E5: Coaching and Mentoring with Professor Rachel Lofthouse

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Transforming Education, a podcast brought to you by Vio. In this episode, I speak with Professor Rachel Lofthouse about coaching and mentoring. This really is a hot topic at the moment with the new early career framework. And Rachel, as Professor of Teacher Education in the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University and Director of Collective Ed, which is a global hub for coaching, mentoring, and professional learning. I couldn't think of anyone better to really pick the brains of about what good coaching and mentoring looks like. And that's exactly what we cover in this episode. We look at the difference between coaching, mentoring, and training, why coaching and mentoring is so important for early career teachers, why it's so important for teachers in general, and how it can impact teachers and school leaders over time. As always, with these podcasts, any research that we mentioned in the recording itself, we'll place on the website. I love chatting with Rachel about coaching and mentoring, and I hope you enjoy this episode too. - Hi, Rachel, how are you today? - Good morning, I'm fine. Actually, yes, it's a really beautiful day here in Leeds, and I'm looking out at my garden, so I'm fine. - Wow, that sounds fantastic. We are so thrilled to have you joining us today for Transforming Education, been a fan of your work for a long time. And I think many of our listeners will be familiar with you and know your research on coaching and mentoring, but just for any listeners who maybe haven't seen your research before in the past, I was wondering if we could perhaps start by talking a little bit about collective ed and the work that you do there. - Yes, of course, so collective ed is the center for coaching, mentoring, and professional learning. It's what we would call a research and practice center, and it's situated at Leedsback University in the Carnegie School of Education. And it was founded on the basis of my appointment there as a professor of teacher education. So it's been in existence for about three or four years, and it has this kind of remit, I mean, we've designed the remit, it hasn't been given a remit, but it has a remit of trying to expand and share the knowledge base that is available across the education sector. So to academics, to researchers, to teacher educators, to mentors, leaders, teachers in schools, freelancers, and to create this enhanced knowledge base related to coaching, mentoring, and professional learning. And if you take the first two coaching and mentoring, it does give you an indication of what we're particularly interested in, which are these ongoing talk-based relationships where colleagues of some description are sitting and working together for a period of time, focusing on the development of practice and professional growth and formation. - And I think one of the things that I love about collective ed is how you've created this real community with it as well. There are so many interesting people that are involved with collective ed that I see across Edgy Twitter and within the research spaces as well. So is that something that you actually try and bolster people to get involved with as well? - Yes, it's quite deliberate. We are, our achievements are very much entwined with what's going on in practice. And that's both locally and nationally. And also internationally. We have, for example, a working paper series and we have, that's multi-authored. So we encourage anybody who's writing, thinking, developing practice, researching in those three fields of coaching, mentoring, and professional learning to contribute to the working papers. And we're interested in summaries of research. We're interested in practice insights. We're interested in think pieces. We also include conference and book reviews. So we're really, you know, we want to bring together in one place a resource that draws on this wide range of perspectives and experiences locally, nationally and internationally. We also have a network of collective ed fellows. So our fellows are all people who have already contributed to that knowledge base. So they might have contributed a working paper. They might have contributed to one of our seminars or hub events. So they've already brought their insight, their knowledge, their experience to an audience through collective ed. And that bringing of that knowledge to others rests on their work out in the field. So we invite those people to become fellows. And not everybody does, but many people do. And it means that we've created this international network. And what's lovely about the network is it's not just international, but it also brings together educators working at very different career stages, working with a different emphasis. So some are very definitely practitioners. You know, they are dealing with the nitty gritty of what's going on in schools right now, whether that's as a mentor or as a school leader. But also we have academics, teacher educators and freelancers. And there's a lot of freelancers, consultants, coaches, mentors that work in this space, but are actually working for other people through their own practice as opposed to employed directly by a school or a university. And it is quite a unique space. So we have our fellows. We also open up a lot of our events just to a wider audience. Doesn't matter whether you're recognized as a fellow, you're very welcome to attend our CPD events. For example, for example, we spend time focusing on the detail of a particular working paper inviting the author or authors of the working paper to be in conversation with one of our fellows to open up a conversation to a wider network. And that's a really interesting punchy form of CPD, very focused form of CPD. And then this year, in addition to all of that, we've also created a new coaching community. And it's a bit different to the other networks. It's a subscription community. It's we're piloting it this year, so it's quite heavily subsidized. But we've invited people who have a significant role and responsibility for coaching in education. Again, whether they're working freelance for an organization for a school, but whose substantive role includes coaching. And we've invited them to join a community, because what we know is that a lot of people working as coaches are working relatively independently of each other. It would be easy to think they're always in competition with each other, actually. Their general stance is to work collaboratively. And this new community is offering them a shared space for professional learning and development for networking and also for supervision as a coach, because we recognize that coaching is a complex dilemma-based practice. And we want to offer them the opportunity for formal supervision, because we see the value and benefit of that. So our work is continuing to evolve, but it's been very exciting work so far. And I think that's so important right now to have that kind of community aspect with everything that's going on with the early career framework. I spend a lot of time on Twitter, I don't post that often, but I spend a lot of time just watching and seeing what's going on. And I love just seeing the current trends and ebbs and flows in education. And at the moment, it seems like there's this huge wave of schools trying to instill instructional coaching or coaching within