Contents
The Spring Blog - Philippa Cordingley
Education International - Paige Johns
Professional Learning and the Arts - Bart Crisp
Encouraging teaching excellence in Ipswich - Dan Case
Developing coaching infrastructure in Solihull - Bart Crisp
Out and About; Where in the world is Philippa Cordingley? - Evangelia Araviaki
The Spring Blog
I spent last weekend in a village where the farmer was bringing new born lambs to our Cumbrian village green, propping them up between his legs and walking backwards to give them a head start in the business of managing 4 legs- very distracting in an enchanting way!
I have been wondering since whether this might be a useful or at least an uplifting metaphor for exploring the widespread outbreak of interest in enhancing the quality of mentoring and coaching we are experiencing right now? I have been slightly worrying too, that some colleagues might miss the excitement and delight and see this as patronising – so my fingers are firmly crossed that you will bear with me.
For those of us who have been extolling the virtues of high-quality mentoring and coaching for what feels like quite a long winter, this definitely feels like spring. School leaders who have, in the past, considered themselves as “having a coaching culture” on the basis of using coaching style approaches to performance review conversations are starting to see what more is possible and diving into developing coaching and mentoring skills in depth. They learn fast, but not quite as quickly as lambs do, moving rapidly from early tentative steps to the equivalent of spirited explorers of their fields - occasionally jumping for the sheer joy of it!
CUREE colleagues have been enjoying, as it were, acting as midwife / farmer by modelling effective practices in person and via:
- a bank of videos of real coaching and mentoring conversations which transition from common mistakes to approaching excellence, sometimes in the same session
- introducing the research evidence about when where and how effective coaching works for pupils as well as teachers and tools to help ensure coaching conversations reach right into pupil success.
We are hugely enjoying the range of contexts and the seriousness with which colleagues are developing, reflecting, and analysing on the basis of evidence from their practice and from research. You can see just how flexible a professional learning tool coaching and mentoring are from the range of contexts we have been/are supporting. They range from:
- training NLES as lead coaches in Bradford Opportunity Area
- providing executive coaching to school leaders in the Ipswich Opportunity Area
- training all school leaders across the very sophisticatedly structured Community Academies Trust MAT to provide structured co-coaching in partnership with colleagues in schools in other CAT Hubs; and
- 180 mentors, again in the Ipswich Opportunity Area
- training school leaders in coaching to build a cadre of coaches to persuade potential, but not yet aspiring, school leaders to take the plunge into leadership across Solihull
- not to mention the ongoing coaching CPDL that accompanies our popular research route maps
Swiftly as they grow and mature, the lambs still need occasional support. Frost has produced jackets and nice warm barns at night. Kindly villagers get out of cars to nudge and sometimes lift sleeping lambs off the nice warm road and away from traffic. Similarly, after an initial period of phased CPD and practice using tools, we still find successful coaches want to work with us again for one or two final sessions to explore together how much more there is to coaching and mentoring than they thought, how much it contributes to school improvement and capacity building, and ways of pre-empting and avoiding mistakes when taking it to scale. But we are always delighted to find ourselves, like the farmers and the ewes of at least the upland lambs, redundant as those we trained as Coaching Champions start to train others and build genuinely embedded and self-sustaining coaching cultures.
Philippa Cordingley
Chief Executive
Education International
CUREE are delighted to be able to announce that a research project conducted over the past two years in collaboration with Education International has now been published. This project explores how seven education systems worldwide have constructed teachers’ identities through a number of lenses e.g. collaboration and networks, teacher voice and leadership, and professional learning and development. One aspect of the research findings in particular highlights the importance of continuing professional development and learning (CPDL) in the formation of teachers’ professional identities.
The findings often reinforced other current research about effective CPDL but sometimes revealed some surprising patterns and complexity (see figure 14 below for an example), which are explored within the full report. One of the interesting findings that is heartening for CPDL leaders is the finding that CPDL plays a powerful role in contributing to increasing recruitment and retention of teachers. With problems with teacher recruitment and retention being a frequent topic within the education system, the recent findings provide an insight into this. The research suggests that CPDL is a complex entity – large amounts of CPDL provision don’t necessarily result in positive outcomes. The evidence explored the importance of CPDL being designed to be sustained over time, in order to support (via coaching and mentoring) meaningful changes in practice. However, despite this finding being present within a number of policy goals, evidence suggests this was not necessarily taking place at the level of practice at a teacher level. The report pulls out examples of this within the seven systems and explores some of the disconnects between policy goals and teachers’ experiences.
