COACHING SKILLS FOR HIGH IMPACT TEACHING

COACHING SKILLS FOR HIGH IMPACT TEACHING

Nike Audu & Geoff Barton

Saturday, April 22, 2023

PowerPoints available to download at www.geoffbarton.co.uk


The Day:

1. Education coaching: its impact on whole- school, teacher and pupil performance

2. Essential coaching skills for the classroom

3. Developing the micro-skills of teaching

4. Structuring effective lessons

5. Top tips


SESSION ONE

Education Coaching:Its impact on whole-school, teacher and pupil

performance


Whole-school culture:Some opening assumptions

Michael Fullan:“20 years in teaching is … 1 year, repeated 20 times”

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• Good teaching is a set of learnable skills, not a God-given gift• Performance management is about performance• We should encourage experimentation and occasional disasters• We should be intolerant of mediocrity• A genuine evaluation culture builds reflection• Real change comes from within



How…?



• Have a clear view of what the essential skills of teaching / tutoring / behaviour are• Map them out• Build everything else around them


Peak performance will happen when you permit your imagination to study, explore and grow.

Motivation is training or programming the creative mind to desire or expect the best, plan and work for the best. Whatever you do in life, you are going to work hard for it, so you might as well choose to work hard for what you really love and want to do.

Education means awareness and use of what works. Things that work have a pattern, and this can be learned thoroughly and applied

1COACHING SKILLS FOR HIGH IMPACT TEACHING


SESSION TWO

Essential Classroom Coaching Skills:

• Listening, modelling & thinking skills• Performance coaching to raise pupils’ aspirations• Techniques for change: Overcoming barriers to learning

The Magic of Goal Setting

• Research shows that people who have achieved success in different walks of life had precisely written goals or ‘well formed outcomes’-WFO in (NLP literature)• SMART :- Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic,Time-phased

• Why does goal setting work?• We think and behave in a way consistent with our beliefs• Get pupils to write down goals and review them regularly (create the opportunity)

2

How our brain works

• The Reticular Activating System (R.A.S.)

• Thoughts (Self-talk)• Comfort zone

(Feelings and emotions)

5, ex 2

Coaching works

• Value of beliefs and attitudes Reticular Activating System (R.A.S) and observationsThought forms and self-talk (Neuro-linguistic Programming) Feeling and emotions (comfort zones)

5 ex 3

Links between beliefs, thoughts, feelings and experience

PERCEPTIONS(R.A.S)

Imagination

THOUGHTS(Self-talk)

Information

FEELINGS(EMOTIONS)

Intuition

BELIEFS / ATTITUDES

7: bridge

Techniques for change

• Positive listings and reflection- a simple strategy to reinforce positive beliefs, thoughts, feelings and perceptions

• Reframing - a powerful strategy for changing negative feelings and the effect on performance

• Create powerful anchors – as expressive holding forms

• Pattern breaking (distraction from the negative, attention on the positive technique)

• Imagination – a natural ability to bring to mind what is seen, heard and felt

• Rational analysis – an objective analysis of objects

• Learning Log - (contact book, diary, visual journal)

• Music and Symbols (Image, logo-NIKE, theme songs, anthems)

7

Emotional barriers and solutions• Negative memories

(Trigger: recurrence of negative performance memories -will lead to negative self-talk & emotional discomfort, the R.A.S. will notice things that are negative, poor results & that reinforce the memory)

• Negative expectations - pupils project negative expectations of their future

• A limiting belief (can be challenged & then create a better one)

• Inappropriate emotions (fear, anxiety etc triggered by an external threat)

• Other damaging thought patterns as barriers: jealousy, Self sabotage, unrealistic competitiveness, mindless gossip and lack of discipline

• Judgemental beliefs and attitudes: Educated desire means programming for positive results, self-confidence and high self- esteem.