their setting because of the early career framework and they're grappling with how to do that. So what a great resource to have here that's available for schools all over the world through Collective Ed. So if you are interested in coaching or mentoring, have a look at Collective Ed, have a look at the research, see if there are any ways you can get involved. If you're a writer, even if you're doing a bit of research or a book review, have a look, have a look and get involved. So in terms of actually getting started with coaching and mentoring in schools, I feel from what I've seen on Twitter and from the discussions that there sometimes seems to be a little bit of a confusion between what coaching is and what mentoring is and even what training is and how that links with how they link with one another. So I thought I'd ask the expert herself if you could perhaps give us a little bit of a breakdown of what the difference is between those different opens. OK, I think I'll give you the differences I see it, but also share some of the commonalities. But I think it's worth noting that whether you're talking about coaching, mentoring, or training, they are human practices. They involve real people. And real people don't work in silos. They work across boundaries, even if they don't classify the work as working across boundaries. So inevitably, if you're a coach, you might dip into a mentoring approach. If you're a mentor, you might dip into a coaching approach. And you might do it consciously or you might do it without much awareness. And it's important to create some definitions, but we have to recognize that, worst, we create definitions, the boundaries, other places where people kind of trespass and we can't stop that happening. However, let's try to create some definitions. So I would say in an English context, because I think it's worth noting that the words get used differently in translation in different contexts, different international contexts, but also used differently, even in English-speaking countries. But if we're talking about an English context, we would typically see mentoring as something which is offered to individuals who are working in a new professional domain. So they might be very early on their journey to becoming teachers. They are student or trainee teachers. But that's a new professional domain for them. And they are being mentored by somebody with expertise, with experience, with insight, with a grounded common sense, if you like, that they can offer that insight to the mentee. Very often mentoring happens within an additional structured program, so a PGCE, or a B.A. Ed, a teacher first, or a skip program, where the trainee or the student teacher commences training is offered a whole range of opportunities, both in schools and often out of schools. And along the way, they work with mentors who are these more experienced teachers to help them to navigate that training and learning experience, and to help them contextualize it and make sense of it on a daily basis. So as they're struggling to learn to teach, and struggling to learn to teach is normal. It's temporary, it's fine. And a mentor is there to help you grapple with it. Similarly, for the early career teachers, the early career teachers, in the past, they would be on an England, a one-year NQT program of, with lots of different flavors. I mean, there wasn't a huge amount of consistency or coherence, but often there was a mentoring aspect to that. But now that's more formally developed into the early career framework, which is a framework, or I would say it is a curriculum, a training curriculum, and a mentor plays a role in helping that mentee, that early career teacher, engage with that curriculum, make sense of it in the light of their own emerging practice, and the specific context in which they're working, and support them, and challenge them, and be that critical friend, and be that trainer at times, as a mentor, you're taking on lots and lots of different hats. The other thing about mentoring is that, in some cases, a mentor plays a role in making a judgment of progress, not in every case, depends on the, if you like, the rights of passage for each program, but a mentor can be one of the people who says, yes, you're meeting a set of professional standards in this new professional domain, or, actually, you're not, and we need to think about how we address those challenges. So we can think about mentoring at that early stage in somebody's career, but we can similarly think about the offer of mentoring when somebody steps into a new professional role. So if you're a new deputy head, a new head teacher, a new CEO, a new governor, you might be offered, or you might seek out mentoring, from somebody who is close to that practice, has experience of that practice, and is able to support you for a period of time as you make that transition. So I would say that was mentoring. Coaching. So I guess it's probably easiest if we, first of all, say that coaching is a word that's used in many walks of life, as we know, sports coaching, life coaching, business coaching. I even saw a BBC report about love coaching recently. So it's, you know, it's not exclusive to education, but if we think about it in relation to education, then we can see it as something which has at its heart, the motivation to support an individual through the challenges that they face to draw upon the opportunities that they're offered within a context. But also to think about their own professional growth, their own professional formation, to develop a strong sense of agency and self-determination, to be able to establish targets and goals and be supported to meet those targets and goals, but not necessarily be driven by targets and goals in a sort of slavish fashion, to be in a space with a coach where conversations are managed and the person is, if you like, supported, they're held in that space. So that space is a privileged space, and through which a relationship has sustained over a period of time that is based on trust and it's based on high quality dialogue, but with a really strong focus on the individual interests, dilemmas, goals of the coachy. Now, you could say, well, mentoring is like that as well, and mentoring is like that. But the other thing about mentoring is that very often, the attention is drawn to the needs of the school context, the needs of the professional standards, the needs of the curriculum, like the early career framework, alongside the needs of the trainee or the student or the teacher in meeting those challenges. Coaching is usually less attached to a specific program, not always, it has to be said, not always. And then I think there's a difference between training and education, so I'd see training as something which is essentially relatively procedural, not prescribed or prescribed necessarily, but it engages somebody in a set of learning activities which are usually predetermined, which are pretty significantly contextualized and which have a pretty clear set of learning training objectives. And you would expect somebody to demonstrate competence as a result of training. And I would say that education is a little bit broader and wider than that. Education is much more again about the development of, you know, the continual expansion of understanding, which is gained through engagement with a knowledge base engagement with others in the same educational context. So that kind of opportunity for dynamic