leader of instructional coaching within the school, the delivery will fail. Training heads was key and their buy-in determined success.
3. Systems
Another crucial element of implementation was in system design. The deeper we went into considering the changes we needed to make, the more we realised we needed to create real alignment across the schools to launch at scale. This included aligning our school days to allow for common twilights across the schools, plus adding two extra training days in the year to signal the value we were giving to instructional coaching. These additional days, disaggregated into twilight sessions, became the foundation for deliberate practice. We also aligned teaching allocations and allocated a protected time for coaching conversations to take place.
We then worked with schools to create a framework for teaching using a common language based on research-informed practices which schools then adapted to their contexts. We had long discussions about what we would standardise, align and leave autonomous. Some of our schools used trust frameworks whilst others thrived on creating their own.
Based on our work with Dixons, we provided schools with a decision-making grid to support schools’ autonomy in how they developed their coaching models. Schools chose whether to coach weekly or fortnightly or whether leaders should also coach and be coached. The decision-making grids provided the framework for delivery. This systematic approach ensured teachers and leaders had the time and capacity to embed effective coaching in ways that were flexible and context-specific for their schools.
4. Responsive leadership
Several of our schools now have incredibly effective coaching models in place. They have a full cohort of coaches and there are tangible signs that it is leading to less ‘in-school variation’, a higher quality culture for children and for staff, and a renewed sense of self-confidence.
We have learned it is vital to be responsive to the different contexts and experiences of our schools. We continually evaluate and refine our approaches, utilising our Steplab platform to identify patterns and provide support. We set clear targets for the numbers of coaches in each of our schools, we support twilight sessions, observe, and quality assure to support fidelity to our coaching models. Most importantly, the trust team stands side by side with schools in addressing issues and supporting delivery so that improvements are sustained. The conversations are challenging, candid, and open, but always supportive. We are in this together.
Final thoughts
We committed to viewing professional development and the implementation of coaching as a long-term, sustainable approach to school improvement and we embraced the process and energy required to make this successful. We learn every day: we see great successes and use these to improve, and we encounter challenges where we have to adapt and reset.
As a trust leader, I am as passionate about instructional coaching as I ever was because I see how our schools, our staff, and our pupils are benefiting from its implementation. There is less variation in the quality of teaching, between schools and within schools, and because of this, our pupils are better served by our trust.
We have systematically and intentionally leveraged the capacity we are able to offer as a trust to help make our professional development model effective. Over the course of the last two years, we have got as many things wrong as we have right and there’s no shame in that. The marker in the distance, the research that we followed, and the challenging target we set to ensure every teacher benefits from a highly skilled coach, remains our guiding light. We remember the lessons and remember this is a journey, and it should be fun!
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