 Welcome to this webinar, which is offered by the European School Education Platform, the European Commission's Platform for School Education in Europe. My name is Maria Elena and I will be your host for today. Just some practical information before we officially start. This webinar will be recorded and the recording will be used for dissemination purposes and you will be able to find it online on our YouTube channel. So regarding the topic, this webinar about teacher mentorship will focus on the Erasmus Plus project repeat and challenges of sustaining education through the pandemic and how we can apply it in mentoring and co-coaching methods. But now I would like to give the floor to our guest speaker, Professor Rachel Lofthaus, whose expertise on the field of professional learning will give us more insight to the topic. Rachel, we would like to hear from you now. Thank you so much, Maria Elena. Thank you for joining me. It's really very nice to be here. I'm going to share with you a set of slides and I'm going to talk to you about a project as described by Maria Elena that was funded by Erasmus, but beyond the project to think about how what we're learning is applicable to mentoring and I'm really keen to answer any questions if we have time at the end, but also just to see any thoughts, responses that you want to share in the chat. Now, as always in this type of event, it is very difficult for a presenter to know what your prior experiences, prior understanding knowledge is and indeed what exactly your roles are in education. So please listen and engage with an understanding that I'm afraid I don't know you very well, not like I was teaching you over the course of a year. I hope there is something here that's relevant to you and if there's anything that you want to pick up and discuss with me individually at a later stage, then you'll be very welcome to get in touch. So I am Professor Rachel Lofthaus. I'm a professor of teacher education and I work at Leeds Beckett University in the north of England. I've been there for about five years and I joined as a professor having had about 17 years in another university where my main focus was training teachers and supporting their mentors, the people who were working with them in school when they went into placement, but also in developing understandings of both mentoring and coaching and teacher learning through a research career. So I've undertaken a variety of research projects. The outline for this session is first of all just to give you a single slide overview of mentoring and coaching and that will help you to, if you like, locate your own work or your own interest and understandings on this particular spectrum. Then I'm going to refer to the particular Erasmus project from which I'm drawing much of the source of this information and the focus from that Erasmus project that is relevant here are the narratives and co-coaching approaches and will make the link to mentoring as we go through. The slides will come quite quickly. I'll talk through them, but hopefully if there's anything that you want to re-watch, you can do that at a later stage and hopefully you'll start to share thoughts in the chat if you choose to. I am aware that for many of you, you'll have been working all day. It's the end of the day and therefore you may just choose to sit and listen and think rather than spend too much time adding information to the chat. So coaching and mentoring. Now we do know that these two terms are relatively common in education settings but that they mean different things in different places. So all I'm doing here is expressing a basic distinction between mentoring and coaching which is applicable in my context and then you can decide whether you see it as applicable in yours. So in the English context, when we talk about mentoring, we usually talk about supporting an individual who is relatively new and they may be new into an organisation, newly employed in an organisation or on a training placement in an organisation or they may be new into a new role. So perhaps they've become a head of department or a subject leader or a head of pastoral or whatever their new role is. So part of the point of mentoring is often to help support the process of induction. In other words, enabling somebody to make sense of the context they're in and the job they are being asked to do and the mentor is often somebody who is embedded in that context and who has a really good understanding of the role that the new person is developing and so they offer support and guidance and they help somebody to make sense of the expectations and the learning that they will need to engage with as they undertake their new role. Sometimes there is an element of what we call gatekeeping and what that means is that a mentor might be responsible for judging the extent to which somebody is developing success in that role progressing in that role. They may even be doing that quite formally part of a reporting system whereby somebody is going to gain a professional qualification or be passed through an induction period successfully. Mentoring takes many different forms but how might it be different to coaching? So if we talk about coaching again I'm drawing much on my own context and understanding. We're often thinking about something which is more to do with the development of somebody over time as opposed to enabling somebody to be successful in a new job. Development over time might take longer might take less time but we're focusing on a particular area for development and the development is often in an area that the coachee, the person being coached is wanting to gain more progressive. A coach acts to facilitate that development but they do it in a certain set of ways and we'll explore those today. And the coaching is more about