conversation and which has a very open offer, if you're like we're saying, if you're becoming educated, then your ideas are expanding. It's a divergent activity. You don't know where you're going to go with this knowledge. You don't know what this expertise is going to, how this expertise is going to lure you in. Whereas I think training is a more convergent activity because we're asking people to more narrowly focus on the objectives of that training. So there's a little bit of me that thinks sometimes training and mentoring work well together and coaching and education work well together, but it's not quite as simple as that. It's a confusing space, isn't it? Because basically all of those things are focused on improving teaching practice, making teachers better, but they all approach from a slightly different angle. And a lot of it comes down to intense for me as well, when you're looking at like a mentor, the intention there, as you just so clearly said, was to help support typically newer teachers through a set process or a set structure from reach from point A to point B. Coaching is often eventually led by the individual themselves about the problems that they're having, or the issues that they're having, and they have that expert there to support them. And in both cases, the mentor and the coach have to be extremely well trained or have a lot of knowledge, but that application is sometimes a little bit different. And I think it's so difficult as well for schools who have tight resources. Because I was looking at your research on coaching for leaders recently, and the paper that you did with integrity coaching. And some of the findings there about what made the coaching so effective was the independence of the coaching, and the high level of skill that those coaches have. So sometimes if you're a school that's trying to roll out coaching for early career teachers, sometimes the only resources that you have available is the staff within that school. How do you then create effective coaching relationships when you don't have the budget to bring in, kind of, external? I think that's a really interesting feature of that research that you've picked out there, actually, that as you say, the headteachers who we interviewed and held focus groups with during that research were absolutely adamant that the value of it rested in the expertise of the coaches, but it wasn't that the coaches were all former headteachers. It was that the coaches had been really carefully selected because of their coaching expertise and the nuance that they could apply to their practice. And they actually, when we talked to the coaches, had a whole host of different professional and academic qualifications and past experiences, which they were drawing upon and reforming into a practice as a coach. And the independence was really critical as well. And you're right, that mentoring is typically something which is much more internally constructed using the resources of an organization. Coaching may not be, but we're often now conflating the two. Now, about 10 years ago, whilst working at Newcastle University, I was part of a research project on teacher coaching funded by the National College of School Leadership as it was then and CFBT. And it was about peer coaching. It was about saying teachers who are seeking to enhance their practice in their classrooms can learn from and with their peers. If their peers adopt a coaching approach and have appropriate knowledge and experience to bring to that field. And it's not easy. Lots of things get in the way of that internally, including the bottom line, the finance, the resource, the availability of people to give enough time and to get well enough trained and to sustain something over a period. But it is possible to create coaching, practices, and cultures internally. But it has to be viewed as something which is likely to sit a bit uncomfortably with some of the other procedures and protocols that have evolved in our schools. So the relationship between coaching and performance management, for example, there's a relative tension there. The relationship between coaching and being led, there's a relative tension there. And I think it takes a lot of fathoming out. So it's not just about the resource that you can put in physically and practically. So can I release people? Can I make sure they're trained? Can I give them time? Am I doing this without just adding an additional workload burden? It's also about the effort that it takes to create the culture and the practices that can actually make the difference. And that's often unquantifiable, because it requires knowledge. It requires engagement with the coaching community to learn it and guide. It requires all sorts of things at a multi-level level or levels within a school, not just the coaches, but the leaders, the governors, et cetera. Mentoring is able to adopt coaching practices. So again, there's a conflation of the two. And we would argue that the best mentors are more than able to adopt a coaching stance at times and know when it's appropriate to-- if you retreat a little bit from a training curriculum that they might be following with their mentee, and actually take a greater coaching stance. And that might be kind of momentarily within a conversation, or it might be because of the point of progression and development that their mentee is at. You mentioned instructional coaching at the start of this. And I think it's worth just noting that instructional coaching has a very, very long and well-evident pedigree. It is known to work well. But most of the evidence-based-- most of the research that is being drawn upon to validate it as a process here is not from the UK. It's from the States. No, there's a different system there. And they have a very different system. Yeah. It's not that there are no parallels. It's not that we can't learn from each other, because of course we can. But I was talking about this yesterday with Christian Van Nureberg, who works a lot with Jim Knight, who is one of the main-- he has worked in instructional coaching for 25 years and has huge credibility. But one of the things that we were thinking about was the extent to which typically, not exclusively, but typically the kind of work of instructional coaches in the US relates to a specific area of pedigree. Now, the reason that they use the word instructional is because they tend to use instructional to mean pedigogy. Or we use pedagogy where they mean instructional. So it's not about giving instruction. It's not about direct instructional teaching. It's about the use of the word instruction to mean pedagodic coaching. So there's a focus on the pedagogy of teachers. And there's also a focus on the pedagodic process of coaching or the instructional, because they use that word instead, process of coaching. It's typical for instructional coaches in US context to be instructional coaches working, for example, in the field of literacy or mathematics education. And it's typical, isn't it, in the US, for there to be perhaps someone like a regional coach that's hired by the district or by the group of schools and their sole job is to provide non-judgmental coaching to staff members on particular skills. And the UK don't think our staffing structures are almost set up. No, I mean, we have. We enable that quite as much. It's interesting, because I think with the growth of maths, for example, we really do have the opportunity to create a model that