The teacher recruitment and retention crisis continues unabated. The previous government consistently missed its secondary teacher recruitment targets for all but one of the past 10 years. And around 80,000 teachers have quit teaching for reasons other than retirement in the past two years.
It is paramount that we do everything we can to enable teachers to do their job to the best of their ability, as well as giving them the skills and reflective capabilities to want to stay in the profession.
In education, there is, of course a focus on students, outcomes, and day-to-day school life, but when do teachers get the chance to think about themselves, especially their own wellbeing?
The answer is abundantly clear – rarely. We wanted to address this and created a coaching model to concentrate on the teacher – not their outcomes, their performance, or results, but rather on them as an individual and their own wellbeing.
Professor John Hattie’s Barometer of Influence (Hattie et al, 2017) shows that the strategies which have the greatest impact on student progress are linked directly to teacher input and their skill-set.
This should be of no surprise. However, it highlights that we should be doing all we can to nurture and support a school’s greatest asset. This needs to be through both their personal and professional wellbeing.
There is also much research highlighting the importance of cohesion and belonging. The model we created in our school aims to develop cohesion through shared practice and moves to a participative, collaborative approach in the third year.
The importance of this work has been further highlighted by the Department for Education’s Staff Wellbeing Charter (DfE, 2021). The Charter highlights the importance of the wellbeing and mental health of all teaching staff. It also states that improved staff wellbeing is a key outcome of educational policy.
Points 7 and 8 of the Charter assert that schools should embed wellbeing as part of training and CPD and improve access to mental health and wellbeing resources respectively. It emphasises that schools should provide resources to empower staff to take ownership of their own mental wellbeing, as well as to look out for the wellbeing of others.
With this in mind we wanted to do something in school to meaningfully help teacher wellbeing, and so we trialled this approach in a rural comprehensive secondary school in Suffolk.
School funds are tight, so formal coaching training for staff is often not feasible. However, schools are full of teachers, many of whom have the empathetic listening skills and emotional intelligence required to make excellent coaches.
So, we decided to create a model that would utilise those skills to enable them to coach the rest of the teaching staff – the idea being that we would provide guidance, focus, and questions, as well as modelling on coaching, to enable the staff to carry out empathetic coaching for all teachers.
The model ensures that each session, which lasts around 20 minutes and takes place once a half term, has a clear focus and direction. Coaches are given conversation cards to guide each session and to make the most of their time.
Year one
The first year of the coaching is all about personal wellbeing. The teacher gets the chance to reflect on their own attitudes and behaviours and themselves as an individual.
Schools rarely give meaningful time for a teacher to talk and be listened to. It is an unbelievably powerful tool to give someone your focus and attention and in those one-on-one coaching sessions that is what the teacher gets.
Before each session we met with the coaches to discuss how to lead the session and what the focus was. For example, in the first year, this could be “creating the relationship” or “what is stopping you”. We then coached the coaches before they went away to lead their sessions.
This modelling process proved invaluable in helping the coaches to feel confident in their role, but also in ensuring consistency and quality through the process.
Year two
The second year is focused on professional wellbeing. There is still a focus on the individual, but time was given to reflect on their skills and practices. Each teacher is given a reflective tool that we called the teaching star. The star provides the opportunity for staff to reflect on characteristics linked to the Teachers’ Standards and the opportunity to consider where their strengths lie.
We found this extremely positive because teachers demonstrated in their discussions that they often undervalued what they were doing.
Through the sessions they were able to understand that they were doing a huge amount for the school as well as consider personally where they need to or would like to develop in the future. This then created opportunities for bespoke CPD in the future.
Year three
The third year moved from one-to-one coaching to a collaborative coaching model. We call this participative wellbeing.
There is lots of research highlighting the benefits of teacher collaboration in moving the teacher skill-set forward. For example, Coe (2023 concludes): “We know that students learn best when teachers create a supportive environment, with a climate of high challenge and also high trust. Teachers’ learning benefits in the same way.
“By virtue of comprising multiple people, collaborative learning benefits from the collective expertise of the teachers in the group … all teachers can be brought up to the level of the best.”
However, we felt we needed to give staff the opportunity to develop their growth mindset and start that self-reflection to enable them to get the most out of the group model, hence the first two years of the programme.
There was still a coach assigned to each group and again a clear focus with conversation cards to help lead each session. But instead of being one-to-one, staff collaborated in departments or groups of departments.
This proved effective as staff were able to learn from each other, see themselves as part of a bigger picture, and so begin to help move forward whole school improvement.
Challenges
Obviously, there were some challenges when setting this up. We are all aware of the time constraints that are already on teaching staff. If this was going to be successful, staff needed to feel like they could set aside the time to do this.
The coaching became part of their directed time, but each session was only 20 minutes long. We gave staff and coaches flexibility on when to hold the sessions to enable some autonomy.
The empathetic coaching that we set up was absolutely not the instructional coaching that a lot of schools do. For us, instructional coaching is not coaching in its pure form, and either way it is not focused on wellbeing.
Because of this it meant that the technique was unfamiliar to a number of staff and initially this can make it difficult to “on-board” people. We found teachers were a little resistant, fearing that this might link to performance management or quality assurance within school. This is why it is important to ensure staff fully understand the process, the confidentiality of the coaching, and also that the coaching is absolutely not linked to any kind of performance management.
The key to quality coaching
Listening is the key skill in any coaching relationship. One must respect and be sensitive to the needs of the coachee, allowing them a catharsis of negative thoughts and feelings.
Effective listening will lead to the alleviation of problems and the removal of blocks on the way to achieving goals. Listening, observing, allowing the coachee to tell their story, and working with how people feel are the fundamental aspects of coaching.
This is also where active listening plays an important role. Active listening is a communication skill that involves going beyond simply hearing the words that the coachee speaks but also seeking to understand the meaning behind them. It requires being an active participant in the communication process.
Active listening techniques include:
- Being invested in the conversation.
- Listening to understand rather than to respond.
- Body language that portrays you are listening.
- Eye contact.
- Open-ended questions.
- Withholding judgement and advice (remember: 80% coachee, 20% coach).
In communication, active listening is important because it keeps you engaged with your coachee in a positive way. It also makes them feel heard and valued.
The coachee must feel that you are truly invested in their dialogue and that everything else is secondary.
The coach helps you to break-down the barriers that you impose upon yourself. It is predominantly about change. It empowers the individual to instigate a transformation process in their life, eradicating self-limiting thinking, motivating them to improve their self-image.
It encourages them to evaluate their current way of life, their values, their idea of self-worth and ultimately the process they need to undertake to change.
This altered mind-set not only enables staff to better fulfil their role as a teacher, but also helps them to feel better equipped to tackle the challenges of the modern teaching profession. Consequently, teacher absence, retention, and wellbeing will be improved.
- Helen Lambert has been teaching for 16 years and has been head of religious studies at a rural comprehensive for 10 years; Mat Heath has been teaching for 28 years and is head of languages, professional tutor, and a SCITT tutor. Together they have founded the CoachEd programme for schools. Visit www.coachedforschools.uk
Further information & resources
- Coe: Teacher collaboration: Why we’re for it (even when the evidence is weak), Evidence-Based Education, 2023: https://evidencebased.education/teacher-collaboration-why-were-for-it-even-when-the-evidence-is-weak/
- DfE: Guidance: Education staff wellbeing charter, 2021: www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter
- Hattie et al: Hattie’s Barometer of influence – Infographic, 2022: https://visible-learning.org/2022/01/hatties-barometer-of-influence-infographic