Three Lessons Learned from Coaching Teachers

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Lesson 1: the short cut can waste time

I often saw Jack* explaining an idea to students and there would be some whispering. He seemed not to notice or at least he appeared to ignore it. He also let students talk during independent work when it seemed as if he wanted them to concentrate.

I was Jack’s (out of school) mentor. His line manager, the Head of Science, would be urging me to get Jack to follow the behaviour policy and make sure he waited for, and insisted on, silence. In our coaching sessions, I modelled and we practised waiting for 100% silence before speaking, positive reminders, setting students off on independent work and staying at the front of the room to make sure all students get into the work before circulating etc. Nothing seemed to work.

I tried explaining the importance of attention for learning (we had already covered this in his training). Again, it didn’t make a difference. Jack could tell me why it was a good idea to wait for and insist on silence but never seemed to make this a concern that drove his teaching decisions.

I sat with him one day and broke with our usual structured conversation. He seemed exasperated, and it wasn’t fun to watch. I asked him something along the lines of ‘why don’t you seem to mind when they talk?’. He said ‘They’re teenagers. They talk. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t help myself – it’s natural.’

And looking back, this was the turning point. I realised this decision-driver wasn’t going to go away for Jack. But it could be channelled. Where in the lesson could he give them time to talk (productively)? We built in more opportunities. It wasn’t overnight, but Jack became much more insistent on silence at key points knowing he had a task coming up where they could properly air their views.

My big mistake was that I’d assumed Jack and I were on the same page about the situation: I assumed he knew he had to get silence but just hadn’t honed his practice enough to do it. It taught me the value of uncovering teachers’ decision drivers rather than jumping to honing actions.

Lesson learned: actions are important but if we skip the decision making, the shortcut can be a waste of time.

Lesson 2: don’t dismantle what you don’t understand

There’s a rule of thumb people talk about – Chesterton’s fence. If there’s a fence, don’t remove it until you understand why it was put there in the first place. I learned the hard way (it took a while) to apply this to coaching.

I coached Anna when she was a trainee teacher. She had been a brilliant teacher and open to any support she could get. At this point in time, she was in her fifth year and second in department.  I was in her school a lot because I mentored six trainees there. She asked me to come and watch her with one of her classes (testament to her openness) where she was working on a strategy to better gather data on their understanding as she circulated.  I hadn’t seen her teach in a few years and thought this was bound to be a treat.

Strangely, it wasn’t.

Anna did a bit of input, read some passages from the textbook with the class and had all the students work on a set of questions in silence. She circulated, provided some 1:1 feedback and did a little whole-class feedback but much of the lesson was just silent work with the odd bit of input.

This struck me as odd. But I’ll admit I remember feeling relieved I had something to coach on. I immediately thought she had mistook ‘explicit instruction’ to be just tell them stuff and get them to work. I came prepared to explain how explicit instruction is so much more dynamic than that and involves a lot of questioning etc. I even found a video model. I showed up to our coaching ready to model some ‘we do’ instruction.

Anna very quickly sussed me out. She worked out that I was suggesting she get students far more involved. She explained that the class had been the most challenging she had ever had (this shocked me as they seemed really calm and engaged). She’d worked hard to get them to pay attention and learn. Eventually, she resorted to what she called ‘silence and support’ and results had been brilliant. Students said it was their favourite lesson – they learned something and felt proud of themselves. They were sick of getting told off and needed calm and quiet to focus. She was surprised by this as she’d thought the tactic would feel like a punishment, but it ended up being quite the opposite. Anna wasn’t opposed to changing the teaching style at some point but for now, this was working. She wanted support with how to capture data better as she circulated… as she’d told me originally.

I’d like to say I learned a lesson straight away from this but it actually took many more mistakes. I made assumptions about teacher’s teaching without understanding their decision drivers many times – a good few when I was coaching outside of my subject area. As an English specialist, I can’t guess all the concerns driving a science teacher’s decisions. The eventual lesson learned though, I think I’ve only just found the language to describe to you:

Coaches see usually >1% of a teacher’s teaching.** This, coupled with the fact that we all perceive the same situations in at least slightly different ways, means we need to check the assumptions we are making about a teacher’s teaching. The coach’s role is to first surface the teacher’s thinking, i.e. their mental model, of the situation.