is more similar. Now, there's lots of variety in the states. You know, different districts will use different models, but it is typical for somebody to be employed as an instructional coach with an emphasis on their pedagogic expertise. So as a coach of other teachers focusing on teaching reading, for example, or writing, and it might be also that their expertise is in particular types of school community. So multi-lingual communities, for example. And it's their expertise, which is the foundation of their coaching, both in terms of them bringing that into their coaching training and then taking it into their practice. Now, I'm not saying that in England are-- we don't have that level of expertise, because I think it does exist. But what we've typically done at the moment is we've taken, if you like, a process of instructional coaching, which focuses the teacher's attention on what's going on in the classroom. And some of the routines of instructional coaching. But it's inevitable, because we've suddenly rolled it out across several of the early career framework providers. We've basically just drawn in our mentors to be becoming instructional coaches. Now, I know that there's a training offer, not saying that they're doing it completely blind. But we are basically doing it from scratch. And what we're asking them to do, because they're instructional coaching within and across the whole early career framework, is we're asking them to be instructional coaches across many different areas of teaching expertise. Yeah, and that's not necessarily the same. Yeah, and I have a bit of a worry about that, because I think mentors can be coaches as well and be excellent coaches in many cases. But I think there are some challenges there in terms of the expertise that we're talking about. How can that mentor have that level of expertise across all those different areas? There are some exceptional men, some sure who do, but it's a challenge in and of itself. And then also the element of trust and judgment. So if you've got a mentoring relationship with someone very different to the relationship with a coach where you feel you can talk about things completely confidentially about things that are worrying you and it's going to have no link to any kind of course or any qualification that you're on. It's completely separate. And it's how you can manage that when that mentor has that coaching hat on. So I guess I'm just philosophically naval gazing here after the US system and thinking, actually that is one thing from that system, which I would love to see in the US. Yeah, and I think that that challenge of trust is one that we, it's actually quite sensitive to talk about because if we imply that trust isn't there, we're suggesting that there's some deficit, that the individuals are not good enough people that they can't create a trusting relationship. But trust is built on all sorts of different platforms. And one of those is a sense of solidarity, I think, a sense that the two people are genuinely working in solidarity with each other, and with the learners and with the students and pupils that they're teaching, that they want the very best for that community and that their coaching and or mentoring practice is about gaining the very best and that, actually, through working together, they gain a greater enhanced understanding of the challenges. And that it's not that it's an unbreakable bond, but it's a very clear ethical bond between people. And actually, it is true that when you've got a reporting mechanism, for example, where you're having to report on somebody's progress, that has the potential to undermine trust, regardless of how nice the people are, because you've got a power structure, you've got a systemic structure, which can counter the opportunities for creating trust. And I think we are still really in the grips of that, and it's hard to tackle. And we can be quite extreme in our critique of that. We can talk about the horror of some schools which appear to be essentially toxic working environments. And if you say that, people get quite upset and defensive, but there are certainly some where that appears to be if a really reasonable description. But you don't have to be a toxic working environment for there to be an underlying anxiety around professional trust, because of the power structures. And there's a lot of ego in education, and educational leadership at the moment. And sometimes ego is good, drives us forward, but sometimes it's a really, it's a damaging construct, because to maintain an ego, you actually have to see yourself as better than more superior than others around you, and to be seen as such by others. And actually, that's not a very good relationship basis for coaching or mentoring, to be fair, or leadership, if I'm honest. And I think that trust element, that independent element, it's so important for both early teachers and for leaders with coaching and just effects almost in different ways, doesn't it? So if you're an early teacher who's coming through the system, that independent and expert advice and support can be so helpful to help you tackle and wrangle with the issues that you're going through to become a better teacher. And something really stuck with me the other week, I was at a head teacher's conference in Wales. And I said, I was chatting to the head teacher to a head teacher about how we had very few people come and chat to us on the first day. And he said, it's because, as a head teacher, you can't really go and vent in the staff room. So when we come to conferences like this, we love to just speak with one another and catch up on and share problems with each other. Because quite a lonely position, isn't it? You're always right at the top. And people are always asking you questions about what they can do better or a problem that they have and actually having that safe space that's independent is really valuable for a different reason. And I think that's one of the really strange phenomenon of working an education. And it's not the same for everybody. But whether you're a teacher who walks into a classroom with year 10, you close the door, you've got an hour with them and you're teaching science. You may have a TA with you, but the chances are you haven't. You've got 30 year 10s. Whether you're a deputy head. Yeah, a deputy head responsible for safeguarding and a problem has just landed on your desk and you're the responsible person. That is a significant weight on your shoulders, whether you're the head teacher, who is surrounded on a daily basis by, if you're a small primary school, maybe 50 others, maybe two and a half thousand others, if you're one of the big secondaries. And you walk into this workplace and it's humming and it's busy and there are people. And then there's this kind of surrounding community. The parents, the local businesses, all those people who somehow influence and feed off your school as well. So you're never physically on your own or very rarely. I mean, it's perfectly reasonable, I think to take some seclusion now and again, is a head in order to kind of quieten that noise. But actually in the role that you undertake, you are typically quite isolated. And the human connection is really important for most educators, it's what brings them into the field. But the psychodity is that you can feel that you don't have somebody to turn to, you know, in a kind of flexible, natural way. And yeah, I think your right head teachers do want