CUREE E-News Summer 2019

 

Contents

• Philippa's Blog - Philippa Cordingley

• Coaching School Leaders - Paul Crisp

• Leadership Coaching in Ipswich - Dan Case

• Leadership Co-Coaching in a Multi-Academy Trust - Sally Curson

• Delivering Functional Skills: Collaborative Projects - Ross Harrison

• Work Experience - Oliwia Malicka

• Where are we? - Evangelia Araviaki

 

Philippa's Blog

June is conference season in education, and don’t I know it! I’m current wrestling with my presentation for HallamEdFest (the Sheffield Hallam education festival) whilst also thinking about the presentation I have to do at the Wellington Education Festival and working on the design of our Ipswich programme for training mentors of recently qualified teachers (see below).  

Last week I was working with colleagues from initial teacher training support at an event at the Royal Society of Chemistry which was right next door to the new Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. For years I have had vivid dreams of visual art - and especially textiles - and I wake up deeply frustrated at my inability to recreate them in my waking life. I would give my eye teeth to have a really good mentor who could help me develop my latent talent here J, perhaps help me access the right kind of learning experiences and keep me moving forwards! I know I don’t  even begin to understand the demands of the role and work of visual artists in dept – and you really need a mentor when you don’t know what you don’t know (aka the Rumsfeld question).

But I do know a bit and I know even more about mentoring early career teachers. I know a lot of the evidence about how to help mentors use their experience of developing their mentoring practice in ways that strengthen school improvement. I know quite a bit from helping artists work with teachers to help embed learning through the arts in the primary curriculum.  I know a great deal about just how powerful developing deeper mentoring can be for accelerating school improvement. Sadly, too few school leaders understand the many different ways in which strong mentoring practice can support school (and individual) development.

In my Sauce for the Goose monograph (complete with an apple, chilli, ginger and coriander sauce – also good with vegetarian dishes!) I summarise some of the 42 different ways in which learning to be a mentor enhances mentors’ own teaching practice. Our workshops and development programmes take this to scale by exploring the connections between enhancing mentoring and wider school development. We haven’t got to 42 yet - but we are well on the way, starting with the way mentors can use new evidence and ideas from initial teacher education to review the school’s teaching and learning policies. Come and join us at Sheffield Hallam’s exciting education festival or in the Ipswich programme. Or contact us to explore a training trainers’ model for your TSA or MAT.

Philippa Cordingley

Chief Executive

 

Coaching School Leaders

School leaders’ lives are complex and increasingly difficult. Pressing operational issues clamour for their attention and they struggle (practically and morally) to carve out the time to stand back, review and think. Some development programmes provide that opportunity but at a high cost (in time and sometimes money). What they want is opportunities to sort the signal from the noise which don’t make the time management problem bigger. Leaders in Opportunity Areas have the additional burden of coping with all the ‘support’ being thrown at them at once. In Blackpool, we have been working with others to help leaders sort the wheat from the chaff by equipping them with evidence-informed strategies for working out which initiative really does the job they need done. In Ipswich, we are providing coaching support to achieve the same thing (see more on this below).  And you don’t have to be in a challenge area to find this useful. in the Community Academy Trust (seen below), we are helping school leaders develop the skills to coach each other (in Ipswich we are providing ‘expert’ coaches).

There’s no mystery to coaching (though some models can feel like being inducted into a cult!) but nor is it a skill you just *acquire* with your PGCE. It’s also a slow burn – CUREE produced a National Framework for Mentoring and Coaching in England a decade ago (and then one for Wales) and we’ve been extolling its virtues tirelessly ever since and developing practical resources to support schools implement it. You can find some of them on our website - starting here

 

 Paul Crisp

Coaching in Ipswich

In our previous E-News (available here) we talked about our exciting work with the Ipswich Opportunity Area (IOA) to develop a mentoring scheme for NQTs. In addition to tackling the problem of NQT and early careers teachers’ (ECT) retention rates, we are also working with the IOA and Bath University to provide coaching to Senior Education Leaders to widen the availability of high-quality leadership across the Opportunity Area. Our coaches and mentors will ensure that solution-focussed coaching and mentoring conversations will build on clarity about leaders’ starting points and include in-depth questioning to encourage leaders to own and increasingly identify solutions to challenges.

Leaders in education face both practical and cognitive challenges. From our extensive experience of supporting school leaders, we are very conscious of the demands on their time and workload. The coaching sessions we are offering represent an opportunity for leaders to step back from their daily pressures and reflect on their practice and the larger strategic challenges posed by development programmes. Over several one-to-one sessions our coaches will use our substantial armoury of coaching/mentoring tools to structure our coaches’ engagement with leaders and give them those same tools to support their own coaching of others, supporting leadership and systematic implementation of learning from training.

