Coaching For School Improvement
Building Relationships That Drive School Improvement
Get in touch about The Coaching School Programme TODAY
Create a culture of allies
Many schools are struggling with staffing challenges and more special needs children than ever. This programme develops coaching for ALL your school community with remarkable results.
About the programme
This programme shows that peer coaching can be introduced in a non-hierarchical way, enabling everyone to experience non-judgemental coaching conversations that help them own their own personal and professional development. Once this is introduced to staff, you’ll immediately see the benefits as more collaboration, self-awareness and self-efficacy permeate staffroom and classroom conversations.
The benefits of coaching include becoming conscious of our own thinking and how to manage it productively in a stressful and challenging environment. Your coaching partner will hold up a mirror to your thinking and help you develop the habit of reframing – seeing problems from a new perspective instead of getting defensive and feeling insecure when getting feedback or being challenged. This is invaluable for students too, teaching them how to work with students from other year groups and learn how to really listen and ask helpful questions. The joy of supporting each other in this way is an antidote to the fake news and constant damaging comparisons students often experience on social media.
It Works
Coaching for staff
Latest research at schoolsweek.co.uk shows that coaching is a powerful tool for school improvement.
Our findings demonstrate that effective teacher coaching does lead to conditions that underpin school improvement. Specifically, the positive effect was most evident when there was alignment between the coaching approach and the tenets of collaborative professionalism
Coaching for students
In New Zealand several programmes in student coaching students have found:
Benefits include improved overall confidence in interacting with their peers, improved listening skills, improvements in their ability to empathise and support their peers when working towards their goals.
What you will get if you subscribe
Programme packages
Awards
N.B. All in-person coaching will involve additional travel expenses
There are 6 sections in this programme to follow or dip into
School leaders at all levels will benefit both from coaching and being coached. They will develop their leadership skills, having coaching conversations that grow their emotional intelligence and ability to respond to challenges in their teams. This section shows how coaching can influence your school culture and lead to initiatives being owned by all the staff and therefore implemented more effectively, giving leaders more time to lead.
This section provides all the videos, slides and resources to train your staff in coaching. It gives them practical experience of how a 7-minute coaching conversation can begin to address challenging problems and encourage staff to come up with their own solutions to them and set targets for incremental improvement. This could start with a training session for everyone so that staff know what coaching is (and isn’t!) and why you are aiming to become a Coaching School.
Next, a group of enthusiasts can become pilot coaches, leading the way by taking further training offered in the next section of this programme. These staff (and they may be teachers, leaders, admin staff or Teaching Assistants) can lead the way by coaching each other for half a term, before rolling out the coaching to others who would like a coach. They can set up a Forum too so that the project is monitored and evaluated for impact over time.
Once your staff have seen the power of a coaching conversation, where ownership of change is given to the coachee, ALL conversations between staff and students will begin to change. Coaching creates self-efficacy, encouraging the coachee to feel more in control of their thinking and their responses. This in turn creates the habit of self-regulation in the coachee (and influences the coach too, as they improve their listening and questioning skills). In their classrooms, teachers will start asking more coaching questions. In one-to-one conversations with students, teachers and TAs will encourage more independent thinking and resilience in their students.
The section on students coaching each other has many resources and ideas that can be used to train students to become effective coaches of others outside of their age or friendship groups. There are exemplar checklists for supervision, information for parents and tips on safeguarding when you introduce students coaching each other. Your pilot group of coaches would be ideal candidates to train the students and later, as your school develops experienced student coaches, you can help students train each other in the skills of coaching.
This section on Instructional Coaching may be all you need to help your teachers refine and improve their skills on an individual basis. IC is coaching specific to observing the coachee’s classroom habits, giving the coachee a chance to find out what is working and how to be even more effective. It takes small targets, ideally set by the coachee, and improves practice by trialling them and getting constructive feedback. IC works best when a school already has a strong culture of allies so all involved can be open to feedback and growth.