an opportunity, and often an opportunity to talk to people who are not their neighbouring head teacher, who perhaps is in some sort of competition with them. But to just say this is how it is, certainly, you know, there are occasions when within collective aid, we create opportunities for conversation, and this is going to sound ridiculous, but it almost feels like group therapy, you know, and we're not therapists and we're not aiming for that. But that sense of space to breathe, space to share, space to hear other people's stories, space to be reassured that the things you're dealing with the dilemmas you have are shared. Yeah, those are really important parts of any coaching type community, actually. And I think that's, and even for the teachers as well, the same kind of patterns are there, you know, the burden of taking on all of those lives onto your own soul. So, you know, when you're looking after your class, you know about all the different problems for all the different students that you look that you have under your wing, and you take that all on. I remember in my teacher training, this lady gave us such a great analogy about teaching, and she said, "You start off the day "as like a pristine snowman with your wake up "with a little scarf on and your hat "and your little carrot nose and all your buttons." And as the day goes on, you just melt. And then at the beginning of the next day, you kind of set up again, you were all ready to go, and that pressure kind of builds over time. So, I guess that leads me on to my next question is, well, why do you think coaching is so important for teachers in general, not just early career teachers, but teachers in general, and just to be really cheeky, 'cause I know you used this a lot on Twitter. Does mentoring matter, Rachel? - Okay, I love that metaphor. I haven't heard that one, but I might have to pinch it. - It's great, isn't it? - It's lovely, it's really, it's really, and I've got that image now, I can't get out of my head for it's a perfect description. So, let's stick with the mentoring for a minute. So, yes, I don't know if I was the first, but I did quite deliberately for a long time, or for a while, use the hashtag #mentorsmatter, and you know, every now and again, I still do, and I link it to other people's blogs or other people's work, as well as our own research. So, I do believe fundamentally that mentors matter, and some of that is a purely personal understanding of why they matter to me. And I can think very fondly of my mentors, when I was doing my teacher, training my PGCE, at Newcastle University, I went to two very, very different schools, and I was mentored on both occasions by, dog, dog features, the head of department, I think, on both occasions, in the geography department, and they were invaluable. You know, I can't, I mean, it almost sounds like a cliche, I wouldn't have got through it without them. I might have got through it without them, but I wouldn't have learned so much. I wouldn't have gained so much ground so quickly. I wouldn't have had the sorts of conversations that really made me make sense of what I was trying to do, that helped me gain insight into the pupils I was teaching, that allowed me to draw on their expertise, and that allowed me, if you like, to make that connection deep back into the profession, that their expertise was partly built on how they drawn on other people's expertise that had been working for decades before them. So it's this part of this kind of ongoing professional conversation that we have with each other, I think, is through mentoring. And I think they matter because they, you know, they're there. They've got your back, they should have your back. And you can go along and you can ask them a direct question, or you can go along and you can say, I'm really struggling and I don't really know why, and you can go along and you can say, I've had the best day ever. Can I just tell you about it? And I think those things are all true when mentoring works, you know, they sound sentimental, but I think they're true when mentoring works. I think one of the benefits that I had when I was doing my PGCE was that we had almost no framing of that PGCE or that partnership or that mentoring by any external outside agencies. I mean, the DFE knew we were there. We were going to get a DFE qualified teacher number at the end of it. Presumably, Newcastle University couldn't recruit to its PGCE unless somebody had said, you're good enough. You're going to do a good enough job. But we'd really only just invented partnership. You know, that notion that this is a shared responsibility between the university and the schools is what was emerging in the early 1990s. There wasn't same kind of documentary evidence trail that we had to keep in relation to a set of standards. There wasn't a defined curriculum that off-stead were judging anybody against. And so mentoring mattered because one of the things it did was it helped to glue together the different parts of the program, but it also existed in a space that was allowed to be quite unique between the individuals. It's very different now. Mentors are much more, well, they're hopefully better trained because they've got a bigger suite of jobs and wider range of responsibilities for which they should gain better training. And hopefully, the resources there to allow them to do the work in a way that's a bit more sustainable. There are more constraints on what they do. There are more frameworks that they have to work within. But at the heart of it, it's about saying to somebody, as you enter into this new professional practice, this new world, this thing that you feel you're familiar with because you went to school as a pupil. You might have been a learning support assistant. You might have been a volunteer. You might have done all sorts of work in a school that you haven't yet trained to teach. So this is going to be new, but we've got somebody here who can be beside you on that journey and can actually fundamentally knows how to help you on that journey. So yes, of course they matter. I think Mentors matter are all sorts of career stages when somebody wants to draw upon that additional expertise of an experienced colleague. And I think we should make Mentors more available. - And if we believe in the concept of lifelong learning for our students, then, you know, it's exactly the same for us. - It's a competition, isn't it? - And actually, the other reason why mentoring matters is I think it really illustrates to children and young people going through school that if they observe that mentoring process, I mean, not saying they would sit there and observe a conversation in a formal fashion, but you know, just being aware that it's going on, that actually also speaks to them a bit about what workplaces are like. You know, that when you enter a workplace, there is going to be a lot that's unfamiliar to you, but it's okay because there are other people who have more experience and who can offer you their expertise and guidance and can be there, can have your back. And I think actually making that more visible to young people as they move out of school and into their own workplaces is not a bad thing at all. You know, it's a good model, you know, for those young people who move into apprenticeships, for example, if they've seen, you know, that kind of relationship working in a professional domain, then it would make sense to them that it would work for them. And