Developing practices in teachers’ professional dialogue in England: using Coaching Dimensions as an epistemic tool

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how teachers who were working in a range of developmental relationships with researchers used coaching dimensions to understand, describe, analyse and improve the quality of their coaching and mentoring conversations. The findings are based on analysis of transcriptions of case studies of one-to-one professional dialogue practice. The dimensions of coaching provide a language and mechanism through which teachers can analyse and reflect on their 'coaching' practice.They can act as a metacognitive tool for teachers, providing them with the opportunity to engage with the complexity of their practice. Such self-knowledge enables productive practice development, and an ability to talk with peers about how their practice is developing. This can help teachers to plan for, and be more responsive within coaching or mentoring meetings. Use of the dimensions allows the relationships between the nature and the intent of practice to be explored and may help to clarify the roles of different types of professional dialogue, securing them within CPD structures in schools. As relationships and trust within coaching and mentoring partnerships can be vulnerable, gaining greater awareness of the significance of the semantics of the dialogue can support the participants to match intent with outcome.

Coaching for professional growth in one Australian school: “oil in water”

“…Like much school reform, coaching initiatives should include adequate training, sufficient time, appropriate resources, and a process to review their effectiveness (Lofthouse and Hall, 2014;Wong and Nicotera, 2003). As individual and organizational trust is a foundation stone of effective school relationships (Tschannen-Moran, 2014), consideration of school context is key, as coaching dynamics cannot be separated from the wider contextual culture.…”

“…This also requires the organization to trust the coachees, their professionalism, and their capacities for self-reflection and development. A tension can arise in school coaching contexts when school leaders colonize and infiltrate the process for management agendas, rather than protecting it as a growth process (Lofthouse et al, 2010;Lofthouse and Hall, 2014;Lofthouse and Leat, 2013). Hargreaves and Skelton (2012) warn about "contrived collegiality" in which coaches force compliance rather than help teachers help themselves to build capacity.…”

“…Edwards and Newton, 1995). Concerns remain about the school-based implementation of coaching, including that the purpose of coaching initiatives can be shifted toward surveillance and performance, rather than collaborative learning and individual growth (Hargreaves and Skelton, 2012;Lofthouse and Hall, 2014;Lofthouse and Leat, 2013). Questions remain.…”

Critiquing the “National Standards for School-based Initial Teacher Training Mentors” in England

“…Although these roles are explored within separate literatures in social work, nursing and teaching, there is little comparative work to date investigating how these roles are constructed and practised across the professions. If we accept the notion that mentoring is a skilled profession within a profession (Lofthouse and Hall, 2013), then the ITT mentor standards can be interrogated not just within the parameters of ITT, but through comparison with other professions where similar PWE roles have emerged. McNamara et al (2014) have also drawn attention to the importance of drawing upon research in workplace learning and how insights across the professions can provide us with useful perspectives on policy and practice.…”

Performance over professional learning and the complexity puzzle: lesson observation in England’s further education sector

“…We would argue that it would be positively utilised in a wider reformed view of teacher growth, where teachers see continuous classroom investigation and data analysis as part of their core role as professionals. There is a growing bank of evidence in the areas of coaching, mentoring and lesson study, for example, that serves to illustrate how lesson observation can be reconceptualised and repositioned as an opportunity for practitioner investigation rather than the narrow lens through which it is currently conceptualised in education as an instrument of teacher assessment (for example, Lofthouse and Wright 2012, Lofthouse and Hall 2014, Cajkler and Wood 2016.…”