Simon Garrill, Chief Executive Officer, Education for the 21st Century
One of the most powerful ways that leaders can improve schools is by learning from one another. As a trust, we wanted to share, through this blog post, some of the challenges we faced when improving our schools and how we focused on the professional development of our teachers and leaders to overcome them. As we came through the pandemic, it was clear that we needed a model of professional development across the trust that would accelerate learning, improve teaching, and build a positive culture amongst our staff. Through this, we would be able to create sustainable school improvement.
As part of our development for leaders, the trust made the decision to enrol several headteachers and executive leaders in the Exemplary Leadership Programme. It was on this programme that we first heard of instructional coaching, and of Steplab. We made the decision to move towards an individualised professional development approach for staff, powered by instructional coaching. But we also knew that a whole-trust implementation approach like this needed to be carefully considered. So, how could we go about this?
First, we identified several barriers to effective professional development which in turn were acting as barriers to our school improvement.
Four Barriers
1. Professional Culture - How could we develop a culture of openness to feedback and commitment to ongoing development? (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Joyce & Showers, 2002; Marsh et al., 2017)
The pervasive culture in our schools was not conducive to supporting teachers to develop and get better in their practice. Schools had been used to graded systems of lesson evaluation with lesson observations often linked to quality assurance or external visits such as trust reviews, Ofsted, or ‘deep dives’.
Pay was closely linked to lesson observation and any feedback on teaching tended to be broad and vague. Observations would include feedback to ‘increase challenge’, ‘improve pace’ or ‘use data more effectively’. They rarely helped teachers focus on the mechanics of their practice or on their ingrained behaviours and as a result, most teachers found it extremely hard to respond to feedback.
The approach centred on judging lesson quality rather than supporting teachers to improve. Therefore, developing a culture of openness to feedback and commitment to ongoing development was a key challenge.
2. Training - How we can recruit and train a team of skilled, knowledgeable coaches? (Gibbons et al., 2017; Gibbons & Cobb, 2016
Across the trust, all eight schools had different approaches to professional development. Some were beginning to employ coaching models, but there were very few examples of deliberate practice and there was no common language for teaching or feedback.
Training, systems and frameworks for effective coaching were not in place so even where there were pockets of coaching happening in schools, this was not as effective as it could be. Furthermore, there was a small minority of leaders and staff that were unconvinced that coaching approaches to professional development were worthwhile as the models they had experienced to that point had not helped improve their practice.
Without this buy-in, or the models and training in place for good coaching, it was difficult to develop great coaches and in turn, to embed consistently high quality professional development across our schools that all teachers and leaders could see value in.
3. Systems - How should we structure our programme so that it delivers results in a way that balances with other school systems, and delivers efficiency? (Boguslav et al., 2022)
One of the greatest barriers was the different systems each school had in allocating time and structures for professional development. We had eight very different schools, with varied school days. Some closed early for CPD on a Friday. Some squeezed professional development into five inset days, whilst others allocated no time for professional development.
There were also, as there are in all schools, competing priorities such as budget, curriculum development, new behaviour systems and a newly introduced MIS and recruitment. The sheer quantity of what needed to be improved across our schools meant it was challenging to bring everyone together to help focus on a common aim.
In addition, our teaching allocations were not standardised. There was no expectation that in any given school, staff would have the same amount of time available. We therefore needed to structure a programme that delivered results in a way that balanced with other school systems.
4. Responsive leadership - How can we gather information about what’s happening when our programme is up and running? How can we respond effectively to address issues and deliver continued improvement? (Blasé & Blasé, 2003; Bryk et al., 2015)
Change management is challenging enough in a single school. We are by no means a large trust but launching, developing, and sustaining wide-scale change, required considerable evaluation and responsiveness to ensure long-term success across all of our schools. Once we began to make changes to our professional development approach, we had to ensure we could gather information and respond effectively to address issues and increase fidelity in what we wanted to achieve.
Finding effective ways to help evaluate progress and to support further training and refinement is particularly challenging at scale as it is difficult to get a strong picture of schools’ needs in order to adapt and support in the right places and in the right ways.
To address these challenges, we needed to find agile and effective approaches to professional development that would be most likely to make a real difference to our teachers and pupils. We decided that our ‘best bet’ for overcoming these barriers and for improving our schools through teacher development was to introduce instructional coaching. Throughout this process we have learned a number of important lessons about teaching, about leadership, about culture, and about how to overcome some of the barriers that we, like many schools, face.
References
Blasé, J., & Blase, J. (2003). Handbook of instructional leadership: How successful principals promote teaching and learning. Corwin Press.
Boguslav, A., Cohen, J., Katz, V., Sadowski, K., Wiseman, E., & Wyckoff, J. (2022). Implementing targeted professional development at scale in the District of Columbia Public Schools [Manuscript submitted for publication.].
Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.
Gibbons, L. K., & Cobb, P. (2016). Content-focused coaching: Five key practices. The Elementary School Journal, 117(2), 237–260.
Gibbons, L. K., & Cobb, P. (2017). Focusing on teacher learning opportunities to identify potentially productive coaching activities. Journal of Teacher Education, 68(4), 411–425.
Gibbons, L. K., Kazemi, E., & Lewis, R. M. (2017). Developing collective capacity to improve mathematics instruction: Coaching as a lever for school-wide improvement. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 46, 231–250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmathb.2016.12.002
Joyce, B. R., & Showers, B. (2002). Student achievement through staff development (Vol. 3). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Alexandria, VA.
Marsh, J. A., Bush-Mecenas, S., Strunk, K. O., Lincove, J. A., & Huguet, A. (2017). Evaluating Teachers in the Big Easy: How Organizational Context Shapes Policy Responses in New Orleans. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 39(4), 539–570. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373717698221
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