We’re rolling out Instructional Coaching at across all of our 22 academies with help from our partners at Steplab.
Instructional Coaching helps our colleagues to improve their expertise in their specific domain through deliberate practice. It differs from our Leadership Coaching programme with its focus on developing knowledge and improving efficiency.
What is Instructional Coaching?
Instructional coaching differs from traditional coaching approaches several ways. The coach will help the coachee to devise specific targets and sub-goals, allowing them to overcome ingrained habits and adopt new behaviours.
Instructional coaching deviates from the traditional coaching model, where the coach asks open questions to guide the coachee through their thought process and allow them to find the answers themself. With Instructional Coaching, there’s no assumption that the coachee already knows the answers; it is acknowledged that there will be areas where the teacher still has things to learn, and the expert coach can impart new knowledge to them.
How does Instructional Coaching Work?
Coaches meet with their coachee, observe lessons, and choose a key area for improvement in the teacher’s practice. They’ll generate a plan to help the teacher develop in this area, with managable, actionable steps to improve.
The coach will provide feedback in a controlled environment, allowing the teacher to understand their existing classroom habits, and will design exercises to help them adjust their practice. The teacher can then bring their learning into the classroom with confidence.
According to Ambition Institute Fellow Steve Farndon, “by taking a long-term, incremental approach to improvement, teachers are supported to make sustainable changes to their classroom practice, whilst simultaneously developing the mental models needed to use these new techniques appropriately. This is what makes instructional coaching such a powerful form of professional development.”
How Do We Use Steplab?
Steplab is an online platform built for and around Instructional Coaching. Every coach and coachee in our academies has access Steplab.
Steplab helps our colleagues to keep track of their teaching targets, whilst giving them access to bite-sized learning modules that help them learn and develop. Accessible online and on any device, it allows teachers to efficiently manage their ongoing development around their busy working lives.
