Does instructional coaching have a PR problem?

Before we think about instructional coaching, let’s talk about teaching. It’s clear from just spending a short time reading statements from politicians, reports in the media, or discourse on social media that teaching also has something of a PR problem. Part of the issue is that few people outside of the teaching profession seem to really understand just how complex and challenging teaching is (see more on this here). Most people’s expectations are driven by a combination of their own schooling experience, alongside fictionalised representations in books, TV and film that hugely over-simplify and romanticise the job. What’s often missing is the astonishing level of thinking that goes into the myriad decisions that teachers make on a minute-by-minute basis. Even a teacher observing a colleague teaching in school can only make inferences based on the observable actions of the teacher and the students unless they get to have a meaningful discussion with the teacher to expose their thinking process (for which there is rarely time).

Which brings us to instructional coaching. There’s a huge amount of discussion around the use of instructional coaching in schools as a key driver for professional development, and some are quite evangelical about it. At the same time, there’s quite a lot of scepticism and criticism of this. This recent post on X, for example:

I think this is a disingenuous argument – it’s like saying that people who’ve never tried running aren’t evangelical about it. But it’s almost certainly a view shared by many others and not something we should dismiss. There is definitely truth in the idea that many teachers aren’t enthusiastic about instructional coaching because they either haven’t experienced it done well, or because they are unconvinced by what they know about it. Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of what is visible (to anyone not already well versed in instructional coaching) suffers the same problem as teaching at large – it fails to accurately represent all the nuance and complexity of what instructional coaching looks like when done well. To be clear, this isn’t an attack on those who do or promote instructional coaching, rather a caution on how we should best represent it.

So how does this manifest itself? To me the issue is that the kinds of examples of action steps which relate to relatively routine, performative behaviours are over-represented in the majority of coaching illustrations. I’ve consumed a huge amount of books, blogs, articles, webinars, videos and live presentations or demonstrations and nearly all of them portray examples that are incredibly similar to one another. For instance:

• How to run a smooth entry routine
• How to get and maintain attention of the class
• How to narrate positive norms of behaviour
• How to provide corrections to undesirable behaviour
• How to script a mini-whiteboard routine
• How to give instructions for a task

I could go on. These sorts of examples all share some similar features:

• They tend to be around routines for managing a class / behaviour
• They tend to be removed from subject content
• They are performative in nature ie a highly visible set of discrete actions

This gets played out in a couple of different (but related) forms. First there’s the ‘PR’ around coaching – the sales pitch, if you like, of those who want to convince others that coaching is the solution they’ve been looking for (and I readily include myself in this category to an extent). Second, there’s the materials and training provided for those who have decided to give instructional coaching a go. Of course, it might seem obvious that these sorts of examples are chosen for exactly these reasons. If you want to make IC accessible to all then showing examples which typically could relate to any lesson, regardless of age, phase or content is an effective strategy. If you want to illustrate the specific elements of coaching like decomposition, modelling and rehearsal, then it’s far easier to do so with concrete sets of behaviours that can be performed. If you want to deliver training on coaching then practising with these kinds of relatively straightforward and visible action steps might be preferable to doing something more complex. So what’s the problem?

Let’s consider what a good coaching session looks like. A coach works with a teacher to identify a suitable action step to work on. Done properly this will involve some kind of diagnostic discussion to determine the teacher’s awareness of what’s happening in their classroom coupled with insights about why current practice might need improving, supported with evidence gathered by the coach in the lesson. Potential solutions will be discussed and the coach may help to give the teacher a clear picture of what a solution might look like through careful decomposition and modelling (although the teacher may also be able to generate this for themselves). At this point it may be helpful for the teacher to then rehearse the new strategy and get feedback from the coach. Part of the issue, perhaps, is the reification of rehearsal as the *most important* aspect of coaching. Consider this quote from Peps Mccrea (speaking on Craig Barton’s podcast) “Coaching without rehearsal is like teaching your students then not getting them to do any independent practise!”

Is this true? Can teachers get better without a specific rehearsal phase of coaching? To be clear, I’m not suggesting that rehearsal isn’t an important component of coaching. In many situations it will clearly be of benefit to the teacher to rehearse and get feedback until they are fluent with whatever action step they are working on. And there’s evidence to support the impact of rehearsal (eg Mancenido et al, 2023, summarised nicely by Ollie Lovell here) although the extent to which the effects of rehearsal can be uncoupled from other elements like decomposition or modelling is unclear (and, as yet, doesn’t seem to have been tested empirically). 

Again, rehearsal is probably a good thing in many cases. But it feels like a lot of people are jumping to a consensus view that if you don’t do rehearsal then you’re not doing instructional coaching properly. Indeed, some organisations are so convinced of the power of rehearsal that they deliver PD sessions which appear to almost exclusively focus on rehearsal alone at the expense of some of the other elements of coaching. Of course, if your school priority is getting everyone to perform a consistent lesson entry routine then this seems a legitimate thing to do, but should it essentially become the default delivery mode of PD? 

