When I first started coaching, I was a lead practitioner in a large secondary school and I used to coach 12 people a week, every week. That’s over 400 coaching conversations a year. I coached a lot.
And during that process, especially in the early stages, the thing that terrified me most was the opening of my feedback conversations. The observations bit, I felt I could do. I could gather objective evidence in the classroom and think really hard about barriers to learning- but the feedback conversation was a different beast.
Because conversations are hard!
Firstly, the dynamics of conversation are fast moving and ephemeral and they can very easily get off track.
Secondly, if you are coaching someone that is dubious about the process in the first place, the pressure for that conversation to 'go well' can become quite high.
However, if we think about the work of Vivienne Robson and her thoughts on the impact of leadership, there is clearly a need for high quality and intentional conversations in schools.
Anything that changes in a school starts with a conversation: they are the catalysts for change and, as such, “the art of conversation becomes integral to school improvement” (Sharma, 2023)
So how do we make coaching conversations more deliberate and intentional?
Well, firstly it’s important to consider our role as coaches, which is fundamentally to support the teachers we are working with to overcome barriers to student learning and, in doing so, get better over time.
If you’re familiar with Josh Goodrich's work on Responsive Coaching, he identifies five key catalysts that coaches can look to develop in the teachers that they are working with in order to achieve this:
So, as a coach:
The teacher that I am working with firstly needs to notice important details within the classroom (awareness)
then, they need to be able to interpret that information and make sense of it (insights)
then, they need to be motivated to make changes (goals)
then, they need to know how to make those changes (steps)
and finally, they need to able to develop a clear enough mental model of that change for it to become relatively automatic/ not use up any working memory (habits)
And, for me, that first bit about awareness is key because a teacher's ability to notice things in the classroom is the foundation of their practice. Good teachers notice stuff- or rather, they notice the 'right' stuff- the stuff that matters for student learning, because they have a clearer mental model of what good teaching looks like (Sturmer, 2013)
Noticing = Decision. Decision = Action.
If I notice something important, I can do something about it. I can make a decision.
Even if the decision that I make isn’t great – or I decide to do nothing- at least I noticed.
However, if I didn't even notice in the first place, then nothing changes- and fundamentally teachers go into classrooms to make things happen, not let things happen.
So, as a coach, I want to start by identifying what was noticed and what decisions were made as a result. And if I can do this 400 times a year, I’ll be doing a pretty good job as a coach.
Sounds easy, right?
But let’s not be too harsh here. As anyone who writes about such things acknowledges, classrooms are extremely noisy places and teachers are hit with staggering quantities of data to process.
Often, teachers aren’t even that cognisant of what they are noticing- they are just doing it. This process of noticing happens quickly and teachers are quite literally running on auto-pilot (and I use that word ‘autopilot’ deliberately because it’ll become relevant in a minute.)
So, although I now have real clarity in terms of what I’m looking for as a coach (i.e. how aware of the classroom environment is the person that I'm coaching), I need to do a bit more work to surface that teacher's mental models so that I can really understand the decisions that they are making and why.
More to the point, I also need to be social about it: I obviously wouldn’t want to make any assumptions but if you go into someone’s classroom and start by saying "you did this. Why did you do that?" or asking "how aware are you of what’s going on in your classroom?" I’m going to hazard that that conversation is not going to go very well.
Situational Awareness
I need something else to help me here- and this is where situational awareness (SA) comes in.
As a model, 'Situational Awareness' (SA) was first theorised by Mica Endsley, chief scientist for the US Air Force as a model for helping US pilots to make better decisions in the air. In a paper written nearly 30 years ago, but which will sound all too familiar to teacher educators today, Endsley summarised:
In the flight environment, the safe operation of the aircraft in a manner that is consistent with the pilot’s goals is highly dependent on a current assessment of the changing situation.” Furthermore, “without this awareness… the air crew will be unable to effectively perform their functions [and] even small lapses in situational awareness can have catastrophic repercussions.” (1995).
As an analogy for teaching, Endsley isn’t far off the mark. As a teacher, you are effectively a pilot trying to keep things constantly moving towards a particular goal- which is no doubt a very stressful thing- and if you miss something important, it’s quite easy for the whole thing to come crashing down on top of you.
Moreover, she states:
“a person's situational awareness is restricted by limited attention and working memory capacity. Where they have been developed, long-term memory stores, most likely in the form of schemata and mental models can largely circumvent these limits by providing for the integration and comprehension of information and projection of future events, even on the basis of incomplete information and under uncertainty…SA is largely affected by a person’s goals and expectations which will influence how attention is directed, how information is perceived, and how it is interpreted… in addition, automaticity may be useful in overcoming attention limits; however, it may leave the individual susceptible to missing novel stimuli that can negatively affect SA.” (1995)
Making better coaching decisions
Taking this as a point of departure, there are two key points here that are relevant for coaches:
Mental models allow people in data rich environments to overcome the challenges of working memory.
People with strong mental models or schemata can ‘integrate, comprehend and project’ future events, even when information is limited.