self-determination than it is about gatekeeping. The key thing here being that mentoring is often about making sure somebody is adequately prepared for and able to do a particular job well. Coaching allows for a space for the individual to be more unique and to flourish and to think more in a self-determining fashion so making more decisions for themselves. Now we are going to explore co-coaching in the context of mentoring and I'll come round to explaining what the relationship is there as we go along. So I said that I was going to introduce the source of some of this webinar content and here is the source. We are at the very near end of a two-year Erasmus Plus project which our university Leedsbecket is leading and which has partners in Slovenia, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Scotland as well as us in England and Hungary. And the project is funded by the EU through the Erasmus scheme and it was set up in response to the challenges that the pandemic brought to education. So what were those challenges? The challenges were related to an urgent need to think about how we as educators, whether we were a teacher in a school or a university, whether we were a leader or perhaps even now that we were a home educator, perhaps as a parent, we were interested in how the pandemic created challenges for those of us who were trying to sustain education. And we acknowledged that a number of challenges emerged and we acknowledged that a number of changes had to occur and that many of them had to occur very quickly. What we're interested in in this project is how both the changes themselves but also the thinking related to those challenges can help us to reimagine a positive direction for education. There are two key strands of the project and one was quite realistically the emergence of the digital platforms and the digital interactions that we were tending to become more reliant on as educators, but also the fact that in this period of turbulence and transition we needed to think about how teachers and school leaders were learning to do their job in a different way and what difference that might make for the future. So the slide here says that part of the project has a focus on the narratives that emerged from the pandemic, what people told of their experiences the stories if you like of the pandemic and also the role of co-coaching as a way of engaging thoughtfully and opening up dialogue in relation to the future of education. Hopefully those two things will come clear in this presentation. So we know that the pandemic created challenges. It created dilemmas. We're aware of those and we wanted to know more of those. We were also interested in how changes in the way that schooling could be organised and offered and the changing relationships between home and school, parents and teachers and other individuals who would normally have been thinking in a organised fashion around supporting well-being were suddenly put into a place where everything was new and different. So we were interested in how we learned to work differently, professionally. And what we're hoping is that we've learned something that is of value way beyond the current pandemic and has implications and value in all other sorts of challenges that education is in the midst of. So including, for example, refugee crises, climate change, threats to the infrastructure, the resources, and also, of course, the opportunities that emerge as community, society, innovation continues to move on. Opportunities can create challenges because they make us think differently. So there were a series of project objectives. Don't need to worry too much about them, but they were related to increasing our ability and our confidence to work well, going into this new education world. So this is where we begin to find a link with the narratives and the coaching. Essentially, in this project, we were inviting people to look back. What were they experiencing during the pandemic? How had their teaching realities changed? And how had they had to react? And we were then encouraging them to look forward. So using their reflections on the past or the current situation and thinking about what lessons am I in my organisation or my learners learning that can help us into the future, that can make sense of a future direction for education. Now, just pause for a minute. If you're a mentor and you are mentoring somebody who is new as a teacher, who has a new responsibility perhaps as a leader, who needs some additional support, you are working with somebody who already has a back story. They already have experiences that are relevant. And so the pandemic is just one example of something that creates an opportunity for a starting point for learning. If you're a mentor, there are many starting points for learning. Some of them are disruptive. Some of them are difficult. Some of them can be planned for, but they all create stories. And that's what we're going to focus on for a few minutes. Okay. So in our Erasmus project, we started by interviewing teachers in all of our partner countries, so eight countries, nine countries across Europe. We used these interviews to write stories or narratives. These are not fictional. They are based in the interviews, but they are, they are synthesised as a narrative. And then we had a collection of narratives from teachers, student teachers, leaders, parents who'd become teachers, etc. People who were dealing with the realities of the pandemic. And in these narratives, after we had gathered them all together and started to read them carefully, we realised that the narratives were not just looking back at the realities of the pandemic, but they also told us something about how individuals had responded to the pandemic in their role. So class teacher, whose class is now always