I think that happens naturally as well, doesn't it, mentoring? You know, sometimes even without a formalized structure, if you're in a workplace and you're a slightly less experienced or a bit younger, you might look at someone who's a little bit more experienced, but you admire them as a professional, you admire them as a person, and you might just lean on them for advice and guidance in an informal way. So I guess, yeah. So I guess is there any real benefit in terms of formalizing that a little bit more to create more of that culture? - It is interesting because if you ask a kind of question about mentoring to the general public, and actually even to teach as many of them, will name somebody who they will say was my mentor, who was never actually designated as their mentor. But yes, you're right, you spot people in your work environment or in the community. And you think, I want to learn from them. I want to be like them. I'm drawn to their personality, to their stance, to the way in which they do their work, or the way in which they are with others. And you inadvertently try and occupy some of the same spaces as them. And sometimes you have quite an upfront conversation about I really admire what you're doing, I value what you're doing. Would you mind me kind of just being present? Will you help me, will you mentor me? And sometimes it almost happens without the person knowing that you've kind of instilled in them the role of mentor, but they just naturally are the person who takes you under their wing, gives you advice, shows an interest in you, and is with you for a while, rather than just, you know, you can have fantastic one-off conversations with people, absolutely, but that's not mentoring. So I think that's interesting. And I think the question, if we can do that anyway, naturally, do we need to formalize it? I think we do in our workplaces, like education, because I feel that it is too easy for people to fall through the gaps. It is easy, too easy for people to feel overwhelmed. It is too easy for the resource that might be made available for informal mentoring in that there's enough time to breeze here. I can have a conversation in staff room, because we're not having to rush away and do duty. Or it's only a 20 minute, you know, 30 minute lunch break, and actually your 30 minute lunch break doesn't come inside with mine. So we're not going to sit down together anyway. I think because of the relentless, you know, pressure, workload, schedule that teachers are under, when they're actually on the school premises, it's important that we do create that capacity for mentoring, because it's more difficult for it to happen naturally. And how do you match mentors and mentees? I think the natural thing is, if your new teacher in history department, or in the English department, you haven't had a English department, as you mentioned, or the head of the history department, as you mentioned, or if you're a maths teacher, the head of the maths department. But the person who's head of that department might not be the best mentor, because it's a different set of skills to perhaps being a really good teacher or head of the department in terms of playing curriculum, and so on and so forth. So is there a bit of an art to matching these people up? I think that's a really important question. I don't think there's a simple answer to it. I mean, if I'm brutally honest, I think we don't match in the current time. We rarely have an opportunity to do that matchmaking, because what we're doing is we're scrambling to look for anybody who will mentor in any placement or in any context. And that isn't-- it's not to say the people who end up mentoring other wrong people. But it's honest. We know that the early career framework and it's demand for mentors has put quite a lot of pressure on initial teacher education mentors that have now stepped up to being early career teacher mentors and are now not available to be mentors on skits and PGCE. So that's putting a lot of pressure on placements. And you can't ethically put a student or a trainee teacher into a placement if there isn't a mentor for them. I mean, it's part of the way that we're compliant, and it's part of the ethical ways in which we work. So we are struggling already. And that's just year one of the early career framework. Year two is going to double the number of mentors working with early career teachers, which might expect even more pressure on our ITT infrastructure. So if I'm honest, I don't think we match deliberately very often. And that's not to say that once you've met your-- let's say somebody comes onto a placement with you on in a school or joins your staff as an early career teacher, that as you get to know them, you don't necessarily think, well, who would you work well with? But actually, it's more likely to be who's the person who's available for the training, who's timetable can be wriggled with to give them a bit of capacity, who might have some experience of mentoring, and who has the relevant expertise as in-- they're not going to be unfamiliar with the world of the student teacher or the early career teacher. So I think it's often just a bit more of a jigsaw puzzle. I mean, I was very fortunate. I often talk about this, and I know I was lucky, when I was a PGC tutor for about 10 years-- sort of 2000 to 2010-- that was a really substantive part of my job. And particularly in the first seven or eight years of that, we had cohorts of-- I was a geography PGC tutor between 14 and about a 24 geography student teachers every year. And that was always based on the allocation. We always recruited to target. We nearly always had finished recruiting by about March. So we then had some opportunity to get to know our potential students a little bit in between. Not too much. We weren't stalking them. We weren't hounding them, but we could start to get to know them. We'd interviewed them all. We'd understood some of their backgrounds and their interests. And what kind of placements might work for them? And we also always had sufficient placement offers. So even when we had our maximum cohort, we always had at least as many and usually more offers of taking a student teacher for both the first and the second placement than we needed. And they were the type of offers that were sustained year on year. So we had a group of schools who almost always would offer geography placements, at least once in the year, sometimes twice. And geography departments are usually quite small. Maybe three teachers. They're generally quite stable because of that, not always, but generally. And what you tend to get is a mentoring culture in the department if they take student teachers on a regular basis. And as a teacher, I did it. It was one of my key jobs was to get to know my departments, to get to know my potential mentors. And as I got to know my students, to be able to place them with people that I thought they'd work with. And particularly in the longer placement for people between Christmas and the summer, where they were going to have to make really good progress as teachers. By then, you've got to know people really well. And you can match them. I don't know if you've ever seen the TV show married at first sight on a channel four, but I've afforded it. So I mean, your role was very much like the matchmakers there. Oh, maybe I should watch that, though. Trying to look at the psychology of the different people and how to how to pair them up. And