• Goal setting for desired outcomes – using a ‘solution focused’ approach or systematic approach to a ‘Well-formed outcome’

7/8

The Magic of Goal Setting

• Research shows that people who have achieved success in different walks of life had precisely written goals or ‘well formed outcomes’-WFO in (NLP literature)• SMART :- Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic,Time-phased

• Why does goal setting work?• We think and behave in a way consistent with our beliefs• Get pupils to write down goals and review them regularly (create the opportunity)

8






SESSION THREE

Developing the Micro-skills of Teaching:

• Creating a self-evaluation culture• What are the skills and qualities that effective teachers have?• How to make these explicit and build staff development around them?


Part One: Creating a self-evaluation culture


Creating a self-evaluation culture:My 3 gurus

Carol FitzGibbon (Durham):

Get data into school life, without necessarily doing anything with it



John MacBeath (Cambridge):

“We should measure what we value, not value what we can measure”



David Reynolds (Exeter):

Aim to be a ‘high-reliability’ organisation …


Such complex social organizations as air traffic control towers continuously run the risk of disastrous and obviously unacceptable failure.

The public would heavily discount several thousand consecutive days of efficiently monitoring and controlling the very crowded skies over Chicago or London if two jumbo jets were to collide over either city.

Through fog, snow, computer-system failures, and nearby tornadoes, in spite of thousands of flights per day in busy skies, such a collision has never happened above any city, a remarkable level of performance reliability …


… By contrast, in the U.S., one of the most highly educated nations on earth, within any group of 100 students beginning first grade in a particular year, approximately 16 will not have obtained either their high school diploma or a General Education Development certificate 12-13 years later.

In Britain, just under half of all 16-year-old pupils will not have the benchmark of 5 or more high grade public examination passes in the national system. Obviously, many nations have even lower levels of educational performance.


Creating a self-evaluation culture:

Therefore, for me, …

Whilst coaching is about teacher development

It’s also about student entitlement to good teaching



Forms of self-evaluation:

• Student performance data - results, targets, etc

• Ethos data

• Questionnaires and focus groups

• Faculty reviews - inc observation sheets … plus …

21-27



Bedding this in as genuinely SELF-evaluation

8 -13


TALKING POINT

How might you use these approaches in your own school?


The essential skills of good teachers



TALKING POINT

What do you think are the 3 most important ingredients of good teachers …?

… and bad?



How to customise these for your school

How to spell out the essential skills explicitly

• (staff handbook, differentiated training (eg literacy grid), review cycle, observation sheets

How to develop a shared approach to observation, with protocols, and specific issues as focus

• using observation triads, questions rather than comments …

2-5



How do you feel the lesson went?

Why did you start the lesson with activity X?

How many students do you think took part in the discussion?

Were you conscious of whether boys or girls answered?

Why did you stand where you did for the plenary?




How to provide differentiated training?

8 -13

Reading Writing Speaking & listening Use layout and language to make texts accessible –

eg white space, typographical features,

summaries, bullets, short paragraphs

Be clear and explicit about the conventions

of the writing you expect from students – eg audience, purpose,

layout, key words and phrases, level of

formality

Using a variety of groupings for structured

talk – pairs, same-sex, friendship, triads, ability

groups

Using a range of strategies to support students’

reading – eg reading aloud, key words and glossaries,

word banks, display, paired reading, talking about texts

before answering

Providing assessment criteria and models of appropriate text types

Setting objectives for talk and providing language

models – eg level of formality, key words and

phrases

Spelling – marking no more than 3-5 key

spellings per work, writing the correct spelling in the

margin with the error identified; students putting these into spelling pages in

the middle of exercise books; using starters /

word games / mnemonics / display / rules / words

within words to support students’ spelling

Using shared composition to show students how to write

Providing alternatives to traditional Q&A

approaches – eg open questions, thinking time, big questions, no-hands, paired consultation time,

dealing with answers, prompts, answer starters

Eg:

Essential

Literacy


TALKING POINT

1. What are the good features of coaching in your school?

2. How well do you articulate a shared view of effective learning & teaching?

3. How do you ensure consistency across teams?

4. How do you develop the teaching skills of people at different phases?

5. What are your points for action? QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor







SESSION FOUR

Understanding & Structuring Effective Lessons:

• Using coaching to improve behaviour • Personalised learning & coaching: making it work in your classroom


What do we know about effective behaviour management?