This section can be dipped into at any point. It explains why coaching works and how our limiting beliefs and unhelpful thinking habits can get in the way of good relationships and improving our performance. Some people will find coaching more challenging, and this section will help everyone understand how to nurture and develop the hope and optimism which characterises an improving school. This section will help your whole school community see every challenge as a gift and opportunity.
About the author
Jackie Beere MBA OBE
Jackie worked as a newspaper journalist before starting a career in teaching and school leadership. She started as a teaching assistant and primary school teacher, later moving into secondary school as an English teacher. She became one of the first Advanced Skills Teachers in 1999 and, eventually, the Headteacher of a large, successful secondary school in Northamptonshire.
She was awarded an OBE for developing innovative learning to learn and metacognition programmes that raised achievement for both students and teachers.
Since 2006, she has been training teachers and leaders all over the world in the latest strategies for developing resilient, independent learners and a growth mindset culture in the classroom. Jackie is a master practitioner of NLP, a trained Clarity and PQ Coach and author of several bestselling books. She wrote and edited the best selling ‘Perfect Ofsted lesson’ and its follow up series. The latest version of this book is ‘Teaching and Learning – developing independence and resilience in all teachers and learners’. ‘The Complete Learner’s Toolkit’ published in 2021 is a book of lessons to develop metacognition and mindset skills for 9-14 year olds. Her personal development book called ‘Grow: change your mindset’ has been re-published in USA as ‘Get the Growth Mindset Edge’.
Jackie has been a coach for UK and international school leaders for the last five years and has worked with many schools helping leaders introduce a coaching culture to improve results and wellbeing. Her passion is to help teachers and students understand their thinking so they can fulfil their potential for success and happiness.
How to use this programme
Assign a leader
Assign a leader for Developing the Coaching School from the leadership team. Plan a whole school training session for all staff (TAs, admin and technical AND governors) Follow the video shown in the Section 2. Use any resources from this section and add your own input to show how it fits with School Development Plan and targets. Ensure everyone has a chance to experience coaching using the STRIDE 7 minute model and ask for volunteers to be the Coach Pilots for deepening training and early adoption of the peer coaching partnerships.
Coaching all the staff
Your Coach Leader and coach pilots then have further training from Section 2 and 3 and begin the journey. A Coaching Forum can be set up to evaluate the programme and eventually this team will roll out coaching to all from the staff. (some will not want one but they will soon realise they are missing out! It should be voluntary.)
Train the students
As the year progresses the Coach Pilots can begin to train the students using materials in Section 4 to be peer coaches. Then partnerships are set up between different year groups and this is monitored by the Coach pilots.
Personalised CPD
Section 5 gives resources and videos to develop Instructional Coaching, so that teachers are now ready for short observations and specific coaching on their classroom practice giving them high quality personalised CPD. This will be more successful now because you have established trust and confidence that coaching is non-judgemental and gives personal ownership of change.
Emotion and Mindset
Finally, Section 6 focuses on Emotion and Mindset coaching for wellbeing and resilience. This section has resources and videos that help support the whole programme and journey so can be dipped into at any time throughout the course.
Finally
Throughout this programme leaders, teachers and students talk about how coaching has impacted on their performance and wellbeing. As a former teacher and Headteacher of a large secondary school, I experienced the full range of thrills and challenges this profession brings. I have spent decades researching how we can make our schools happy and successful. Discovering the power and magic of coaching has been my light bulb moment.
Some schools say – ‘We’ve done coaching, and it didn’t work’. If you introduce coaching on a training day and then impose a coach on everyone, it will not work. However, if you decide to go on a journey to embed a coaching ethos in everyone, you will transform your school.
Coaching, introduced as this programme suggests, will impact on results and wellbeing. It will help everyone who works at your school feel a sense of belonging and being valued. It’s not a quick fix, it’s a way of becoming the very best that you can be – for yourself, and for the school you love.
