Increasing recruitment to Partnership schools of ITT students: proposals to create viable cohorts to implement new models of coaching, support and organisation.

Mick Statham

The GrangeTechnologyCollege, Bradford

ContentsPage

Introduction1

The GrangeTechnologyCollege2

Training history3

Distinctions between coaching and mentoring4

Professional development options4

Summary of research5

High performance coaching6

Education coaching6

Partnership teaching6

NLP6

Accelerated learning6

Mentoring7

Identifying coaching features7

Integrating coaching7

Key summary ITT project7

Management of ITT within Grange 2002/39

Professional development opportunities9

Summary of roles9

Outline of a school-based training provision 2002/3 10

Whole school induction10

Departmental mentoring programme10

Whole school seminar programme11

Management of ITT within Grange 2003/411

Written tasks11

Proposals11

Outline a school-based training 2003/412

Serial phase12

Block phase12

Dealing with practical arrangements13

Evaluation13

Issues programme addresses13

Issues programme raises13

Issues remaining15

Recommendations and next steps15

Appendix summary

Appendix 1

  • role of teaching assistant

Appendix 2

  • whole school seminar programme

Appendix 3

  • Grange partnership training providers

Appendix 4

  • induction and coaching support programme, September to December 2003

Appendix 5

  • evaluations of peer coaching programme, student teachers

Appendix 6

  • Key features of LUSSP framework

Appendix 7

  • Key features of high performance coaching model

Appendix 8

  • description of some written tasks

Appendix 9

  • integration of coaching approaches to learn from own teaching, learn from others teaching, progressive collaborative teaching

Appendix 10

  • NLP patterns and what to use where

Appendix 11

  • problem categories from an LP placed in an ITT context

.

Appendix 12

  • integration of coaching perspectives into an ITT curriculum

Appendix 13

  • performance coaching for ITT, links to education coaching

Appendix 14

  • analysis of education coaching materials as source material for ITT independent study booklets

Appendix 15

  • swish technique

Appendix 16

  • how the aims of this project were met

Appendix 17

  • distinctions between coaching and mentoring

Introduction

This report outlines the motivation behind involvement in this project, reports on some of the issues that affect recruitment of large numbers of ITT students into schools, and presents professional development options drawn from experience and qualifications in mentoring and a range of coaching options including neuro linguistic programming (NLP), Education Coaching, Life Coaching, High Performance Coaching, government initiatives through the key stage three coaching strategy and work undertaken in higher degrees. In this project all the various strands from these personal development options were pulled together into a single integrated coaching model appropriate for ITT.

Research into coaching models proposes that integrating key ideas from the various coaching options into a whole school ITT option for professional development has considerable potential to enhance outcomes for all participants in school-based ITT. This also forms a base strand for continuing professional development interlocking into the continuing professional development provision for newly qualified teachers. At the same time this will facilitate an increase in the numbers of ITT students that schools can host. This report shows how.

Peer coaching, derived from models of mentoring, high performance coaching, and the key stage three coaching framework depends for successful outcomes on working with a large cohort of students from different institutions for the process to work. This programme in turn is supported by a series of key written tasks that students take into their department and work on and by students learning skills of coaching school pupils.

This report proposes that coaching is best learned by doing coaching. In the process, as a coach practices their work, so they in turn receive coaching from their partner. ITT students can therefore both coach and receive coaching in learning to teach.

In this work, the materials and outcomes, long used by mentor teachers from the Leeds University secondary school partnership materials were used to create the learning to teach context into which our coaching processes and NLP exercises were placed.

Partnership teaching, very successful at the Grange and nationally recognised for its work, has provided a strong influence on the cross curricular nature of the peer coaching work, providing as it did a mechanism for students to work right cross school, to share strengths from different departmental areas and to work on weaknesses with each other to enhance the practice of learning to teach.

Outcomes from NLP support the development of an individual support programme which would be straightforward to produce and distribute across partnership schools. This report shows how work on this can develop using models based around distance learning materials which are themselves based on materials from neuro linguistic programming.

The motivation to work on this project came from the realisation that the academic literature on learning to teach, researched as part of an M.Ed can be filtered to produce easily understood models of coaching and these in turn can, potentially be packaged into support materials that make the entire process of learning to teach much more straightforward and remove from the mentor teachers, school coordinator and subject staff the need to produce such materials of quality from scratch. From the student teachers point of view, since these are free of theory, they are an extremely practicable addition to the support materials that are available.

This report proposes next steps based on the outcomes of our one-year project at the Grange Technology College in Bradford. An outline is provided of how materials can develop from this point.