“Young people today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age.”

Peter the Hermit, 1274


Some principles:

Good behaviour management is a prerequisite for effective teaching and learning

Again, we can identify what effective teachers do

We shouldn’t tip-toe round the issue

A heavy focus on systems can create problems

Keep it simple, and light

Don’t use charismatic teachers as mentors

Take a long-term approach: not quick hits

6/7

What we know from research into behaviour management …

Reactive approaches to difficult behaviour can and do make matters worse.

Schools make a difference: pupils’ behaviour does NOT simply mirror behaviour at home.

There are higher rates of difficulty and exclusion in schools with lower confidence in their ability to handle the problem.

Proactive schools have better behaviour – early intervention and preventative measures.

Schools that form tight communities do better – spectrum of adult roles, engaging students personally and getting them involved. These schools have a more diffuse teacher role, with frequent contact between staff and students in contexts other than the classroom.

Collaborative approaches lead to better behaviour – rather than individual teachers isolated.

Schools that promote self-discipline and active involvement do better.

Teachers engage in 1000 interactions or more a day. It is closest to being an air traffic controller. Teachers therefore react and make quick decisions. If they do not have a way of coping with the busyness they can experience tiredness and stress.

The action teachers take in response to a ‘discipline problem’ has no consistent relationship with their managerial success in the classroom. However, what teachers do before misbehaviour occurs is shown to be crucial.

In well-disciplined schools, teachers handle all or most of the routine discipline problems themselves. Indeed, the over-use of hierarchical referrals is a characteristic of high excluding schools.

One of the most worrying assumptions is that if mild punishment does not prove effective, then we should try more severe punishment. In other words, one is led into a false escalation, rather like the postcard notice: “The beatings will continue until morale improves”.

Chris Watkins, Institute of Education

16


Develop a ‘house style’

Before:

• Set out expectations

• Model the behaviour and language you expect

After:

• Give students choices

• Avoid the public arena by being prepared to defer issues

14/15


TALKING POINT

What are the implications for your own school?


SESSION FOUR

Understanding & Structuring Effective Lessons:

• Using coaching to improve behaviour • Personalised learning & coaching: making it work in your classroom

Learning: performance strategies• Promoting positive

communication or rapport• Developing Self-esteem • Increasing motivation:

setting learning goals, and the steps to get there i.e. performance goals - write it down

• Raising achievement is key

• Framing positive expectations

• Giving immediate and Positive feedback

• Listening / questioning• Modelling, Thinking skills

• Making learning count (link to career, hobby and life goals)

• Accessing VAK • Group work – Learning together• Promoting recognition and

responsibility for each pupil / learner

• Creating interesting and meaningful activities - Mind map, Games,

• Providing more choices• Use curiosity / anticipation• Promoting active reflection

9: reminder


SESSION FIVE

Top Tips for Effective Coaching:The coaching process

Creating a coaching culture

TOP TIPS: COACHING

1. Talk with them and listen, use the insight gained to modify your relationship, expectations and presentation

2. Be genuinely interested in your pupils3. Learn alongside your pupils - Treat them as equal learners

and prepare your lessons as you would if you were going to coach your team to win every time.

4. You must have a very high expectation of all your pupils and replace all negative judgemental attitudes –with a positive alternative and just observe and comment accurately on observation.

5. Define and focus your coaching goals –use the R.A.S to set up a desire (passion) for learning something new everyday, observe and note how you did it – identify your learning patter

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TOP TIPS: A COACHING CULTURE

6. Start from your students’ entitlement to good teaching 7. Build a culture of constant, ongoing evaluation …8. … plus a strong emphasis on SELF-evaluation9. Develop a shared view of the essential skills teachers

need10. Develop a house style to develop them … and relentlessly

aim for consistency


Thanks for listening!



Documents

COACHING SKILLS FOR HIGH IMPACT TEACHING