Curee (2005) found that ‘professional development is much more likely to be successful when it involves collaboration between staff and that effective mentoring and coaching is key to professional development.’
Coaching is certainly seen as a powerful tool which can be used to support learning and development. But what is coaching? And how is coaching different to mentoring?
Some can get confused by the two terms: mentoring, which can be traced back to ‘Odyssey’ a Green poem where there was a character called ‘Mentor’, who offered counsel to both Odyssey and his son. Here one can start to see a distinction between the two. The National College defines mentoring as:
‘..a continuing but informal relationship focused on long-term goals, aspirations and career transitions. Involves passing on knowledge and offering support, based on the mentor’s work’.
Similarly, coaching is defined as:
‘there are many models of coaching, they all start from the premise that people have the resources within themselves to achieve their personal and leadership potential and the task lies in assisting them to access those resources’.
One can see that whilst the two are similar, there is a distinction that a coach does not necessarily need to have expertise in the areas being coached (unlike mentoring), rather they have the skills to allow the coachee (client) to access his or her own resources to be able to come to their own solutions. Timperley (2011) emphasises that coaching is not a cosy chat, it is about change which is clearly linked to goals and actions.
There has been much research carried out about coaching and mentoring. Though most research has been since the 90s, in 1951, the psychologist Carl Rogers, was interested in human motivation and ‘learner-centred education’. He outlined his work on the positive relationships in the development of humans’ concept of self.
Rogers was interested in the importance of relationships and the effects of those relationships on human development and placed the importance on the ‘power of facilitating learning, rather than just teaching’. He went further to suggest that ‘the facilitation of significant learning rest upon certain attitudinal qualities that exist in the personal relationship between the facilitator and learner (Roger, 1994:305).
The focus of the research started to widen from here with a recognition in the role of coaching in enhancing feedback (Hillman, Schwandt, & Bartz,1990), the contribution to both leadership and management (Popper & Lipsitz 1992). Commentators talk about the most interesting and rigorous studies during this period carried out by Peterson, 1993 on the triangulation and psychometric based study on coaching efficacy. This research showed that the participants who took part in the coaching improved by 85 standard deviations in overall effectiveness as a result of the coaching programmes.
During this time research questions moved away from counselling and training as had been the case previously and in 1996, it was the work of Olivero, Bane and Kopelman with the first reported attempt at examining the influence of coaching in the public sector. It is argued that this research paper was an important milestone (Fillery-Travis, 2011) because there was case-study that could be looked at and used as an example of how coaching was used as a management skill.
Action research was also used to examine the influence of coaching on changing behaviour in the workplace and the outcome, was that productivity increased by 88% after coaching (Fillery-Travis, 2011).
Coaching is clearly a powerful tool for personal change. Ultimately it involves empowering people by facilitating self-directed learning and we believe that coaching can make a positive impact in schools if a culture of coaching can be adopted by everyone. The best schools, develop networks which support the development of leadership at all levels. As Hattie, (2012) says
‘what works over extended periods is leaders working as coaches for their teams’.
There is a strong evidence base that coaching promotes learning and builds capacity for change in schools.
Research shows that school leaders who invest time in developing coaching as a common practice in their school, can help staff adapt and make changes to improve the way they teach. The challenge today is how can research be translated into practice?
John Hattie’s ‘Visible learning’ has arguably been one of the most influential pieces of work carried out over the last decade. This research, ‘Visible learning’ has enabled educators to read about the highest leverage factors that contribute to student achievement. These lists of best practices’ highlight the importance of coaching for teachers:
‘Coaching involves empowering people by facilitating self-directed learning, personal growth, and improved performance’ Hattie, 2012:72.
So how can peer coaching be implemented to maximise John Hattie’s mind frames for successful visible learning? Let's find out in our next blog…
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