To find out more and to read the full report click here http://www.curee.co.uk/node/5153
To read a blog written by CUREE exploring CPDL and the learning from the full report click here http://www.curee.co.uk/node/5154
Paige Johns
Professional learning and the arts
One of the (many) features which has distinguished the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Teacher Development Fund from other similar CPD funding initiatives is the Foundation’s commitment to collective learning – throughout both the pilot and the first round of funding, there has been a consistent push to ensure that grantees are able to learn from each other’s experiences, challenges and successes. This has been reinforced in many ways, but in particular through the Foundation’s regular sharing events, in which grantees and other key contributors to the Fund’s success – such as teachers, arts-based learning practitioners, and school leaders – come together to engage collectively with key issues. These events have been structured to achieve multiple goals, and CUREE’s involvement as evaluators has enabled us to observe and learn from them in great depth, but they are perhaps most interesting as examples of continuing professional development for participants.
CUREE and the Foundation are both committed to high-quality professional learning rooted in high quality evidence, and this has been reflected in the co-development of events – in particular, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation have committed to modelling the principles they advocate grantees to adopt. If you would like to know more about how to design events, conferences etc. which are rooted in evidence about CPD, please contact niamh.mcmahon@curee.co.uk to find out how we can help.
Bart Crisp
Encouraging teaching excellence in Ipswich
As one of the 12 designated Opportunity Areas in England, Ipswich is keenly placed to make great, sustainable improvements to teaching through CPDL. To that end, CUREE is working with the IOA Leadership and Development Programme to ensure all NQTs will have access to a fully trained mentor in the first years of their teaching career. This is an area of concern in the industry, both locally and nationally, with a spike in the number of teachers leaving between their third and fifth years. With a peer-to-peer support network in place, both the mentors and mentees stand to gain valuable experience and knowledge they can use to further their professional career, as well as the standard of professional learning in their own schools and colleges.
CUREE are also matching Senior Education Leaders in Ipswich with executive coaches in order to promote and enhance the development of leadership practices. After discovering their aspirations for the differences that coaching can make to pupils, the leaders are provided with one-to-one coaching sessions and our extensive coaching and mentoring tools, to best deploy coaching as part of a leadership strategy. Alongside our work with NQTs, this will attack the issues raised by the Opportunity Area in a ‘pincer-move’, addressing the needs of professionals both at the start of their career and with several years’ experience under their belt.
If you would like to know more about the project, please visit www.curee.co.uk/our-projects/ipswich-mentoring/ or email mentoring.ioa@curee.co.uk.
Dan Case
Developing Coaching Infrastructure in Solihull
CUREE has been working with primary headteachers in Solihull to support them in developing both their own coaching skills and the infrastructure for coaching in their schools. This project has been commissioned by the Tudor Grange Teaching School Alliance in order to support currently serving heads in encouraging skilled, experienced teachers to develop their leadership expertise, and through this to address a burgeoning lack of candidates for school leadership in the area.
The programme CUREE has been running has two goals: firstly, to support heads in thinking about how coaching can play a role in bringing this on, and secondly on how to professionalise coaching and deepen its impact within their schools. CUREE have run a number of these sessions so far, and what has been interesting is the extent to which participating schools all have pockets of coaching which take place somewhere within their schools. During the most recent session, this common thread made it possible to work with heads using our framework for coaching and developing coaching skills to think about systematising these pockets, and thus to connect them up with teaching and learning more broadly in their schools.
If you are interested in using development to broaden and/or bed into school systems coaching practices which exist in your setting, or to start to create such pockets of coaching, please contact sally.curson@curee.co.uk today to discuss what we can do to help.
Bart Crisp
Out and About – Where in the world is Philippa Cordingley?
- 5th March – Mentoring in Education Conference
- 6th March – Blackpool Ks3 Literacy Project Learning Event
- 11th March – PHF Sharing Day
- 14th March – Big Education Trustees meeting
- 15th March – ASCL Conference
- 23rd March – ResearchED Blackpool
- 25th March – PHF Advisory Group meeting
- 26th March – EMAC session at Tudor Grange
- 15th April – Teachers' Professional Development Expert Group
- 30th May – Leadership Research Advisory Panel meeting
- 4th June – The Big Evidence Debate
- 6th June – Big Education Innovation committee meeting
- 14th June – Sheffield Institute of Education - Festival of Education
- 17th June – PHF Sharing Day
- 19th June – The National Coaching Symposium 2019
- 21st June – Festival of Education
- 27th June – Board meeting and RTI session in Blackpool
Evangelia Araviaki