The purpose of this project was therefore to create coaching models from the wealth of coaching material available applicable to schools as both an on-site training programme and looking further ahead as distance learning materials modelled around our pathways to qualification in coaching. It was also to show how schools can deal with the practical demands of working with students from a variety of institutions.

A further challenge was to incorporate theoretical aspects from the learning to teach literature and particularly related to the Schon model of reflective practice, the subject of the authors year-long dissertation into the acquisition of professional teaching capability.

The Grange Technology College

The Grange Technology College has been extensively remodelled and enlarged in recent years to accommodate approximately 1800 students. The College has special status as a science maths and technology College. The College has become very successful, attracting 'very good' OFSTED gradings, DFES value added scores in the top 10 in the country, and a record of innovation that has resulted year on year in the achievement of ever higher results.

Promoting and valuing innovation in teaching and learning lies at the heart of the expansion of the ITT programme that has mirrored the growth of the school as a whole. In 1998, the school accepted six placements. There was no whole school induction or coordinated mentoring programme. In 2003 the school accepted 38 placements supported by coordinated departmental mentoring programmes, a whole school seminar programme and whole school induction. It was onto this framework that the coaching programme was planned to integrate and complement an existing programmes.

Within Grange, ITT forms a foundational core of a continuing professional development strand that runs throughout the school. There are programmes for NQT’s and experienced staff and these take place on a regular basis as twilight sessions. Student teachers often access these

Our interest in promoting this work stems from our work in Partnership teaching. In recent years this has provided one means of raising attainment across the school. Models from this have provided INSET at school, district, and national level delivered by amongst others, staff on this project. Current DFES interest is such that the school is providing a model for national dissemination supported by the production of videos and training materials based around the work of the school. Outcomes from this work, particularly models of working in collaborative ways, were drawn from in the planning and delivery of this project. In addition, outcomes from research models in higher education, and edited collections of coaching texts were also drawn from in the construction of this programme. This report shows what was used, and from which coaching discipline it was drawn (appendix 12)

We have also provided trainings for partnership providers on accelerated learning in science and from 1997 to the present date, language for learning.

Training history

The Grange has steadily increased year on year the number of partnership HEI’s and the total number of placements we offer. In 2003/4 we worked with six partnership HEI's accommodating 35 students on a timetable remission for the school coordinator of one lesson per week. We have built up our programme over the years by, from the outset, working with one or two major providers. This enabled us to construct a whole school seminar programme that all student teachers could participate in and that staff could be released to for to take the sessions. A major issue with the provision of school-based ITT is the discrepancy in the placement provider’s timetables which do not overlap with each other and the coordination of this has been significant as a factor in increasing our placements. This report shows ways the Grange has addressed this issue by using a teaching assistant to carry out many of the day-to-day administrative duties of ITT (appendix 1), and by pairing student teachers in partnerships across institutions in ‘buddy’ arrangements.

An example of this in practice is when a student from Leeds University buddies a student from Huddersfield University. Leeds University students have a serial placement on a Wednesday and Thursday. Students from Huddersfield University have serial placement on Thursday and Friday. Information from a whole school seminar programme on the Wednesday, when the bulk of students are present, is passed over by the buddy on Thursday. In this way there is continuity established between students from different institutions. Establishing partnership as a way of working from the first day in school creates the context for this to work well. It is not ideal but it works in practice

Against this background the approach to the TTA to develop coaching models was made. The key outcome of this from the point of view of the TTA was that we could demonstrate that such programme could increase the numbers of placements we could offer. In 2002/3, we offered 28 placements from five HEI’s and in 2003/4 this increased to 35 placements from six HEI’s. Included in this programme were three unqualified teachers following the graduate teacher programme training route into the profession making a total of 38 placements All our other placements were following the PGCE route. The exceptions to this were the students from Leeds Metropolitan University on the second year of their B.Ed in physical education.

Distinctions between coaching and mentoring.

In order not to duplicate work elsewhere in the partnership whether in school or in the partnership institutions it was necessary from the outset to make some distinctions between coaching and mentoring. Appendix 17 presents a working definition of this from a high performance coaching material. There are other definitions of this.