And in particular, it’s the integration, comprehension and projection of future events that has real value for coaches. If you can dialogically test each of those components as a coach, then you are on to a winner.
Making coaching conversations more granular.
Endsley’s model of SA is ultimately about understanding decision making in complex or dynamic environments (like when you are running a classroom or flying an aeroplane) and can be presented visually using the (simplified) model below*
More specifically, this model also breaks SA into three constituent parts or levels: perception, comprehension and projection and how these link to decisions being made.
*note that ’other variables’ is also a massive area including things like stress, workload, complexity of task, preconceptions, experience, training, long term memory stores, automaticity- all of which have an influence on our ability to ‘notice’ and make decisions.
If a decision (action) is made in a complex environment like a classroom, my natural question as a coach would be to ask:
“Why did you do that?”
But that is pretty much where my line of enquiry ends.
Using Endsley’s model of Situational Awareness, however, I can now be more specific and start to explore the thought process that led up to that decision and subsequent action at a more granular level:
What did you notice within the environment?
What did you understand from that information?
What did you predict would happen next?
What did you do about it? How did you act? (i.e. what decision did you make?)
Then, “why did you do that?”
As a coach, what I can then do is start to unpick that chain of events (noticing, understanding, predicting & acting) and get a better understanding of how developed the mental models of the teacher that I am coaching really are.
So, what does this look like?
Using Endsley’s model of SA, I can begin formulate some diagnostic questions that will help me to better assess the mental models of the teachers that I am working with. Things like:
Perception Questions: what did you notice?
What did you notice about X?
What did you notice when…?
How would you describe the main features of this task?
How would you describe what students needed to do to be successful at this point in the lesson?
How would you describe what happened in this section of the lesson?
How would you describe how students reacted when you did X?
How would you describe what we just saw in this video?
Comprehension Questions: are your mental models strong enough to explain why these things happened?
I'm not a specialist in this field so, just so I’m clear, can you explain how that task would reveal potential student misconceptions at this point?
Can you explain why those areas are the ones that students need to focus on?
Ok, so when you did X, students did Y. What might explain why some students reacted in that way?
When the teacher in the video did X, how would you explain why they did that?
and Projection Questions: are you at a point where you can easily substitute ideas into and out of your mental model and adapt the whole?
Because you were able to identify potential misconceptions here, how did that allow you to better predict where the barriers to learning would be later on in the lesson?
What could be done here that might help you better predict which students might struggle with this task?
If you did X at this point, how do you predict that students would respond?
How would this change if you did Y instead?
And the very best teachers- the ones with the strongest mental models- can do this. They seem to have a clairvoyant ability to predict what will happen in a room of 30 human beings who probably don't even know what they are about to do themselves. This skill is precious- and is precisely why good teachers matter.
But… it's not that simple, surely?
You're right. It's not that simple and it's not that straightforward. The inherent ‘messiness’ of conversation invariably means that we can’t be as calculated as the method outlined above implies. But, what we CAN do is stick to the broad principles of:
‘what did you notice?’
‘what did you understand?’
‘what did you predict?’,
and ‘why did you act as you did?’
in order to be intentional and diagnostic in our questioning. Suddenly, we can bring a richness to our coaching conversations simply because we can begin to be really specific about the things that we are looking for.
We are no longer tempted to regress to "how do you think it went?" or to simply skip the conversation altogether and just tell coachees what to do.
We don’t even need to use the words ‘notice/describe’, ‘explain’ or ‘predict’ if we don’t want to- but the underlying principles are the same.
To conclude:
As a coach, I want to support the people I am coaching to improve by developing catalysts for change- and what teachers are aware of and notice is key to this.
However, there is a lot to notice in a classroom- so I need to understand how the decisions that teachers make are being arrived at.
Using the principles of SA: perception, comprehension and projection, I can effectively diagnose the strength of teacher’s mental models and conduct better coaching conversations- and that is to the benefit of everyone involved in the process: you as a coach, them as a coachee and, most importantly, students in classrooms.
Happy coaching!
First presented at ResearchEd Cornwall (5th October 2024)
Link to slides (.pdf)
Bibliography
Bambrick-Santoyo, P. (2018) Leverage Leadership 2.0: a practical guide to building exceptional schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Vol. 37. Issue 1. Sage Journals.
Endsley, M. R. (2006). Expertise and Situation Awareness in K. Anders Ericsson, R.R. Hoffman, A. Kozbelt and A. Mark Williams (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodrich, J. (2024). Responsive Coaching. Woodbridsge: John Catt.
Sharma, L. (2023) Building Culture: a handbook to harnessing human nature to create strong school teams. Woodbridsge: John Catt.
Stürmer, K., Seidel, T. & Schäfer, S. (2013) Changes in professional vision in the context of practice. Gruppendynamik und Organisationsberatung 44(3).
Stone, M. (2024). Coaching, co-construction & conversational dynamics. Blog: https://coachingcasenotes.wordpress.com/2024/02/10/coaching-co-construction-conversational-dynamics/.
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