This is part 2 of a blog post series in which Elliot, a coaching lead at Manchester Communication Primary Academy, shares the five lessons he learnt when building a TA coaching programme, and the positive impact Instructional Coaching has had on TA practice.

In Part 1, Elliot outlined how he:

• Built a positive culture around coaching
• Reduced TA co...

In UK schools, contracting, timetabling and budgetary constraints often mean that Teaching Assistants (TAs) do not always have access to the same high quality professional development (PD) as teachers. TAs support learners with the most complex needs, and therefore ongoing training is key to their effectiveness. According to the EEF, having suppo...

If we want instructional coaching to make a real difference to teachers and pupils, we need to focus on getting the implementation right. Importantly, this is likely to mean adapting the programme to fit our school’s unique context. How can we tackle existing school pressures of workload and time, to make space for high quality coaching? At Ridgeway High School, Kate Hytner’s relentless enthusiasm for instructional coaching, coupled with a carefully designed, context-specific coaching programme is having a

Rachel’s Introduction:

Steplab supports schools to supercharge their professional development programmes. Every day schools get in touch because they want to introduce instructional coaching for the first time, and need training resources, implementation models, and quality assurance tools to support an effective launch. Increasingly, we’re hearin...

If you're reading this, you’ve perhaps explored our thinking on lesson drop-ins before: they're a powerful tool for building the positive culture and confidence around peer feedback that's needed to launch instructional coaching across a school and they provide a useful overview of what's going on in lessons.

But what if lesson drop-ins could a...