Professional development options

Making the right start to learning how to teach is essential for a lifetime of continuing professional development. Habits acquired as a student teacher, embed to inform practice as an NQT and stretch into the early years of professional practice. In the literature, reflective practice has universal acceptance as a model for professional development. The Schon model is particularly influential

Professional development options in learning to teach varied. They include mentoring, course input in the HEI and written assessment processes. However, in a broader professional context, coaching has in recent years been the focus of much interest as means to accelerate professional development although it has yet to make a real impact in ITT

There are different sorts of coaching. The skills involved are the same, but applied in different areas. Coaches may specialise, but there is often considerable overlap, for example between life coaching, business coaching, and executive coaching. A life coach cannot work without looking at the client’s job for example and a business coach cannot do the client justice unless they help them fit their work into their life. High performance coaching has developed by behaviourally modelling the work of coaches in different fields and pulling out the strands of what marks out the best coaches from the average. The high-performance model was central to our own development work. In order however to fully understand the different types of coaching, courses were undertaken and completed to at least diploma standard in the following over a few years. Outcomes from this have impacted in other areas of professional life as well as in ITT

  • Education coaching (2001/2)
  • Life coaching (2003/4)
  • High performance coaching (2003/4)

In addition, NLP training was completed to practitioner level with Dr Richard Bandler, the creator of NLP.

The diploma in life coaching was taken specifically to support this work. The difference between following the academic route through an M.Ed, in which half of the course was devoted to the work of Schon and completed to distinction standard and the practical route through completing diplomas and attending seminars is that the academic route is theoretically based with a practical orientation. Coaching courses are simply practically orientated whilst assuming, but not owning up to, any theory. They therefore a very suitable as training models for student teachers for the very reason that no theoretical understanding is required or assumed. An example of this is the Education Coaching diploma where 120 hours of study are packaged into 36 pages written text which contain all the background and exercises required.

In our work we made the following working assumptions. Securing long-term career and organisational success in teaching involves not only learning the foundations of teaching thoroughly but also the skills of continual improvement. The fast track to professional development is to work on the weakest areas and to be clear about what these are. Regular coaching when effective can turn weaknesses in strengths, develop skills and raise performance; problems can become opportunities to learn. At the Grange, because the coaching programme was undertaken between student teachers and in this way there was no threat because everyone was in the same situation.

In addition to coaching and mentoring, outcomes from partnership teaching informed the programme. The materials from the Leeds University secondary school partnership provided a means to frame written tasks undertaken to complement departmental programmes.

Ghostly Summary of research into coaching programmes

All the research for this project is an outcome from actual practice, qualifications obtained. In NLP terms, we are talking from experience or from being ‘associated’ rather than talking about experience, ‘disassociated’ from practice. The research was conducted by both the school coordinator and the advanced skills teacher (AST) who jointly developed this work. A summary is provided of the key features that informed this project (appendix 12).

During 2002/3, as part of this project, the school coordinator and the AST both undertook additional coaching training following the distance learning course undertaken with Newcastle College in life coaching. The same year, a course was completed in high performance coaching in London. This added to NLP practitioner level qualifications, to education coaching diplomas and to INSET completed in the key stage three coaching strategy framework.

Some key informing features of these courses and from our own partnership teaching model are outlined

High performance coaching

  • for coaching to be successful it has to produce a sensory outcome. This draws from the NLP approaches and from work on accelerated learning
  • For coaching to be successful it has to have a clear structure or else the conversations meander
  • effective coaching is like effective teaching acquired in stages and integrated into a whole
  • there are training exercises to facilitate the acquisition of competence at each stage of the learning to coach process
  • student teachers are assumed to be already high performers therefore a high-performance model is particularly appropriate
  • the outcomes from coaching need to be tested as soon as possible

Life coaching

  • coaching is based around the skill and ability to ask questions, to challenge assumptions and limiting beliefs and move the client forward
  • making progress depends on the client view of their circumstances - in this case the student teacher whose judgement on what has to alter
  • as in high performance coaching the coaching has to have a clear structure
  • coaching is distinct from mentoring counselling or teaching

Education coaching

  • setting goals is the most important part of performance improvement
  • limiting beliefs about the ability of someone to learn need to be challenged
  • there are techniques for practice that promote change as an accelerated rate
  • there are inner barriers to progression which can be removed
  • there are outer barriers to progression which can be removed

Partnership teaching

  • working in pairs using the planning cycle of plan do monitor reflect introduces a range of new options for teaching which, left to their own devices teachers may be unaware of
  • this approach is proven in practice at Grange and has made a considerable impact on the performance of pupils are

NLP

  • gaining control over subconscious processing abilities is the skill that can be acquired in used as a basis for the development of professional practice. In NLP terminology this approach is known as ‘running your brain’
  • accelerated planning and review can be undertaken at a rapid rate
  • particular attention can be paid to developing states for learning and teaching
  • language patterns are hugely influential to have the practitioner frame their understanding of classroom interactions

Accelerated learning