The Perfect (Teacher) Coach

Jackie Beere, Terri Broughton, Jackie Beere

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781781350034
• eBook ISBN: 9781781350256
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many schools are now recognising that using a coaching model is the very best way to make sustainable improvements in the standard of teaching and learning across all departments.The Perfect Teacher's Coach presents a simple and practical guide to making coaching work well in your school in order to deliver consistently high standards. This is ever more important with Ofsted increasing the number of lesson observations and 'evaluation of teaching and learning' providing a key performance indicator, alongside student outcomes.Everything you need to know about what coaching is and how it works is provided in this book. This includes details of various models of coaching and how to implement a successful model suitable for your school, training your coaches and ensuring you have a sustainable performance management process that really works.

Chapter 1

What is coaching?

If you want one year of prosperity, grow seeds. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want one hundred years of prosperity, grow people.

Chinese proverb

I never cease to be amazed at the power of the coaching process to draw out the skills or talent that was previously hidden within an individual, and which invariably finds a way to solve a problem previously thought unsolvable.

John Russell, Managing Director,
Harley-Davidson Europe Ltd

You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.

Galileo

Coaching1 has been widely used in industry, sport and politics to support personal and professional development. It is the powerful process of supporting someone to move forward towards their goal. It is not a passing fad but is here to stay and, when it is done well, it can transform the culture of a school and empower teachers to respond positively to the relentless demands of continuous school improvement.

‘Coaching is a highly structured way of working one to one with an individual through a series of meetings. The coach will enable the learner to take responsibility for his/her learning, develop an awareness of his/her situation and increase his/her skills. It is a way of reaching the potential of all staff.’

(Tolhurst, 2006: 3)

‘[Coaching is] a process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve. To be successful a Coach requires a knowledge and understanding of process as well as the variety of styles, skills and techniques that are appropriate to the context in which the coaching takes place.’

(Parsloe, 1999: 8)

In practice, coaching is a discussion, or series of discussions or structured conversations, which:

Are highly motivating for the coachee.

Use skilful questioning to identify issues.

Facilitate learning and commitment from the coachee.

Encourage the coachee to take responsibility for their actions and outcomes.

Give choice about the content and direction of the discussion.

Allow creative solutions to problems to emerge.

Lead to clear targets and definite commitment by the coachee to agreed courses of action.

Promote personal and professional development.

What coaching is not

Coaching is not a fluffy, cuddly, open-ended process that takes hours.

Coaching is not telling somebody what to do or showing them better/different practice.

Coaching is not rubbing someone’s back and telling them that it will all be fine and agreeing that their classes are a real pain.

Coaching is not about continually analysing what went wrong but looks for practical solutions.

Coaching is not a one-size-fits-all process.

‘Coaching has helped me to become a better teacher, leader and mother.’

Liz Bernard, Advanced Coach

A brief introduction to coaching

The terms training, mentoring, counselling and coaching are often, wrongly, used interchangeably but, as the table below shows, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Who this book is for
• Chapter 1: What is coaching?
• Chapter 2: What makes a ‘perfect’ coach?
• Chapter 3: Coaching with edge, for performance management
• Chapter 4: Creating a culture of coaching
• Chapter 5: The skill of questioning
• Chapter 6: A coaching framework
• Chapter 7: Embedding the coaching culture for the long term
• Appendix 1: Coaching agreement
• Appendix 2: Coaching evaluation tools
• References and further reading
• Copyright