learning at home, for example. A school leader who instead of managing a timetable and supporting children in a school and supporting staff in a school is now having to be concerned with the well-being and learning of children scattered across the community, hidden behind doors in lockdown. They're thinking that responsibility, their concerns changed because the reality changed, but they couldn't sit still. They all had to respond. I had to respond. I'm a teacher. I have a cohort of students. We were halfway through the year. We were only meeting occasionally, but we were meeting in person for a whole weekend and everything was disrupted. We knew we wouldn't be able to continue. So we did what everybody else did. We responded by taking stock, taking a bit of a break because I could do that online. So we responded. And then in that process of dealing with the realities, making decisions about how to respond, making plans or having to respond really quickly, what that was doing was creating a space in which we were reflecting. And in addition to that, to some extent, we were looking to reimagine. And I'll explain what I mean by that. Here's an example of a narrative from a teacher. Now, as I've said, what we were able to do was we looked at the narratives and we started to see comments in the narratives, which related to the realities of the pandemic, how educators had responded, how that had created opportunities for reflection and what that might be leading to in terms of reimagining. So here's one. There were lots of ups and downs during COVID. And I've put the ups and downs in red because that's an example of the reality. Lots of ups and downs during COVID and remote teaching because there was so much pressure. Children were stuck at home. The classes were done online. This is all the reality. But sometimes with the regular schedules and content, but teachers still somehow had to carry things out normally, the usual assessments and be prepared for evaluation. So this teacher, first, I attended an eight-week course on well-being to make sure I could keep up with the pressure and take care of my well-being in school and outside of it. That's in blue. That's a response. What did I do? I took a course on well-being. Secondly, it was all very much about being open and talking to your colleagues. So we've passed that as a reflection, a space in which the colleagues were thinking together by being open with each other and talking to each other about what they were going to do next. You have to be open. You have to be, otherwise it is, you have to be very open. You have to feel and what is going on. So some of these narratives are close to the text of interviews. And the interviews are in a variety of languages and we've tried to translate them. But that notion there that this teacher is recognizing that this is an emotional experience as well. You have to feel this. You can't just blank it out. And then this teacher carried on. I decided to work out a strategy with me participating actively in the matters of well-being and communicating about it, especially when I saw some colleagues not adapting to the situation and changes. So that thinking about herself differently, working out a strategy for participating actively in matters of well-being. She's reimagining what it is to be a teacher. And because of this it started to do more work and it created more problems with well-being consequently. So there's a whole host of complications here. But it's an example of a narrative emerging from the pandemic. Now just for a minute forget about the pandemic and think about being a new teacher and meet Ruba. This is Ruba. And Ruba has a story to tell as well about being a new teacher. And if you asked Ruba to draw a chart of how she felt in the first four months when she was a new teacher this might be her chart. She started off feeling not so happy she ended up feeling happier. This is a good outcome but along the way Ruba's feelings went up and down. Some days were good some days were better some classes were difficult some things were challenging some days she felt like she'd made real progress. Hopefully Ruba is working with a mentor. And Ruba's experience could be described as a series of narratives of stories of her experience. In these stories there are some settings so let's imagine Ruba is a maths teacher she's teaching mathematics in a high school she's got children from age 12 to age 17 some of the maths she's teaching she feels very confident about some of it less so she's got children of different mathematical proficiency children who like maths children who don't like maths there is a setting that Ruba's stories are set in and it is very different. Ruba used to be an estate agent let's imagine Ruba was an estate agent working with customers to sell houses working to try and encourage purchases but also to help the people who were selling their house she chose to leave estate agency to become a teacher so it's a very different setting for her and she's retelling her story from those settings she's meeting lots of different people the characters in this story of Ruba's first four months as a teacher are very different from the characters that she met as an estate agent and the dilemmas that she experiences are different the challenges the things she has to make sense of the things she has to do so it's inevitable that Ruba's experiences are a bit up and down. What kind of things might Ruba have said about this period of time her first four months as a teacher well how about these things I started at a low point remember the graph started low down I was nervous and I found some unsolicited comments from my colleagues undermined my confidence that's quite revealing isn't it that some of the people she was working with maybe made comments that