1. Rachel Lofthouse Newcastle University NAPTEC/UCET 24th March 2017
“Ain't No
Mountain High Enough”
career-long, career-deep and career-wide
coaching and
mentoring
Rachel Lofthouse
Newcastle University
NAPTEC/UCET
24th March 2017

2. Ain’t no mountain high enough:
career-long, career-deep and career-wide
coaching and mentoring
Rachel Lofthouse
Newcastle University
NAPTE/UCET
24th March 2017
Introduction
Unpacking the terms
Career-deep
Making talk count
Career-wide
Learning with others
Career-long
Advocacy and agency

3. Introduction: Unpacking the terms

5. Mentoring Vs. Coaching Mentoring Coaching
Mentoring usually takes place at significant career events, such as induction and taking on new roles.
It has an element of ‘gatekeeping’, and the mentor is almost always someone more senior in the organisation.
There is an organisational motive for the process.
Coaching is usually more focused professional dialogue designed to aid in developing a teacher’s repertoire or skills.
It relies on reflection and propositional skills.
It often supports experimentation with new classroom strategies.
Coaching can assist in the development of open and collaborative cultures.

6. Defining practices
Mentoring and Coaching: opportunities for professional dialogue which aims to foster staff development
Mentoring and Coaching National Framework (CUREE, 2005)
Mentoring is a structured, sustained process for supporting professional learners through significant career transitions.
Specialist Coaching is a structured, sustained process for enabling the development of a specific aspect of a professional learner’s practice.
Collaborative (Co-) Coaching is a structured, sustained process between two or more professional learners to enable them to embed new knowledge and skills from specialist sources in day-to-day practice.
Blurred boundaries in some settings and in some practices

7. Talk to your neighbour(s)
When was the last time you think you experienced mentoring or coaching?
What role were you in?
What was most memorable about the experience itself?
What did you take away from it?

8. Career-deep coaching and mentoring – making talk count

9. A cautionary tale
It [is] difficult for teachers to engage in interaction [with each other] with sufficient frequency, specificity, and depth to generate new insights into teaching dilemmas or to foster instructional innovation.
Horn & Little (2010)

10. Not all teachers can talk like they want to …
Horn & Little (2010) suggest a number of possible explanations for why talk about teaching, even among teachers who are attracted to collaboration and committed to reform, may not add up to much:
the difficulty of making tacit knowledge explicit (Eraut, 2000),
the challenge of confronting well-established norms of privacy and non-interference (Little, 1990) or contending with disagreement and difference (Achinstein, 2002; Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001),
insufficient structural and social supports (Louis & Kruse, 1995),
taken-for-granted language and frameworks that reify assumptions about learners and learning (Coburn, 2006; Horn,2007),
the urgency of the immediate and multiple tasks to which teachers must attend (Kennedy, 2005; Little, 2003b).

11. Other cautionary tales
TES,
30th May 2014
Anonymous
(R. Lofthouse)

12. Coaching and mentoring: Enablers for effective professional conversation
(after Helen Timperley)

13. Improving Mentoring Practices through Collaborative Conversations

14. Good Coaching & Mentoring Conversations
Stimulate
Know how to initiate thoughtful reflections and stimulate decisions but also know when to hold your tongue and let your coachee take the initiative.
Use what is available to create stimulus, to provoke discussion. Try video, agreed observation notes, teacher learning journal, pupils’ work, planning etc
Scaffold
Introduce a sense of scale in discussion. Be aware of the relationships between …
Critical moments (unplanned but interesting),
Planned learning episodes,
The lesson as a whole,
Broad themes which open up discussion about Teaching and Learning,
Big ideas – exploring the relationship between school, individuals and society.
Sustain
Think about your tone of voice – keep it neutral and curious.
Create opportunities for time travel - think ahead, think backwards, think laterally.
Create a dynamic conversation in which there are opportunities to share problems, to pose & respond to questions, to extend thinking, to build solutions.
Good Coaching & Mentoring Conversations

15. Career-wide coaching and mentoring – learning with others

16. Learning with others: part of the standards
National Standards for school-based initial teacher training (ITT) mentors
Establish trusting relationships, modelling high standards of practice, and empathising with the challenges a trainee faces.
Support trainees to develop their teaching practice in order to set high expectations and to meet the needs of all pupils.
Teacher Standards (QTS)
8. Fulfil wider professional responsibilities
….develop effective professional relationships with colleagues, knowing how and when to draw on advice and specialist support
CPD Standard
3. Professional development should include collaboration and expert challenge.

