In November the National Agency for School Autonomy, an agency that work under the vigilance of Italian the Ministry of Education sought help from CUREE to support a large scale project which was likely to include a significant element of peer coaching. Giusy Cannella asked Philippa Cordingley and Alison Halford to visit their base in Florence to share the experiences of the UK system in developing coaching and mentoring. We were also pleased to run a development programme for 20 key staff from the department who will be part of the roll-out of various training programmes for teachers.
We shared with them the Principles and Concepts from the National Framework for Mentoring and Coaching and we were even able to exemplify the concepts through this lovely image of a tree that we found on a tile in a nearby traditional building!
We introduced some of the skills of specialist coaching and professional learning and used the materials from the Effective Mentoring and Coaching resource packs to show how they might roll-out some of the development practically and quickly using the tools, protocols and activities already in place.
We are looking forward to now scoping the next stage of the project to reach a broad population of Maths teachers across the whole of Italy.