Part of the issue also stemmed from the way I viewed my role as a coach. I felt the way I could add value was by spotting a problem, solving it, then explaining it to the teacher through the medium of coaching. Reframing this role has helped. I watch lessons and capture what’s seemingly going well and find a situation that jars with my mental model of the way those types of situations work. This ‘jarring’ feeling is similar to what Gary Klein refers to as a ‘tilt’ (Klein, 2013). I map this situation out as this uncovers all my assumptions about the teacher’s goal, their decision drivers (what I’ve previously called concerns) and the problem. But I hold this lightly because it’s a deliberate attempt to map my assumptions. I know I need to find out what the teacher’s mental model was too.

This isn’t very comfortable because even though I can plan what I might coach the teacher to do (technique-wise), I can’t be sure it will be that. This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t prepare before the coaching, but it does mean I’ll need to hold it lightly. Adaptive experts also seem to hold their hunches lightly and reform them in light of the data (Crawford et al., 2005), so you’ll be in good company! We can’t let this preparation give us blind spots or our role as a coach - to provide a wider lens on the situation than the teacher can have in that moment (Kohlbeck, 2024) - is diminished.

Lesson learned: don’t dismantle what you don’t understand.

Lesson 3: it comes down to better decision making

I speak to a lot of schools and trusts who are using coaching as a form of professional development for their teachers. For a while now, they seem to be saying the same thing in different ways. They are usually variations on these two:

“Teachers are doing the techniques but not at the right time.”

“We’ve got more consistency but need to break free of a compliance model.”

“I’m not sure how to train coaches to spot important things to coach on.”

When we train teachers by focusing on actions, we get overgeneralised actions. They won’t be done at the right time for the right reason.

To be clear, learning techniques is really important: experts have a vast repertoire of techniques they can use in “a variety of ways to get things done” (Sieck et al., 2007). We must train on these, and they are a fundamental part of cognitive coaching. But, actions and techniques must be a logical conclusion to a decision making process or teachers won’t use them at the right time for the right reasons. And, just as (if not more) important, by skipping decision making, we are robbing teachers of the thinking that makes them professionals not technicians (Kavanagh et al., 2020).

This means we can’t keep doing things in the same way and expect to get better results.

We also can’t expect more processes to help us escape a situation where processes are holding us back. If it was as easy as giving coaches a list of things to check for in order of importance, there would be no issue with what coaches picked and all teachers would systematically improve. But we can’t process our way out of a process problem. Teaching is uncertain and unpredictable and requires judgement to do well. When people are operating in complex environments you have to look at their thinking as well as their actions (Crandall et al., 2006). Cognitive coaching is designed to do both. Does it use a coaching process? Yes. Is it rigid? No. In almost all cases, it involves some reframing of what you’re already doing, and tools coaches can use flexibly to coach much better.

Need proof?

Listen to the podcast Coaching Unpacked for examples of high-quality coaching.

Join our free webinar: Cognitive Coaching: Coaching for Adaptive Expertise for more.

Get in touch to find out how we can support you, your school and your trust to supercharge coaching: sarahcottinghatt@cognitive-coaching.org

*Stories are real, names are fictional.
**This point came from Tom Sherrington’s blog but I’m struggling to locate which one!

References

Crawford, V. M., Schlager, M., Toyama, Y., Riel, M., & Vahey, P. (2005, April). Characterizing adaptive expertise in science teaching. In Annual meeting of the american educational research association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (pp. 1-26).

Kavanagh, S.S., Metz, M., Hauser, M., Fogo, B., Taylor, M.W. and Carlson, J., 2020. Practicing responsiveness: Using approximations of teaching to develop teachers’ responsiveness to students’ ideas. Journal of Teacher Education, 71(1), pp.94-107.

Kohlbeck, A. (2024). In conversation.

 Sieck, W.R., Klein, G., Peluso, D.A., Smith, J.L., Harris-Thompson, D. and Gade, P.A., (2007). FOCUS: A model of sensemaking. Fairborn, OH: Klein Associates, p.10.