School leaders and teachers have been increasingly turning to coaching for professional development. But is it right for everyone? Should every school pivot to a coaching model? And is it really a best bet for teachers’ professional development?
In theory, coaching encourages teachers to improve their practice, much in the way that a teacher would hope pupils improve their learning. At the same time, it is a model built on a sense of agency for the teacher, which we know is conducive to engagement.
The important question is whether the research evidence bears out these benefits.
As educationalists with a research background, our first instinct is to define the terms of our inquiry, and here is where we find the first stumbling block.
There is in fact surprisingly little consensus on what coaching actually is. This is even more true when employing the phrase ‘instructional coaching’ made popular by the author Dr Jim Knight. (Had he spoken British rather than North American English, he might have chosen slightly less murky terminology, like teacher mentoring.)
What we’re left with is a range of different models that all purport to offer ‘coaching’ – a classic case of educational jingle-jangle, a term used to describe situations where either the same name means different things, or the same construct has different names.
However, the existing research does offer some good news. One meta-analysis looked at professional development programmes where coaches observed teachers and provided feedback (a rather broad definition). These researchers found that coaching programmes had an overall positive effect on pupil achievement.
Of course, as with any good research, the study’s conclusions came with caveats.
Eagerness of teachers
When a school implements coaching on a wider scale, expanding beyond a voluntary programme, the positive effects diminish. While the enthusiasm and expertise of coaches is important, the willingness of teachers to engage with the programme is even more essential.
Scaling expertise
To remain an effective intervention for professional development at a large scale, coaching models need an increasing number of expert coaches.
A large school, college or multi-academy trust will need a significant ‘coaching corps’ to provide each teacher sufficient time for observations and feedback, without which effectiveness dwindles.
Resource intensiveness
Schools that implement a coaching model generally tend to assign a teacher or senior leader as a coach.
In a small primary school, this senior leader coach will be dedicating about a day per week to coaching duties – a significant resource cost, especially considering the time could be spent teaching. Increase the size of the school and suddenly coaching is a full-time role, or even bigger.
All of which leads us to a big question implicit in our earlier queries about coaching: If we turn the best teachers into coaches, will their impact on the effectiveness of their colleagues outweigh the loss of the coaches’ own classroom expertise? In other words, might it be better if the coaches were instead dedicating all their time to their own teaching?
The research suggests this is a matter of careful implementation. Coaching can be an effective model, but probably not for every school. Coaching is a demonstrably effective targeted intervention with enthusiastic teachers, but this does not make for a one-size-fits-all approach.
If the challenge lies with increasing the scale, we suggest picking elements of coaching models that are more easily scalable.
For example, we’ve written previously about the potential of teacher collaboration. Shifting from one-to-one to a collaborative model can still offer the challenge and feedback of coaching in a less resource-intensive way.
Teachers and school leaders are right to be wary of ‘one-and-done’ professional development sessions. We call this the ‘inspire and forget’ approach, and any CPD (like coaching) that encourages sustained trialling, testing, and developing of context-specific teaching is a much better bet.
However, the practical realities of schools mean it is hardly the one and only (or even ideal) approach to improving teacher effectiveness.
As with so much else in education, it’s a question of resource and context.
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