As I take the first few steps into my new role, I have been thinking about the parallels between my work with codifying teaching and implementing coaching, and the Trust-wide school improvement role I’ve begun.
I think it is useful to start by defining what we hope to achieve. In order to support sustainable school improvement – we need to know what the leaders’ mental model and habits of school improvement look like and then work with them. I’d argue that bypassing this work will prevent long-lasting improvements. In ‘Reduce Change to Increase Improvement’ Viviane Robinson suggests an engagement model – where time is spent unpicking the beliefs that sustain current practice – is often more likely to be successful than a bypass model (where these beliefs are not uncovered or acknowledged). Any work with leaders to support school improvement needs to employ the engagement model – not only to uncover their beliefs – but to make their (otherwise invisible) thinking visible. And this needs to be done in a sensitive and intelligent way.
Given my on-going work with implementing coaching (it’s a process not an event!) I started to draw parallels with Josh Goodrich’s ‘Responsive Coaching’ and the work I’ve started to do supporting leaders in other schools within my Trust – in particular the five change catalysts Josh identifies.
Goodrich, J. (2024) Responsive Coaching. John Catt
(More info here: Responsive Coaching Interview with Josh Goodrich and Kat Howard Part 1 (steplab.co)_)
I suggest that the catalysts are just as relevant for working with school leaders as with teachers – the purpose is the same: improvement (and often not because they’re not good enough – but can be even better).
The following is how I have begun to adapt Josh’s work on change catalysts for teachers to work with school leaders to support school improvement – informed by the EEF’s Guide to Implementation :
Let’s start at the start…
Explore Awareness and Learn from Success: uncover leaders’ ability to perceive salient aspects of school improvement: what is going well (and why is it going well) – and where are the most important areas for improvement?
During my invaluable coaching with Sarah Cottinghat – I was encouraged to think really deeply about this moment in a meeting with a leader and to reflect on what purpose it can serve. It is too easy to ask a cursory “what is going well at the moment?” and leave it at that. Sarah suggested we should reframe this moment in the conversation to learning from success because this begins to reveal the leaders’ mental model of school improvement (School Improvement: leaders’ mental models of school improvement).
We created the following questions – informed by the EEF’s Guide to Implementation :
The next step is to ensure the school improvement team have a real clarity about what a strong, developing and limited response sounds like. This links back to Josh’s ‘Responsive Coaching': he suggests teachers can have a strong, partial or weak mental model of teaching – and, importantly, they can have strong models in one area and partial or weak models in others.
What would a strong mental model look like?
Explore: can you tell me about something that is going really well? How do you know it is going well?
Problem-first approach
Evidence-informed solution
Monitoring the change - leaders have eyes on it
Creating resource/conditions conducive to implementation
Looking ahead
What might this sound like?
Improvement Lead: Thank you so much for agreeing to spend some time with you today to see how we can work together to strengthen the work you’re already doing to improve your school. I’d like to find out a bit more about your successes here - and I’d like to sit with this for a bit so I can learn more about your school and you as a leader. Cam you tell me about something that is going really well? And how do you know it is going well?
School Leader: So, we’re really pleased with our reading interventions – the whole strategy really. When we looked at outcomes, we noticed that we weren’t really closing the gap for the children who enter with very low reading ages – and then we looked a bit more closely at our reading interventions programme and discovered that it wasn’t really fit for purpose – children weren’t improving. In fact, we didn’t even really have a reliable way to measure the impact of the programme. I asked our Literacy Lead to visit our two local schools who seem to be doing good work – and she also booked on to a few tutorials and shared some interesting research with all of SLT about the science of reading, so we all understood it a bit better. We actually spent some time in SLT going through how best to implement this and did a pre-mortem. We now use Programme X, Y and Z, and test all children using ABC. All the data this provides is available for SLT at any point, and we routinely interrogated the data to check it was working for the children. We had to make some pretty big changes to timetabling and staffing to get this going – and we had to work hard to get staff on board who felt like children were being withdrawn from their lessons too much. I’m actually really proud of how supportive all staff are of it now – they can see what a difference it is making. There are a few tweaks and improvements we’re looking to make this year to further strengthen the offer – mostly around how we’re supporting our dyslexic readers. This is a piece of work that feels embedded here now and I’m confident it is making a difference.
What has this told me about the leaders’ mental model of school improvement and implementation?
It may be necessary to push the boundaries of their mental model to find out more – to test whether the model is strong. For example:
Is there a gap in the mental model here?
Might asking: tell me about which phase (explore, prepare, deliver, sustain) in the implementation felt like the most challenging? mean you can close this gap?
Gaining this insight means the next step in our work together can become tailored and nuanced in order to best work with the leader I have in front of me. If I know the leader needs support in the 'sustain' stage of their implementation - I can plan for this once we've identified the change/improvement.
I think this is about supporting colleagues to be better leaders of change - which is (hopefully) really empowering. And crucially, I think this approach supports sustainable improvements.
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