I'm proud to announce that my new book Responsive Coaching is out now 💥

It's the product of 10+ years coaching, 3 years writing, and a year testing in school, and aims to help coaches to be as impactful and useful as possible 💪 My overall aim was to help coaches avoid being tied down by labels...

🚫 Should my coaching be ‘directive’, ‘facilitative’ or ‘dialogic’?

✅ How can I adapt my coaching *in the moment* depending on what teachers know and understand?

Over the last year, I’ve spent 100s of hours reading, thinking, and experimenting with teacher coaching.

I’m stitching this all together, to be released in my upcoming book: ‘Responsive Coaching’

For a flavour of what’s to come, here are 7 of my best blogs on teacher coaching: 1. What Do We Mean When We Talk About Instructional Coaching?

steplab.co/resources/essa…

In the last year, I’ve read 50+ journal articles on teacher coaching.

Here are my top 5.

For each, I'll outline:
→What are the key findings?
→How do the researchers define IC?
→What's the most powerful idea?

🧵👇 1. 'The Gradual Increase of Responsibility Model: Coaching for Teacher Change' (Collet, 2012)

A thread on Instructional Coaching implementation: what are the central challenges of a successful IC programme, and how can we overcome them?

Based on my newest blog: notes.steplab.co/go/BPwg5d3n Implementing Instructional Coaching is tough, and more importantly requires constant effort and adjustment.

Every school I know of that has built a great programme changes something about their approach every year.

Hi folks,

@PepsMccrea and I have been working on some guidance for senior leaders around what Steplab does & what problems it helps schools to solve.

Sharing below in case it's useful.

🧵👇 Instructional Coaching is currently the “...best evidenced form of CPD” (Sims, 2018) @DrSamSims

But, it’s hard to get right.

Steplab has been built and iterated over several years by school & MAT PD leads to solve the problems that arise when trying to build an IC programme.

🔥 HOT off the press:

A must-read paper for those interested in teacher education, in new, improved, short form.

edworkingpapers.com/ai22-507

🧵 Short thread:

Sims et al. argue that effective PD is composed of mechanisms or "causally active components" in four categories: 💡 Insight → “Teachers gaining an enhanced or expanded understanding of teaching and learning.”

For example, a teacher might learn that working memory is composed of separate visual-spatial and phonological systems, each of which has limited capacity

📑A collection of my favourite research ideas on habits and practice.

Getting teachers to practice is arguably the most challenging aspect of PD. It’s so much easier to put together some great resources and teach through presentation and discussion.

🧵... ❓A great session designed like this can leave teachers excited and motivated to change. Yet this can often fail to have any real impact on classroom practice. Why is this?

Seven things the research tells us about the importance of deliberate practice:

📑THREAD: Some of my favourite articles on why teacher change is tough...

💡KEY IDEA: There are significant pressures on teachers that promote stasis over change.

✅Knowing what these are means that as teacher educators we can design ways around them!

🧵 1) Teaching poses very high cognitive load.

There often isn't a clear 'solution' to a problem in teaching, but many possible ways through.

It's impossible for teachers to consider all of these every time they are faced with an issue.

researchgate.net/publication/23…

This thread with a collection of my favourite research ideas on habits and practice was popular:

https://twitter.com/Josh_CPD/status/1364293212010070021?s=20

So, here's a partner thread: ❓Eight Principles for Great Deliberate Practice-based CPD❓

🧵... 1.Prepare-to-Practise:

Practise isn’t just about role-play. Often, the initial stages involve planning, scripting or resource creation. When we design practise activities for teachers to use, we need to guide them to prepare first

📑A collection of my favourite research ideas on habits and practice.

Getting teachers to practice is arguably the most challenging aspect of PD. It’s so much easier to put together some great resources and teach through presentation and discussion.

🧵... ❓A great session designed like this can leave teachers excited and motivated to change. Yet this can often fail to have any real impact on classroom practice. Why is this?

Seven things the research tells us about the importance of deliberate practice:

📖Paper with major implications for T-ED and coaching:

'Cognitive Transformation Theory: contrasting cognitive and behavioural learning' (2006) by Gary Klein and Holly Baxter.

researchgate.net/publication/25…

🏚Moving beyond the store-house metaphor for teacher learning...

🧵... Lots of our theories of T-ED and coaching operate a storehouse metaphor for teacher learning.

In other words, we assume the learner is missing some critical knowledge: coaches identify this, teach or practice, give feedback and test.

📖Another MUST READ article for T-EDs/coaches.

'Parsing the Practice of Teaching' by Mary Kennedy

researchgate.net/publication/28…

I'm obsessed with this paper - probably talk about it too much TBH - and here's why

... 🧵 Kennedy is writing in response to a 'Lemovian' approach that focuses overtly on teacher moves...

I certainly don't have a problem with this approach (far from it!), BUT...

💡Important paper for teachers and T-Eds:

Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design by Sweller, van Merrienboer and Paas.

researchgate.net/publication/20…

I think CLT is *the* grand organising theory for everything that teachers need to know about cognitive science. This paper takes all the components of a model of how we learn, and organises them into a usable framework for how to teach.

And, importantly, how *not* to teach...

🤓🤓🤓THREAD: Paper on T-ED / coaching for the nerdiest of the nerds.

Insights for how we train teachers to deal with the ill-structured domain that is classroom teaching

'The Structure of Ill-Structured Problems' by Simon, H. (1973)
ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/desi… ❓ What is an Ill Structured problem (ISP)?

- No criteria by which potential solutions can be measured
- The problem space is not clearly defined
- The knowledge resources required are not immediately available, or exist in different categories...

Sounds like teaching to me!...

🤓Thorny Coaching Issue:

When I work with schools on setting up instructional coaching, a question I get asked A LOT is:

"But, who should coach who?"

I've found a paper with an answer: scholar.harvard.edu/files/erictayl… Lots of schools argue that coaching pairs should be Novice - - > Expert, or that teachers should be exclusively paired with subject specialists.