Why schools need to create a coaching culture now, more than ever
Developing a coaching culture in a school or college is the best decision senior leaders can make. Now is the time that many in education leadership will be looking to plan a strategy for the training and development of their staff.
Change over the past two years has been immense and creating the right strategy for effective CPD that helps build new futures is an essential way forward. Understanding the power of coaching as the means by which professional development of staff makes a difference is a quintessential first step. Coaching is about looking forward, understanding how the past shapes future success. It is about self-awareness, where individuals reflect on their strengths and their gaps in learning.
Coaching is about individuals setting clearly defined goals, understanding the steps they need to take to achieve their targets and reflecting on their journey towards success. Coaching is also about effective time management, deeply thinking about priorities in relation to objectives that need to be met and not deviating to other issues and tasks that mean the main focus cannot be achieved.
Start your coaching journey by attending our highly praised live webinars about coaching. Attending the webinar an Introduction to Coaching is a powerful first step.
An Introduction to Coaching in Education
Leadership and coaching are synonymous, join us for our deeply informative course,
Pastoral leaders gain some very important skills to support well-being and behaviour
Coaching is about collaboration, cohesion and delivering high quality curriculum outcomes
OFSTED’s judgement ‘The Quality of Education’ requires senior leaders, middle and subject leaders to work together with their teams to deliver a curriculum that sequences the learning from early years to post 16 and beyond, that builds on prior learning and states what pupils will achieve at certain clearly defined end points along the way.
This is impossible to achieve unless there are opportunities for subject, curriculum and teaching and learning teams to share their profound understanding of the vision and ambition for the curriculum, how it is designed to reflect the clear intention that it has breadth and depth, parity for all learners and is woven together to build skills, knowledge and conceptual learning over time.
Putting the curriculum jigsaw together can be achieved through high quality coaching and the professional learning conversations that are the result.
Where middle and subject leaders use coaching skills
Where middle leaders and subject leaders use coaching skills to empower their teams to work collaboratively to translate the curriculum vision into a beautifully orchestrated learning experience for all pupils the impact is very clear and profoundly positive. Professional learning conversations are at the heart of creating this collaborative approach.
However, learning how to build a system where teams work together effectively to deliver a shared goal or outcome requires some highly developed skills that are akin to those of a coach. Active listening skills, the skill of asking probing, challenging and incisive questions and the ability to facilitate a change in belief, attitude or value in order that quality assurance creates the evidence that every lesson, in every subject across the years delivers outstanding content through excellent pedagogy and good subject knowledge.
Take your coaching journey to the next stage and build the coaching skills of middle and subject leaders as they work towards delivering curriculum excellence. Focus on how to interpret the curriculum standards and build substance and quality into the planning and delivery of the primary and the secondary curriculum.
Enhancing the Role of the Middle Leader in a School or College
Creating a Knowledge Rich and Sequenced Secondary Curriculum
How to Weave a Knowledge Rich and Sequenced Primary Curriculum
Coaching cascades high quality learning and teaching
Coaching is a pedagogy and when teachers and support staff learn how to coach the skills they develop are incredibly useful in the classroom. Learning how to ask questions that challenge pupils to think more deeply, listening with intent to hear what isn’t being said or where misconceptions are emerging.
Creating a culture that rewards effort, that creates a climate where pupils know that failure leads to learning and resilience fosters a growth mindset and self-belief. Building lesson sequences that are designed to allow pupils to solve problems, find solutions and take risks with their learning are all a part of developing a coaching philosophy in the classroom.
The other benefits for the school of teachers learning how to coach is the opportunity to learn from other teachers through positive approaches to lesson observation and reflective feedback. Where teachers share their practice and explicitly talk about the impact of their teaching on learning and achievement they are developing new skills, trying out new approaches and building their pedagogical repertoire.
It is a cost-effective and highly beneficial approach to ongoing and seamless professional development. Teachers are continuously learning through interaction with their peers within their phase or subject area and where there is a clear strategy for other cross-curricular interactions. Our on-line webinar for teachers provides the framework to see all teachers grow in their role and develop as outstanding practitioners.
We also have live webinars for Teaching Assistants and support staff who through coaching can work more closely with the teacher and other educational professionals to create a culture of reflection, professional dialogue and help to foster excellence in learning and achievement. We also have a course for Cover Supervisors who can gain in confidence through developing a range of coaching skills.
Coaching for Cover Supervisors – creating seamless learning when the teacher isn’t there
A face to face conference – Celebrating the power of coaching
We are tentatively bringing back some of our events that we run in prestigious venues where educational professionals can be together to share ideas, learn from each other and have an opportunity to work with some of the leading experts in CPD for educators. We are running an event on 6th June at Milton Hill House in Oxfordshire. Celebrating the Power of Coaching which will bring together some of our highly trained and experienced coaches who will share their knowledge and a range of useful resources linked to leadership, teaching and learning, the pastoral process and managing change.
Build a coaching culture with our certification route
Choose our certification route and become a certified coach with Learning Cultures and The Association for Coaching. This is an exciting route to follow. The journey is over three terms and participants learn coaching through training, one-to-one personal coaching and developing their skills through working with colleagues and other professionals. This is a highly interactive and powerful way to create a coaching culture and is increasingly a choice for those organisations who are looking to build positivity, collaboration and continuing professional learning as part of their whole school or college vision.
Join our growing coaching network of education professionals
Join our growing network of education professionals to receive regular policy and CPD updates, some free cameo training snippets for use with colleagues and an opportunity to attend our highly informative network meetings once a term. Membership also gives you 20% discount on all our courses and programmes.
Subscribe to receive our latest articles and other information about courses and programmes that we are running. We are the leading provider of coaching CPD for the education profession.
