MEDD8937 Chap.5 Coaching and Mentoring
Coaching and Mentoring
Three directions, and what each one can carry
Professional development is organised in this session by the direction the initiative travels. The top-down approach has education authorities provide courses and seminars in an area where professional competence needs enhancing, and it is described as mostly focused on the communication of information.
The bottom-up approach starts from the voice of the frontline, collates needs so that provision can be developed and tailored to them, and aims at deep-level change including attitudes and values. The bottom-across approach has teachers at several schools carry a practice between them, moves it across schools and districts, and trades in the working knowledge that has already survived somewhere.
Each carries a different commodity, and none substitutes for the others: information, attitude and tested practice are not interchangeable.
Four providers, and the direction each one brings with it
Educational authorities provide through governmental or publicly supported institutions at national or local level, usually top-down, with enrolment through a central training calendar.
Third-party external provision comes from universities and other higher education institutions passing on expertise through short courses or by backing action learning and research, sometimes through consultants, and it is placed between the first two directions.
Schools provide in-house through designated staff development days or longer programmes, organising themselves as learning organisations that facilitate peer learning, with in-school curriculum leaders carrying the design. Inter-school collaboration works through formal and informal contact between teachers across schools, who learn about classroom innovations through observation and exchange.
A learning organisation is defined by three continuing activities among its members, which are acquiring knowledge, passing it on and adapting it, and by two results, which are growth that belongs to the group rather than to individuals and the ability to respond quickly when conditions shift.
What makes a coaching relationship work
Five enabling factors are named.
How open a novice is matters, because being ready for coaching and receptive to it raises how much it achieves. Contextual support means collegial school cultures, sufficient preparation time and freedom from external pressure. Coach selection and pairing asks for coaches who exemplify good practice and share expertise openly, with well-matched personalities and aligned subject specialisations.
The strategies employed include emotional support, regular reflective meetings, lesson observations, helping novices feel included and providing feedback that can be acted on. Coach preparation and support matters because coaches put through a proper training sequence choose better strategies, with seminars and programmes continuing afterwards on both teaching and interpersonal skill.
Each of the five has an obvious failure mode, and naming those in a plan is what moves a support strategy from general to specific.
Five relationships and four levels of coach
The coaching relationship itself comes in five described forms: facilitative, which builds on the novice's existing abilities and guides her towards insight; instructional, which imparts expertise through demonstration, resource provision and direct instruction; collaborative, which blends the first two with the coach switching constantly between roles; consultative, in which the coach works like a consultant and brings specialised knowledge and resources from which both the novice and her school gain; and transformational, in which new abilities are acquired gradually, success evolves thinking and the new knowledge becomes part of the teacher's identity.
A separate scheme distinguishes four levels of mentoring by what the conversation does, from emergent talk that stays descriptive, through deliberative talk that links teaching to learning outcomes and strategic talk that uses lesson evidence and challenges assumptions, to co-constructive talk that connects practice evidence to wider contexts and explores alternative approaches.
Each level carries its own published training need.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Top-down, bottom-up and bottom-across as three directions
- 02
What each direction is actually able to move
- 03
Four provider types and the direction each carries
- 04
The learning organisation, defined as a specification rather than a compliment
- 05
Five enabling factors for a coaching relationship
- 06
The failure mode attached to each enabling factor
- 07
Five coaching relationships, from facilitative to transformational
- 08
Four levels of mentoring and the training need that lifts each
- 09
Constitution, relationships and purpose in inter-school networks
Match four support needs to a direction, a provider and a relationship
- 4Choose a direction for each of the four needs.
- 4Choose a provider and a coaching relationship for each.
- 2Name one case where the obvious choice would misfire, and why.
Key terms
- Top-down Approach
- Professional development in which authorities provide courses and seminars in an area where competence needs enhancing, described as mostly focused on communicating information.
- Bottom-up Approach
- Professional development built from collated frontline needs and tailored to them, aimed at deep-level change including attitudes and values.
- Bottom-across Approach
- Professional development in which teachers at several schools carry a practice between them and trade the working knowledge that has already survived somewhere.
- Learning Organisation
- A body defined by three continuing activities among its members, acquiring knowledge, passing it on and adapting it, and by two results, group-level growth and the ability to respond quickly when conditions shift.
- Facilitative Coaching
- A coaching relationship that builds on the abilities and perspectives a novice already holds and guides her towards insights she can act on.
- Instructional Coaching
- A coaching relationship in which the coach imparts expertise directly, through demonstration, resource provision and direct instruction.
- Consultative Coaching
- A coaching relationship in which the coach works like a consultant, bringing specialised knowledge and resources from which both the novice and her school gain.
- Transformational Coaching
- A coaching relationship working over time, in which new abilities are acquired gradually, success evolves the person's thinking, and the new knowledge becomes part of a professional identity.
- Emergent Coaching
- The first level of mentoring, in which questions lead to recall and anecdote, attention stays on individual aspects of a lesson and the conversation remains largely descriptive.
Coaching and Mentoring FAQ
Is one coaching approach better than the others?
The session asks that question directly and the defensible answer is no. The five approaches suit different situations, and choosing between them is part of the diagnosis rather than a matter of style. A teacher whose competence is settled and whose uncertainty is about impact needs a facilitative conversation; one who has never seen the practice needs demonstration.
Stating why you rejected the other options is what earns the higher rubric band.
Does a coach at a higher level always do a better job?
No. The levels describe what a conversation does, and the level has to meet the person where she is, exactly as the stages of concern do. Co-constructive talk offered to a probationer who cannot yet describe her own lesson produces a conversation she cannot join.
What the scheme genuinely diagnoses is a coaching programme that has plateaued, because a school where every recorded conversation stays descriptive has a training need in its coaches.
What is the cheapest way to strengthen a coaching scheme?
Protect the time and train the coaches. Contextual support explicitly names sufficient preparation time and freedom from external pressure, and coach preparation is named because systematically trained coaches use more effective strategies.
A scheme scheduled into unprotected time delivers nothing, and an untrained coaching corps delivers whatever those individuals already did, which is the version of the scheme the school already had.
Assessment move
List every piece of professional development your school bought last year and label each with its direction and provider type. Most lists turn out to sit almost entirely in one row of the provider table, and the empty rows tell you which kinds of change your school currently has no route to.
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