 

Leadership Co-Coaching in a Multi-Academy Trust

We have been working on an exciting and forward-thinking coaching programme with the Community Academies Trust. The Trust is investing in Headteacher Peer to Peer Coaching for all Heads across their 16 schools. All Head Teachers are paired with a fellow Head and will meet once every half-term for a co-coaching conversation. The focus of the discussions is ultimately based around ideas for school improvement. The co-coaching also creates some formal time for the Head teachers to engage in personal and professional reflection and encourages sharing of knowledge and innovative ideas across the Trust.

 

Sally and Rebecca from the CUREE team have thoroughly enjoyed running two workshops with the group, delving into our Effective Coaching and Mentoring suite of tools and working alongside them to develop and practice their co-coaching skills.  We have one further workshop to come where the focus will be on how to ensure that the co-coaching is truly linked to school improvement and ensuring that the Head Teachers feel confident to formally start their coaching relationships.

 

We are delighted to continue to work with Community Academies Trust beyond the programme through someone to one coaching and supervision activities and look forward to seeing the programme start to impact back in schools.

 

If you are interested in a similar coaching programme with CUREE contact Dan at 0247 624 3625

 

Delivering Functional Skills - Collaborative Projects

We have been working with Creative Education on an ETF funded programme of collaborative projects as part of the Foundation’s Outstanding Teaching Learning and Assessment programme strand. Practitioners in further education and skills settings have been researching and developing approaches to delivering the new English and maths functional skills specification. We have been helping the practitioners in 15 separate projects define the scope and methods of their projects, collect and analyse evidence and, now, write up their reports in ways which will be valuable to others. We’ve produced supporting resources and offered guidance through a series of webinars.  Next, we will be reviewing what the projects have achieved in terms of their impact. We’re excited to see what the projects have accomplished and share some of their successes. The infographic below shows the journey from the project’s inception to the final stages.

 

Work Experience

Oliwia worked for us for a week in June as part of her Work Experience placement. Here is that week in her own words:

I was given the title of being an Administrative Assistant. At work I was shown a virtual library where CUREE keeps all their resources that help teachers. I was asked to update the library during the first day which was tricky because I wasn’t used to going through so many files just to get to one document, but after a few goes it started to become simpler and simpler. Other than updating the virtual library I was helping other members of the CUREE team with doing their work like writing up PowerPoints and writing up summaries about the sessions they do with other teachers. Overall my work experience was busy and interesting, I was wasn’t bored at any point of being there because there was always something to do. Personally, I thought an office type job where you work at computers all day would be quite boring, but I was wrong. There was always something to do and the jobs given were very time consuming which meant that my week at work went very fast. Finally, what I liked at my time with CUREE was the people there. People that work there are always so nice to each other and are always willing to help. I had a great experience working with CUREE and I hope I was useful.

 

Where are we?

 

It’s a busy month out of the office, particularly for Philippa. Here are some of the places you might catch us:

• 14th June - Festival of Education - Philippa is delivering a keynote at the Sheffield Institute of Education on Evidence-informed mentoring, and is part of a panel session on the theme of 'What has being evidence-informed ever done for schools and other education settings?'
• 17th June - PHF Sharing Day - Philippa is participating in the Paul Hamlyn Foundation's Sharing Day about the Teacher Development Fund (TDF) project for embedding arts into the curriculum. Find out more about the project here, and read the lastest report of the TDF project here.
• 17th June - Tony Little Centre Advisory Group Meeting - Philippa is a member of the centre's advisory group. Have a look at Philippa's contribution to the Eton journal last June here (pages 17-18) where Philippa wrote about 'Developing Great Teaching: lessons from the international reviews into effective professional development'.
• 19th June - The National Coaching Symposium 2019 - Philippa is delivering a keynote and two workshops at the symposium. The keynote is on the theme of 'Making a difference- Setting up coaching to enhance pupil's Learning, as well as their Teacher's Practice', and the workshops are on the themes of 'Building capacity for excellence through coaching - Tools, skills and principles for maximising the benefit of coaching'.
• 21st June - Festival of Education - Philippa is speaking at the Festival of education on Friday afternoon. The session is titled 'Priorities, people and professionalism: policies that shape teachers' professional identities'. The session focuses on our recent research on teachers' professional identities for Education International, the report of which is available here.
• 24th & 25th June - Bede Academy - Philippa will be delivering the 2nd and 3rd CPD sessions in Bede Academy with our Senior Operations Manager, Niamh McMahon. The sessions will focus on targetting the whole school with a focus on co-coaching, and Middle leaders with a focus on enabling them to identify obstacles to overcome and the tools for doing so. Find more about the ways we can improve the CPD in your organisation here.
• 27th June - Board meeting and Response to Intervention session in Blackpool - This is the concluding RTI session in Blackpool, with Philippa, Bart, and Dan attending. Find out more about CUREE's work on Response to Intervention here, and here.
• 28th & 29th June - Ipswich Mentoring Sessions - Philippa is delivering the residential sessions for Mentoring and Training in Ipswich with Dan. 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 few years of their teaching career. To find out more, click here.