A reader recently asked me if I had noticed any positive changes in teacher professional development since 2013, when I started writing for GPE. I replied, “Yes. A lot, even ! » . What has struck me the most since then has been to see the extent to which the international education community has adopted the practice of coaching.
Today, coaching programs are increasingly seen as central, or at least useful, elements in many donor-funded education programs.
Given the increasingly important place that coaching is taking in education programs around the world, it seems useful to take a closer look at this practice, which we will talk about more and more in the next blog posts. blogs. In this blog, it will be a question in particular of presenting what it is about. The next articles will discuss some of the most common misconceptions about coaching and how coaching is practiced during a pandemic time like the one we are going through.
What is a coach?
If you are a sports fan or have played a sport, you certainly know how essential a good coach is to the development of an athlete’s performance.
In education, a coach is a trained and skilled professional who can take teachers (or school leaders) from where they are to where they want to be. In education as in sport, a coach’s job is to make professionals perform better and perform better.
A coach is not a supervisor, evaluator or inspector (think how that would work for an athlete or a team). The coach is also not the teacher’s boss, nor his helper or assistant. Likewise, coaches and mentors are not the same (we’ll talk more about that in the next blog post).
As in the field of sports, coaching in education is based on objectives. It is also done in a continuous, intensive, structured way and aims to improve the teacher’s performance.
As with athletic coaching, teacher coaching involves a myriad of tasks (demonstrate, motivate, plan, formatively assess, cajole, listen, persuade, model, co-create, demystify, process, build confidence), but consists of above all to empower teachers on the basis of a body of knowledge and skills capable of promoting better student learning.
Coaching is physical and temporal. He is highly analytical and mechanical. Much like a football or cricket coach does, an instructional coach breaks down complex behavior into its component parts, so teachers understand those components and the concepts and mechanics of each. Teachers and coaches often work together to create a lesson, teaching unit, activity, or approach based on reviewing the results of a shared analysis.
What Teacher Coaching Is Most Not
Any interaction with a teacher intended to support him/her cannot be considered as coaching. From 2015 to 2017, I worked with university professors in Southeast Asia. I traveled to the region several times a year, visited classrooms, made comments and recommendations. I have also often helped trainers by offering them ideas for the design of their courses. However, I consider that this is more about “monitoring” and not about coaching. It was encouraging. Useful too I hope. But basically, it was not structured, intensive, temporal or continuous.
On the other hand, during this period, I worked with two instructors who were part of this same program. For a number of years, via bi-monthly Skype calls, we brainstormed ideas. I organized debriefing sessions with them, they shared their lesson plans and ideas for new activities. I also conducted virtual classroom tours via Skype and asked their students questions to get their perspective on these activities. The reports were very often appropriate, intense, structured and continuous. I consider this to be coaching.
Why Practice Coaching?
The practice of coaching is not at all new. The majority of us have been coached to develop our talents, whether in the context of a sporting activity, in everyday life or in the context of work. In education, coaching developed in response to the much-vaunted model of just training teachers and sending them out into the field to do the rest on their own. of their career.
Ultimately, coaching in education is the recognition of the fact that to perform at their best, every professional needs the ongoing guidance and support of a more competent practitioner (as recalled by the quote from Atul Gawande at the beginning of this post). The point here is to recognize that learning is not a one-time event, but rather a process.
Coaching, when done right, works. A recent meta-evaluation of 43 studies on coaching shows that, when done by qualified coaches, coaching has significant positive effects on teachers’ pedagogical practices; much larger effects than the difference in instructional quality between novice and experienced teachers (Kraft et al. 2018).
Coaching is also highly valued by teachers, as confirmed by my personal experiences and research . In a recent US study on coaching, almost nine out of ten coached teachers reported that coaching was a real form of professional development and more than half considered it “very” important (Van Ostrand , Seylar & Luke, 2020).
What are the different types of coaching?
Coaching often seems like an undifferentiated term but in fact it is rather specialized. In the field of education, there are instructional coaches, technology coaches, literacy coaches, data coaches and content coaches, among others
In addition, there are two main categories. Coaches can be external to the establishment – external people hired to coach teachers (like me) – or internal – a main teacher or a peer coach.
A successful professional development method to preserve
However, it demands a lot from coaches and those who design and manage coaching programs (commitment to excellence, availability of time, resources, effort and willingness to bring about profound changes in our approach to professional development.