made her feel less confident as a teacher rather than more confident you know the sort of comment the sort of comment like I don't know why you're having trouble with that class they always work for me or well you'll just have to go away and plan those lessons better if those lessons aren't working you'll have to work harder there's a whole host of possible comments what else might she be saying about her story of her first four months the first few weeks left me exhausted some classes were unpredictable but I did start to build a relationship with others another one I found returning after the mid-term break a turning point the students seemed reassured she turned up for them again they seemed relieved and also the subjects she was teaching were more in her comfort zone so the topic areas of maths she had more confidence with I was so relieved at the end of the term when the students test scores showed they were making good progress a good end point in her story she had been reasonably successful even though she was brand new teaching the children maths and many of them showed progress in their tests let's just think about those narratives lots of narratives emerging from that and think about realities, responses reflection re-imaginings so that phrase some classes were unpredictable some children seemed to find it hard to settle this is her narrative they sought attention and were often disruptive if you're a teacher you've probably experienced that at first I thought it must be that they struggled with the maths I used more differentiation and gave more explanations but this didn't seem to help I then asked colleagues to share their experiences with the children this revealed interesting patterns and gave me insights I didn't have I decided to focus on how to create a classroom where they felt safe this is not easy still not easy I realised I needed to learn more and stop feeling that I was failing what did she do I kept notes focused on what I noticed in lessons and used these in conversation with my mentor we her mentor and her agreed to start reading a book called When Adults Change Everything Changes it's a book by an author called Paul Dix it's about relationships in schools I realised I can bring some of my previous life and work skills and personality into building relationships with children I am not just a teacher of maths I am a significant adult in their lives so the reality for Ruba was that some of her classes were quite challenging she tried things she responded to that she created more opportunities to reflect and think it through you could say to slow down to stop panicking to stop blaming herself she started to notice things she brought the things she noticed into a conversation with her mentor between them they agreed that they could do with learning more and they chose something to read that they could see might be relevant and then in those conversations through that reading and through gaining experience started to think differently about herself as a teacher she reimagined herself as a teacher and this last line I'm not just a teacher of maths I am a significant adult in their lives is a really important thing for a new teacher to start to imagine because it changes who they are in relation to the children that they teach okay imagine for a minute your own experiences just take I'm going to give you two minutes of quiet I'll just stop talking what kind of narratives do you have from your own teaching or what kind of narratives get discussed with you if you are mentoring somebody what are the challenges the realities that occur in teaching how do you or your mentee respond to those is there a space an opportunity for reflection and is there any pause for reimagining give you a couple of minutes to reflect and then we'll move on to co-coaching okay so the key thing here is that when we are mentoring somebody it is really critical to see beyond just what they do but to understand how they experience their journey as a new teacher or as a new leader what they find interesting challenging how they respond to that is the way they respond to it similar or different to the way you would respond to it are they responding to something quickly, immediately impulsively or are they taking time to reflect to make different decisions to understand a situation better and as they are learning are they doing more than just learning how to cope with the situation or learning how to be ready for tomorrow are they also developing insights into what it is to be a teacher what the future might look like for them as they move into their career in teaching mentoring is a really rich activity it is about getting to know another person helping them make the very best of the talents they have helping them to hone those talents to the situations they find themselves in now because there are challenges now but also helping them to think forward to a future where they will be happy and successful in their future roles in England like many other places but in England particularly at the moment we have a very serious problem of teacher retention I could quote a statistic it may be not quite accurate but about half of our new teachers stay only 5 years or less in teaching so all that effort to train to gain qualifications to get a job to be successful in those first jobs are too many teachers only for the short term because they choose to leave teaching we have the same situation with head teachers principles that point in somebody's career when they are experienced enough knowledgeable enough brave enough to be a head teacher is often then quite short period of time because usually within 3 to 5 years they leave not all of them too many probably not usually too many though if we as educators whether we are working with teachers in a university