How can schools make time for coaching?

Leaders of professional development face many questions when introducing coaching.  Who will coach?  How can we prepare coaches?  What will we say to introduce coaching to staff?  One crucial question – which we might overlook – is when coaching is to happen.

We could ask coaches to find time to meet – after all, they know their timetables best.  But this poses many problems.  First, finding that time can itself be difficult: coaches and teachers are busy.  Second, they may be tempted – in a particularly busy week – to allow their coaching meeting to slip.  Once that precedent is established, it becomes increasingly hard to maintain a coaching habit.

What should schools do instead?  This is a question that many leaders struggle with.  There is no easy answer – time will always be scarce in schools.  But we have seen Steplab schools find many ways of making coaching work.  In this post, we share some of their approaches.  We hope that this will offer both ideas and encouragement, helping you make time for coaching.

A habit is an action linked to a specific context: I’m more likely to make running a habit if I decide to go “every Saturday morning” (as opposed to “when I feel like it”).  Before deciding exactly when coaching should happen, we need to choose a cadence: how often it should happen.  Successful Steplab schools have chosen a range of alternatives:

• 1.
  Weekly: At Longdendale High School, every teacher has a weekly 60-minute professional development block: coaching is built into that time.
• 2.
  Fortnightly: At Farnborough Spencer Academy, each coach coaches two teachers, on alternate weeks.
• 3.
  Three-week or termly cycles: At Lees Brook Academy, coaching happens on a three-week cycle; at Ridgeway High School, coaching follows a six-week progression, with coaching conversations taking place in weeks two and six.
• 4.
  Blocks of coaching: Pilton Community College found it couldn’t sustain fortnightly coaching.  So staff were divided into two groups: half received coaching in the first half of the year, the others in the second half of the year.

How often should coaching happen?  The more frequent coaching is, the more quickly teachers should improve.  But there’s no point pursuing frequent coaching if colleagues lack the time to do it properly – and there’s no single model which works for every school.  What we want to illustrate here is the value of choosing a cadence which is ambitious and sustainable for your school right now.

Once we know how often we want coaching to happen, we can find a slot for it.  When should that be?  Successful schools seem to choose one of two options:

Directed time during the school day.  Longdendale High School has a thirty-minute practice lab component timetabled within each teacher’s time.  Isca Academy adopts a similar approach, including coaching within directed time – and putting it in a dedicated “Coaching Lab” – a specific room.

Meeting time before or after the school day.  Lees Brook Academy schedules coaching for Thursday afternoons, during Continuing Professional Learning time.  The Ribbon Academy removed a weekly 60-minute staff meeting and replaced it with a weekly 30-minute coach-to-coachee.

This approach seems to be effective for a number of reasons.  First, designating a slot for coaching reduces the need for coaches to coordinate with teachers, or ambiguity about what should be happening when.  Second, it gives teachers the time they need: they don’t need to find time and cut corners, the school has set aside that time for them.

We’ve said that we’re making time for teachers – which begs the question: where has this time come from?  One approach is to reduce teaching load.  At some schools, such as St Luke’s (C of E School), all staff teach one fewer lesson per week – the remaining time is used for coaching.  If staff timetables are full, schools can repurpose existing time to make space for coaching.  For example:

• 1.
  Abacus Primary uses the first half hour of the weekly (hour-long) staff meeting;
• 2.
  Ribbon Academy replaced an existing hour-long staff meeting with thirty minutes for coaching (and two fifteen-minute teaching and learning-focused briefings);
• 3.
  Lees Brook Academy drops a briefing during coaching weeks to make time for observations;
• 4.
  Ted Wragg Multi-Academy Trust repurposed staff meetings.

Where there is free time in teachers’ timetables, we can use this.  Where there isn’t, schools and trusts have looked hard at their existing meeting and briefing schedules, and freed time from them.  This may seem tricky – but if our priority is to improve teaching, and we have committed to using coaching to do so, focusing our meetings on this makes sense.

Coaching takes place in offices, classrooms – wherever we can find space.  Coaching in the teacher’s own classroom can help: rehearsal may be more powerful if it takes place where teachers will be using the action step for real.  But it may be hard to access the space we need – and it’s hard for leads to monitor coaching happening all over the school.  Interestingly, some schools designate a space for coaching, as well as a time.

• 1.
  Isca Academy has dedicated a mini-classroom as a “Coaching Lab” – the place for coaching conversations.
• 2.
  At Farnborough Academy, coaching takes place “all in one central space,” building a culture of rehearsal - it’s clear that everyone has conducted their observation, and is rehearsing - and allowing leaders to monitor quality. 

Having solved when coaching is to happen, choosing where may increase the chances it happens as planned.  

Choosing when coaching should happen is just one of the many decisions we have to make in improving professional development. (Our Implementation Roadmap takes you through all of them.)

These decisions force us to consider other issues, for example:

• 1.
  Should we pilot first, building a team of advocates and momentum for coaching?
• 2.
  If we begin by running group professional development and drop-ins, could this help us build the foundations for introducing coaching?

As we implement these changes, we may also consider related questions, such as:

• 1.
  How will we check coaching is happening as planned?
• 2.
  How will we celebrate the work of coaches and coachees who are completing coaching regularly?
• 3.
  How will we support those who are struggling?

Finding time to improve teaching is always challenging – most of the time, teachers are just busy teaching.  But, for coaching to work, we must make time – scheduled, regular, and protected – for it to happen.  We can do so by:

1. 1.
   Choosing a cadence
2. 2.
   Choosing a time
3. 3.
   Making time
4. 4.
   Making space

The examples above show that the many ways we can do this, fitting around the needs of our staff and school.  They illustrate that prioritising making time for coaching gives us a good chance of ensuring coaching will actually be successful.

If you’re thinking about how to introduce or strengthen instructional coaching, we’d love to support you.

Book a demo to see how Steplab can help you design a sustainable whole-school coaching programme.