I mean, you don't always get it right. But what you can also do is you can spot a personality class pretty quickly. And you can decide what you're going to do to address it. Because there's no point making people's lives miserable if you have misplaced them. But that was-- we were in a luxurious position where as a PGC tutor, I interviewed all of my students. I got to know them really well. I saw them frequently. I saw them all teaching on both first and second placement. I worked with them, and towards I trained them. It was a very organic, but also-- you could say it was quite a closed system, but actually what it meant was it was a very sustainable system. And so that built up, I think, as good a practice as you could get in terms of that mentoring offer, we don't live in that world anymore. It's going to be hard. So for example, the new Institute for Teaching, which is proposed by the DFE, they're talking about hundreds and hundreds of student teachers in one geographical location. And that will absolutely add to the pressure of where are we going to get our mentors from, our placement schools, and how are we going to know that we've matched people well? Because it's a personal relationship. It has to be based on some sense. So these people are likely to be good learners together. And I just want to briefly-- I'm conscious of time here. And I want to briefly close on some of the evidence around coaching and mentoring. So I had a really good discussion with Zoe Marken, so on one of my previous episodes on the CPD curriculum. And in that one, we spoke about the evidence around teacher performance and how it plateaued after a certain number of years kind of correlating with the inputs in terms of training and support from those early first few years. So I know in the paper that you did on coaching leaders, there was some evidence there just talking about retention and how that was impacted by coaching and mentoring. And also, I'm just interested to hear from you what your views are in terms of the impact of coaching and mentoring in terms of performance and retention. And other factors, perhaps, that the leaders and teachers can consider. OK, it's a really important question. And I guess it's the reason why we have to continue to research and submit research to peer-reviewed journals, because that does set a standard of evidence. So I'll just describe a piece of research that was actually published online this week. And it relates to three examples of coaching in the UK. So it's published in the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching and Education, and its research conducted by myself, Anne Theoros, and Ruth White's side. And the short title is "Coaching efficacy in education." So efficacy. So how well does something work? And how do we know it's working? How valid is it as an approach? As an approach. The method by which we judged coaching efficacy was new. It was new because it drew on a theoretical frame called cultural historical activity theory, chat, it's known as. And within cultural historical activity theory, there is something which we call activity systems. Now, I am not the world's greatest expert in either chat or activity systems, but what I'm quite good at doing is getting underneath the skin of other people's thinking and thinking, how can I make that useful and relevant in my field? So about 10 years ago, I published a paper with David Liet, professor at Newcastle University, on coaching and education using cultural historical activity theory as the way in which we analyzed its rollout and its efficacy. And it was essentially a teacher coaching by teachers within schools. And we recognized that there was strong evidence that for many participants in coaching, the self-report from them was that this was a really helpful component of their working life that they really enjoyed the work they did with coaches that they could illustrate how it had changed some of their classroom practices and that they actually came away from those conversations feeling better. And so that's relatively easy to find evidence for. What we did was that with that was we then started to look at, well, if it has this feel good factor, why doesn't it just grow and explosively? Why is it actually quite difficult to sustain in schools? Because the evidence is certainly from that point in time that it often became something that was implemented in schools for a couple of years and then it faded away again. The implementation in most schools often followed a period of organic growth that was below the, it almost below the gaze of school leaders. But actually there was a bit of informal coaching or there was some coaching that was permitted and actually enabled by school leaders. But school leaders just let that work happen. But what tended to happen was as soon as people in school said, this is actually really powerful, school leaders thought, OK, can we use it strategically? And they started to say, well, what we'll do is we'll train up a team of coaches and we'll employ those coaches to support the teachers who we consider to be at risk of being not competent. Who's performance management is indicating there's a problem? Whose observations suggest they need more training in? Well, let's put the coaches in there because these people have been coached, so it's great. And as soon as you do that, you break the bond of trust that was established in some of them. And you also, you wrap it into a performance management or you wrap it into school improvement, as opposed to saying, coaching's about you as a teacher. Like the things that you're interested in, you're clustering what you want to develop. It becomes systemic as opposed to organic. So that first paper illustrated that tension. Now, it doesn't mean it doesn't work, but that was that. Now, about eight or nine years later, so probably two years ago now, I thought, well, it'd be really interesting to update that, to think about where are we now? Because coaching has kind of evolved in all sorts of different ways in education since then. And I had been really fortunate to be involved with three definite coaching practices that were distinctly different from each other but had this common kind of coaching approach underpinning them. So one of them was the head teacher coaching research. So we'd been the evaluators of that across the course of a whole year. One of them was a SIF project, a strategic school improvement funded project, which was based on improving outcomes for children in a particular group of schools and particularly related to maths outcomes. And because it was SIF funded, it needed to be drawing upon the BF teacher's toolkit. So they chose Metacognition as the intervention method in maths to try and improve outcomes for children. And the SIF funding allowed this group of schools through a teaching school alliance to employ lead practitioners who essentially became coaches. In lots of ways, an instructional coaching model, very similar to the gym night type work. So they worked alongside a group of teachers across 10 schools, three coaches across 10 schools using a pedagogic instructional, what I would say is a specialist contextual coaching model. They knew what they, the focus was maths and Metacognition. They built up an expertise in that. They then employed that in the coaching. But it was situated differently in each school because every school in that alliance was different. So I looked at that and I