training teach whether we are supporting new teachers whether we are just trying to be good colleagues to help our colleagues thrive if we are concerned about the future of our profession then we need to address the fact that we are not in a lot of circumstances creating a profession that is sustainable we have a lot of gaps in our teaching force and yes we have burnout we have issues of well-being now nobody wants a mentor who can just apply a sticking plaster and say all you are injured here you are have a sticking plaster go back in just go back nothing has changed just go back what we want to do is create teachers who are themselves able to contribute to a profession which creates good learning conditions for children and young people and good professional conditions for themselves and mentoring and co-coaching can help but none of that works if we don't listen to the stories that teachers have or head teachers have of their working lives and we don't help to think what is the learning that is happening here that can sustain us into the future now that's where coaching can help so a little bit more about coaching it is usually a conversation between two people interpersonal between people sustained so sometimes it happens over the course of months or perhaps a year but if not then at least the conversation itself is really focused and what you are doing in coaching is your facilitating reflection which is helping decision making and action in the context of the teachers or the leaders who are coaching in the context of their own challenges what's that got to do with this project so in this project we collected narratives and then we were encouraging coaching conversations because we were saying hey you you there you there out in the profession do you have enough time to think do you work behind closed doors do you share your stories and dilemmas can you support others do you get support the idea with this is that we can gradually over time begin to change the working worlds of teachers through activities such as co-coaching what we suggest co-coaching is are conversations that are focused on learning but learning in this case of the teachers co-coaching is a situation in which we work together to support really good thinking so rather than rushing from one problem to the next we slow down a little bit to support good thinking we think about what's real in practice we ask really good questions to help somebody reflect think about how they're responding and begin to reimagine what's possible how else they might act what else they might change or if they can't act differently and change anything easily at least how they can understand things differently so it's creating a chance for growth and development and in our project we're saying that co-coaching is something where you might be the coach or you might like to be coached essentially it's about a managed conversation that brings those four things from this project into focus what are the realities how are you responding how is all of that helping you to reflect and how are you reimagining things and even if it's as simple as reimagining my job as a teacher when I walk in tomorrow so Ruba realised I'm not just a teacher of maths I'm a significant adult for these young people and if I think of myself as a significant adult that changes a little bit understand them and see them tomorrow in the next day and the next day what we found in our project is that co-coaching can sometimes start with the narrative so we encourage people to write or talk about their narrative as a starting point and then what a coach typically does is create a space for a conversation by asking questions now these are going to be a little bit small to read but the sorts of questions that we were developing in this project that we're encouraging people to practice using in this project are listed here and you can see that we've slightly categorised them so there's some questions about the realities to help somebody recall and explain and be clear about what's really going on what am I really experiencing who is in this situation what did I notice and why why does that matter to me those are the realities and reflections on those how did I feel did I feel frustrated did I feel satisfied did I feel vulnerable how did I feel all of those things reflecting on the realities and then the kind of okay I'm a teacher I have to do something so what am I doing what is my response how did I react how did you react if you're asking the question what difference did it make did it make it better did it make it worse did you see any changes in your classroom when you did it or if you were a leader when you changed your approach to a meeting did it change the outcomes of that meeting so the questions about the responses and reflections on the responses and then there's the reimagining so okay what are we beginning to understand what are we beginning to think what might this look like in the future so co-coaching has some features to it I won't try and read all of these but in the project we're developing a guide to co-coaching not published yet but it will be in the next few months and the guide to co-coaching will include the questions these sorts of features and an explanation of them a little bit more but in co-coaching we're not there to make a judgment about somebody we're there to be curious to ask them questions and we're not asking them questions because we want to put them on the spot but we want them to be able to experience experiences and also think ahead to future opportunities we're creating we hope a culture where people can voice their concerns so some of you in the chat I think are explaining some of the conditions in different countries for teachers some of the typical characteristics of your workplace actually finding