Coaching, mentoring and teacher development

Pauline Brown, Programme and Research Lead for Red Kite Teaching School Hub, shares her thoughts on coaching, mentoring and teacher development

High quality Professional Development is one of the biggest school improvement levers we have in affecting student outcomes. Consequently, coaching or mentoring is a vital part of any teacher educator’s repertoire, from trainee teachers to executive leaders (Sims et al., 2021). Practitioners, novice or otherwise, need forms of high-quality social support to ‘try out’ and embed new practices in their own contexts. This is where coaching can be a highly effective option to support change (EEF, 2021).

High quality coaching or mentoring is vital for novice teachers. Even having completed a demanding teacher training year, we know Early Career Teachers (ECTs) are still vulnerable to leaving the profession and still need to embed pedagogy. ECTs need intensive mentoring and crucially pastoral support from an experienced, skilled and supportive mentor.

However, one-to-one coaching is a labour-intensive and costly professional development option, critically dependent on protected regular time to execute, in addition to up-front training for the coach or mentor. This is why the Early Career Framework (ECF) is supported with additional ‘back-fill’ funding for schools to implement weekly mentor sessions and access additional up-front and on-going mentor training. At no point in time has the school system needed more effective coaches or mentors and currently there is substantial funding, through the ECF Fully Funded Induction Programme, for schools to increase their mentoring capacity, benefitting first ECTs, and also the wider school community through the coaching capital accrued.

Coaching is not a new to schools, many schools mentor trainee teachers or deliver their own coaching programmes for teachers or leaders. In fact, the plethora of coaching and mentoring models available to schools can seem overwhelming. Many teacher educators could feel confused by the range of approaches available or pressurised to implement the latest trend.

This is where we need to remind ourselves of medical research and the ethical principle of ‘do no harm’, avoiding change for change’s sake. Forcing a new approach that does not have ‘fit and feasibility’ with your school context does risk doing harm, especially when it involves coaching relationships (Collins Kevan, 2018). Therefore, teacher educators should not deliberate too much, or be overly concerned about selecting a coaching model based on the latest evidence. Context is king when implementing coaching in school workforce with finite capacity and the evidence-base for teacher development is not straightforward or robust in demonstrating a ‘winner’, research evidence rarely does!

In terms of wider teacher development, the evidence on coaching is in fact similar to other forms of professional development:

“Across the three forms that we identify (instructional coaching, lesson study, and strong teacher learning communities), the average effect sizes are similar. The confidence intervals for each of the three forms also overlap to a large extent. This suggests that none of these three forms is clearly more effective than others.” (Sims et al., 2021).

What is more, the quality of the coach or the mentor and the protected time to foster a coaching relationship is what will largely define the success of coaching or mentoring. Implementation matters.

Additionally, ECF providers use a range of coaching and mentoring approaches from the directive instructional coaching offered by Ambition and Teach First to ONSIDE mentoring, advocated by University College London’s ECF programme, where the focus is building a supportive relationship through non-judgmental mentoring (Hobson, 2016).

Therefore, as a teacher-educator working with leaders and teachers across a range of types and sizes of schools, coaching, to me, is an implementation challenge. How can the best evidence on coaching translate effectively to a primary school of 40 students with a teaching headteacher as an ECF mentor? Or how do we support schools to effectively mentor ITT trainees, and at the same time, implement instructional coaching for their Early Career Teachers?

Coaching may appear to be the latest school improvement silver bullet. But schools must evaluate coaching approaches in relation to their individual school contexts. We must also guard against our profession’s insatiable pro-innovation bias. Instructional coaching is currently the new kid on the block, but this doesn’t mean it will be the best option for your school, especially if your school already has an effective form of social support or coaching in place. As Sir Kevan Collins reminds us, at the outset of the Education Endowment Fund’s School’s Guide to Implementation:

“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how great an educational idea or intervention is on paper; what really matters is how it manifests itself in the day-to-day work of teachers.” (Collins Kevan, 2018).

Find out more about our ECF programme and ONSIDE coaching here.

Bibliography

E.E.F. (2021) ‘Effective Professional Development,’.

Collins Kevan (2018) ‘Putting Evidence To Work: a School’S Guide To Implementation Guidance Report.’ Education Endowment Foundation pp. 1–42.

Hobson, A. J. (2016) ‘Judgementoring and how to avert it: introducing ONSIDE Mentoring for beginning teachers.’ International journal of mentoring and coaching in education. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 5(2) pp. 87–110.

Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Van Herwegen, J. and Anders, J. (2021) ‘What are the Characteristics of Effective Teacher Professional Development? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.’ Education Endowment Foundation, (October) p. 196.