17. Add a caption to each photo to suggest something about coaching or mentoring

18. Collaboration is an action noun
… describing the act of working with one or more other people on a joint project.
It can be conceptualised as ‘united labour’ and might result in something which has been created or enabled by the participants’ combined effort.

19. e.g. inter-professional coaching
Learning with others: Examples of collaboration –fostering career-wide learning
Changing ITE experiences – building the capacity for collaborative learning using deeper professional dialogue
Changing CPD – working collaboratively to co-construct new professional practices
e.g. lesson study
e.g. inter-professional coaching

20. Developing Thinking Skills Teaching Using Lesson Study
This experience should support you in considering what opportunities there are for pupils to develop and demonstrate subject knowledge and skills through the use of a thinking skills approach
Work together to plan a TS lesson which one of you teaches
Plan how the other will productively observe the lesson and focus on case students
Plan lesson with partner(s)
Partner observes lesson with focus on ‘case students’
Mentor/class teacher observe
Partner meets with case students to discuss learning after lesson
Teach and observe the lesson
Normal lesson debrief with mentor / teacher
Partners review teaching and learning from range of perspectives using evidence and reflection on experience
Review the learning

21. Teaching Thinking Skills
Student teacher / Date / School
Lesson info / Observer(s) 2
What opportunities have been planned for pupils to develop and demonstrate subject knowledge and skills through the use of a thinking skills approach?
Discuss the evidence observer(s) will aim to collect 1
Observer(s) collect and record evidence How successful are the planned opportunities and what does focused observation on the ‘case pupils’ indicate?
OBS ERVE
P L AN
Teaching Thinking Skills
Lesson Study
DI SCUSS
PUP I L
REV I EW 4
Ideas taken forward to future planning (both students) and key issues for presentation
Key outcomes of conversation with case pupils. 3

22. Inter-professional coaching: speech and language therapists
working with teachers and TAs
Our research question:
How do school leaders conceptualise developing communication-rich pedagogies in their nursery and primary settings, and what is the contribution of inter-professional video-based coaching in enabling and sustaining these changes?
Conclusions:
Specialist coaching can play a significant part in creating bespoke professional training
Coaching can create a neutral, non-judgmental space in which teachers' own interactional practices can be exposed and made open to co-construction based on the relationship between pedagogic and communication knowledge and skills.
The coaching approach formed a key component of an ecology for focused professional development, providing participants with common understandings, a shared language, a willingness to share ideas, and to be more open to self-evaluation and critique. It also provided some of the ‘triggers’ and ‘glue’ which supported access to, and learning from, other CPD and the development of new leadership and support roles.

23. Add a caption to each photo to suggest something about coaching or mentoring

24. Different perspectives Up to date knowledge Willingness to take risks
Like-minded friends
Different perspectives
Up to date knowledge
Willingness to take risks
Tools for the job
Time to think
Collective efficacy

25. Career-long coaching and mentoring – advocacy and agency

26. Key considerations – advocacy and agency
Multiple opportunities for coaching and mentoring
Role switching
Formative and cumulative – individual and institutional
Developing leadership and professional culture of trust and dialogue

27. Safe spaces to learn to be the very best teacher you could be
Add to this diagram to indicate your ideals about coaching or mentoring
Safe spaces to learn to be the very best teacher you could be
Permission for purposeful creativity
Solidarity with peers and with learners …

28. Copyright © Newcastle University 2015 all rights reserved

29. Ain’t no mountain high enough

30. Ain't no mountain high, Ain't no valley low, ain't no river wide enough baby If you need me call me no matter where you are No matter how far; don't worry baby Just call my name; I'll be there in a hurry You don't have to worry

31. No wind, no rain Or winters cold can stop me baby, na na baby 'Cause you are my goal If you're ever in trouble I'll be there on the double

32. Remember the day I set you free I told you you could always count on me darling From that day on, I made a vow I'll be there when you want me Some way, some how