a space where you voice that is an important part of being a professional it's not enough just to think it you have to share it because then you start to build an understanding with others about what is typical and also what is possible and what we're hoping we can do in co-coaching is create a space through the conversation where teachers leaders whether they are brand new or whether they are into their career well into their career where we say let's find some space for critical thinking let's look for some new perspectives let's help clarify some decisions so that our future actions will be shaped by them in our guide we're also going to be talking about affordances and constraints of co-coaching in other words what makes it work well but also what should you avoid so the middle column here things you should avoid in any coaching scenario a coach isn't there to give somebody all the answers they're not there to make judgments they shouldn't take the information from a conversation and report it unless there's a safeguarding issue they are having conversations confidentially but they're also not a therapist they're not a counsellor they're a fellow professional in the same field in education so they build trust over time they try and be authentic they try and develop the skill of asking good questions so the conversation is rich and the conversation is purposeful but they can't ask good questions if they don't listen and finally this is my last slide before I just share a website with you as we think about mentoring and coaching whether they are separated out or whether they are connected together as an activity and there is a way of connecting them together because a good mentor will know when they can have a coaching conversation and they'll also know when that coaching conversation won't be helpful because somebody really just needs to learn some basic skills because they're new in the job so let's compromise let's decide today we're thinking basic skills basic knowledge and then other times in a mentoring relationship might be more coaching and Chris has just written I see connections with intervision let me tell you that I learned the word intervision for the first time last week when I was a part of a different Erasmus project meeting in the Netherlands and the leaders are from Belgium and they use the term intervision for this kind of peer group support so that's quite interesting thank you Chris for reminding me of that the key thing here is that we want our teachers to be learners because if they're not learners they're going to be stale, they're going to be stagnant they're not going to change their practice when they need to they're not going to gain confidence they're not going to be able to resolve problems they're not going to be able to meet challenges they're also not just going to be the best teachers they can be but we can't expect the world from everybody all the time so we have to provide lots of support for learning mentoring and coaching are one of the ways that we can provide support why does mentoring and coaching make a difference well you could argue as Corthagin does and there's a very short quote here that teacher learning takes place at the connection between theory, practice and person mentoring and coaching is about putting the person in the centre and allowing that person through the support we give them through the conversations we have with them to think about theory, to think about their practice to develop experiments in their practice to try things out to test out things to come back and relate to another person how things are going in that interaction between the two people the mentor and the new teacher for example the coach and the school leader for example narratives can be really helpful because we're allowing through the narratives to explore the settings what's really going on in this context who are the people the characters that I'm engaging with in this role how do I feel as an individual character in this role and actually what are the real dilemmas not what is the ideal what is the real dilemma and what coaching can do and mentoring can do is create learning opportunities they can encourage problem solving and creativity because they give a little bit of space for different types of thinking they promote dialogue conversation between professionals and in that dialogue we can provoke things a little bit we can push things a bit we can challenge ourselves and we can support critical thinking teachers, school leaders need that intelligent critical thinking all the time they need the space to have it and we can also do what we say here which is scaffold frame and measure so scaffold provide the support to do the challenging work framing, give some boundaries give some context give some let's read this book together it might help, that's a good example of framing and over time when I say measure I don't mean quantify necessarily but we can make sense of change if you have a conversation with somebody over the course of their first year in teaching that conversation can be a place in which you really track and celebrate the changes and identify the other opportunities for development that emerge the very last slide here has some links it has two twitter accounts if you're on twitter there's myself and my research centre it has the website for the research centre but Marie Elena also has this to share and that what is it called? QR code is a QR code directly for our padlet and our padlet is an open access source of working papers blogs, podcasts and videos all about coaching and mentoring and you'll see how the padlet is organised against a series of categories I've slightly run over 15 minutes I was supposed to give to question answers but I'm very happy to stay here and answer any or listen to