So here’s my guilty confession… sometimes I don’t get a teacher to do rehearsal (of a ‘stand up and perform’ nature) during a coaching session (though sometimes I do!). That might be because the teacher I’m working with isn’t yet comfortable with the idea; it might be because I don’t think the thing we’re working on needs that kind of rehearsal; it might be because the preceding discussion took longer than anticipated and there isn’t time; it might be simply because I forgot! And yet, more often than not when I drop into that teacher’s next lesson I can see them successfully implementing what we were working on. Sometimes I think there might be things that they could execute more effectively and maybe we’ll work on that in the next session. Do I think they might make progress faster with added rehearsal? Maybe, sometimes. But I’m not convinced that rehearsal, removed from the context of a real classroom, is necessarily always the best use of our time.

Not every problem a teacher faces is content-agnostic. Not every problem a teacher faces can be fixed by a simple sequence of behavioural steps. Not every problem a teacher faces is about classroom management (although these probably account for a lot more than we might realise). I think this common, public representation of coaching has some potential negative consequences that are worth considering.

First, it’s probably partly the reason why instructional coaching has generated so much criticism in some quarters. An over-simplified representation which doesn’t appear to pay respect to the nuance and complexity of coaching could be seen to be doing the whole thing a disservice. It becomes an easy target because it’s easy to find ways in which instructional coaching, presented in this way, has obvious limitations. It’s easy to think of problems, often subject-specific ones, that can’t be solved by just getting people to do several rounds of rehearsal with some feedback. It’s easy to see how this leads many to the obvious conclusion that instructional coaching isn’t worth it (or, indeed, is actively harmful to the development of teaching practice). It’s easy to see why some teachers who do experience coaching decide that this isn’t for them.

Second, and probably more importantly, there’s a danger that those who are trying to implement instructional coaching may end up doing so at a somewhat superficial level. If all they tend to see are these kinds of performative examples, then at the very least they are not gaining the deep knowledge and understanding of how to support teachers with more complex problems. It’s a classic example we see in teaching more generally, of only presenting examples that share similar surface features so that students don’t get exposed to the full range of things that might be included for a specific concept. 

At worst it may lead coaches to only focus on these elements of teaching. If a coach is determined that the outcome of the next coaching session is going to be some form of rehearsal, then they are going to only selectively attend to those elements of teaching practice that are rehearsable. They will focus on the more overt, behavioural aspects of what happens in the classroom which may mean other, important elements of practice are ignored. There’s also a danger that quality assurance of coaching becomes about checking that coaches have completed all the ‘steps’ of coaching (including rehearsal) rather than thinking really hard about the content and quality of their coaching conversations. Platforms such as Steplab (which I do think is brilliant in many, many ways) allow coaching leads to record metrics like how many rounds of rehearsal occurred in a coaching session. I’m not sure what this necessarily tells anyone about the quality of coaching (this isn’t to say that this data might not be useful as part of a more holistic picture), and could easily lead some coaches to believe that, because it’s being measured, it’s the thing that’s most important.

This has some potentially serious implications. Although I’m unconvinced by the idea that a coach can select ‘the highest leverage action step’ in any meaningfully objective sense (see more here), it is obviously important that they choose to focus on something that is going to have a substantial impact on learning. That might be something around, say, managing attention in the classroom but it could equally be about lesson sequencing, question design or resource preparation – all things which don’t necessarily lend themselves to rehearsal in the way I’ve described above. Sometimes it’s all about the decision-making process which might be rehearsed in slightly different ways as I’ve discussed further here. Sometimes the action step might be something that is simple enough for the teacher to be trusted to implement. Let’s say that a teacher has identified that they are presenting too much information in one go and their action step is to use animation on their slides to allow information to be revealed one bit at a time. Does this need rehearsal with feedback? Really?

So where does this leave us? As I hope is clear, this is neither an attack on instructional coaching as a form of professional development nor those who are proponents of it. I stand by the view that, done well, instructional coaching is one of the most powerful forms of PD available. Neither is it a rejection of the utility of rehearsal as a powerful tool for teacher development provided it is used at the right time, in the right way and for the right reason. But I do think there is a problem that needs addressing. We need to ensure that when we’re talking about coaching we present a broader range of examples to illustrate what it involves. These need to include those teacher goals and action steps that might be highly subject, age or phase-specific practices, or those that don’t lend themselves to rehearsal. We need to be less dogmatic about rehearsal and acknowledge that it is a part of the coaching toolkit, and nothing more. 

Finally, we need to ensure that high quality, ongoing training for coaches is prioritised. I would imagine (hope!) that those leading on coaching are expert enough to be alive to all these nuances. But as soon as a coaching program expands, we need to be confident that that level of expertise is filtered down to every coach. Hopefully a consequence of this would be a better understanding for all of what instructional coaching looks like, and a reduction of some of the cynicism in some quarters. More importantly, it would mean that instructional coaching is consistently delivering the intended impact on student learning.