also looked at a really unusual form of coaching, which was speech and language therapists working with teachers in early years and primary settings using a video-based coaching approach that you'd appreciate the video-based coaching coach. Looking at moments of practice in those teachers classrooms with a focus on enhancing communication-rich pedagogies, particularly for children with speech and language delay and also in communities where 90% of children were learning English as an additional language, so EAL communities. And speech and language therapists work with a group of teachers in primary and early years settings, again, across the course of the year. And I'd helped to develop that with them and then I'd also been involved in trying to research, well, is there any efficacy in this? What's the impact? So the paper that's just been published takes those three examples of coaching. Each of them with a different model of coaching. And if you define it, you'd see the similarities. But there's also different types of, a different stance, different intervention, a different, for example, a different expectation of the role of specialist knowledge, which was definitely there for the Maths Metacognition project and also for the Speech and Language Therapist work, the specialist knowledge feeds into the coaching conversations. So I took those three and I went back to all of the data and the evidence that we had from our evaluations. And I reanalyzed it using the activity system that underpins or is part of cultural historical activity theory. Now, it would take two hours and more brain power than I have to really fully explain that activity system. But essentially what it is is for me, it's proved to be a really helpful method of making sense of the nuances of coaching. Recognising that in each context you have different, you have a different set of rules of engagement. You have a different desired objective. You have different tools that are available to you. So video being a tool that the Speech and Language Therapist use, but not that the head teacher coaching used, for example. But in the head teacher coaching, they had a tool which was very much based on, like a conceptual tool, based on the notion of ontological coaching. But it allowed us to say, right, these look like very different beasts on paper and in practice. But actually, let's see whether we can use this activity system to demonstrate the efficacy of them and what helps and what hinders their impact. And one of the lovely things about doing that was it allowed us to say, of course, there was some desired objectives. The reason why coaching was implemented in the first place. And of course, you can look for the evidence of the extent to which you meet those desired objectives. But let's also remember that whilst the coaching is going on, for example, in these primary schools, developing enhanced pedagogy, communication which pedagogy, the coaching is ongoing, but so is everything else. You know, there's all sorts of other things that might be enhancing the nature of pedagogy. So you can't isolate coaching and say that was definitely the only thing that worked. But what you can say is it's in the mix and let's actually see what we can tease out about its contribution. And the activity system helps you tease that out. But the other thing it does is it absolutely acknowledges that the desired outcomes or the object, if you like, that's called the object, is not the only outcome. There will be many other outcomes that you didn't plan for. There are dependent on the context, that are dependent on the people. And I'll give you one example of that just to illustrate in the Metacognition Maths work. Whether it, I guess they're primary schools. So the majority of teachers are women and the coaches were all women as well. And actually there were 10 schools. There were 10 lead teachers that were coached. Nine of them were women and then and you might think, well, that's just that, well, of course, that's primary. That's primary. But what was interesting was that they weren't necessarily the lead teachers for maths. They weren't necessarily in middle or senior leadership roles at all. But as a result of being coached and becoming part of a community of teachers that were experiencing that work with their coaches. So they also formed almost like a peer coaching community where they went to visit each other. They came, this was before Covid, so they could physically go into each other. They came together in network meetings occasionally, not frequently. But they created this group of teachers across the 10 schools where they were peer coaching, engaging with each other. But as a result of that, the vast majority of those women. Either just towards the end or along the way had applied for a middle leadership roles that they'd never imagined they would. They'd applied to become the lead teachers of maths. They'd applied for, you know, what did we call them, specialist lead specialist teachers, SLEs, SLEs, specialist leaders in education. And they said that the reason they had the confidence to do that was because of their. Enhanced engagement with their coach around their own practice. They saw that they had expertise. They'd gained confidence in building that expertise. They'd had role model ways to work productively and effectively with colleagues and others. And it made them want to offer that into the system. And you could say, well, there be other things that will have to, if you like, it's natural as you go through two years to think about leadership. But it might be, but it's also you have to find the things that create the lever that create the motivation that create the capacity. And those teachers several of them would have said and well did say that their self belief and their desire to make that greater contribution as leaders in the system had grown substantively through coaching. Now, again, you could say, well, that's that that's quite typical. But if you think about one of the metrics in primary education around gender and leadership roles. What you've got there inadvertently is a new group of women who are stepping up to the plate. And so you didn't that wasn't built into the plan. It wasn't deliberate. It was a coincidence. It was women. But those women are now in a different place than they were before. So for John Lennon, life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. So, so yeah, that sounds like such a fantastic outcome that was that that's come from that research that some plan. Yeah. And I think that's what coaching does. Amazing. And I actually haven't read this research, which is obviously indicative of my terrible prep. Let me publish this week for this for this call, but it sounds fascinating. And we'll put a link to this research and some of the other things that we've spoken about on the website. Rachel, I could honestly speak to you about this for hours and hours, but I know you wouldn't appreciate that because I know our listeners would appreciate it, but I know you've got another meeting shortly. So I do apologize to be haven't even spoken about cycles of growth, which I've got written down here. I got so caught up in our conversation. But thank you so much for your for your time. And it's been an absolute pleasure and hopefully we can catch up again at some point in the future. Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been great. All right. All the best. Bye for now. Bye bye.