any comments for the last few minutes thank you very much thank you very much Rachel most of the comments were about bureaucracy and how bureaucratic procedures have some restraints maybe if you could comment something on that absolutely I can promise you that if you have experienced bureaucracy as a teacher or a leader or a student teacher you're not alone as the comments show it is absolutely typical of the system and that's usually because education systems are very much wrapped up with policy and policy directions and policy tends to create bureaucracy because we're always trying to invent new ways of doing things to create new expectations track progress contain at the work of teachers and schools what I can share is that I've been working on coaching and mentoring for about 20 years both from being a teacher to being a teacher educator to being a researcher that bureaucracy isn't going to disappear that doesn't stop conversations emerging within between colleagues just because something is bureaucratic doesn't mean we should avoid listening to people's stories it doesn't mean that we should dismiss their concerns or their ambitions or their optimism just because something is bureaucratic because in the end we cannot do our job as the best possible teachers and leaders for children and young people if we don't build relationships with our colleagues especially those who are new so that that's not to say this is easy it's not to say that bureaucracy can just be put to one side but it is to make the case that most professions are highly bureaucratic in this day and age we could say that they are performative we're always looking to demonstrate outcomes and we're always expected to improve outcomes and often the conditions that we work in are getting worse not better but we're expected to get better as teachers but at the heart of this what people most value what most people most value about being a teacher is the relationships that they have with children and young people and colleagues and members of the community so sometimes we have to find the spaces to work around the bureaucracy because the relationships are what fuel us they keep us going but also they become the place for learning I would also argue that there is a tension that if coaching becomes bureaucratic itself it stops being coaching so if we use coaching as a mechanism for example to keep data on a teacher to track their progress then it's not coaching because we've said coaching is about self-determination it's about growing a profession where we are confident enough and knowledgeable enough to be able to push back a little bit against some of the decisions that are made and actually say can we explore different ways around this and it does happen there are examples of schools even in England which is hugely bureaucratic where schools are pushing back and teachers are pushing back and where head teachers for example are realising that it doesn't matter how much they talk about the outcomes for children and young people if they don't put their staff first as a head teacher then their colleagues are going to burn out or they're going to fail to do the very best work so they have to create spaces for really high quality support and learning for their teachers I think that's it's worth knowing that we can argue it that way but yeah bureaucracy is endemic the key thing here as I say is try not to make coaching more bureaucratic don't bring bureaucracy into coaching don't make coaching part of the bureaucracy so it essentially this is about relationships it's about teachers as people and it's about the working lives of teachers and people and how we can best support them to be confident happy and successful and yes that will hopefully meet the ambitions of the bureaucrats as well but we can play our part as mentors or coaches thank you very much notice it's true and maybe if we can take one or two more minutes to answer a question we had in the chat do you know any schools that do co-coaching and how do they have an hour established in the weekly timetable if you could answer it varies a lot and very few schools have got this if you like completely sorted that in most cases they are still developing and emerging their work but I will give you an example last week I was in so I was in Netherlands for part of the week and I was in Belgium for the other part of the week and I was at a school in on the outskirts of Brussels now it is an international school it's a fee paying school so it's a bit different to many of the schools that we work in there is a school where they have developed over a number of years a program of coaching as part of the way in which teachers work with each other and support the development of practice and not just in terms of enabling their teachers to do their job well as defined by the senior leaders or the policy but enabling teachers to contribute to that policy development and to rethink so how do they do that well they have a team of people who are given an amount of time in their schedule to work as coaches they are teachers or their middle leaders but part of their workload is to be a coach not a huge amount they make sure that that team of people have time to work together so they also develop their skills as coaches and they then make the offer to colleagues in the school that they can gain if you have access to or support from the coaches and they enable some shifting of time which allows the coaches to work together now it will be different for everybody because it is different if you are a senior leader who is looking for a coaching compared to a teacher with a very heavy timetable but the other thing which that school have done is they have they've stripped away nearly all of the meetings that teachers and leaders would normally have had to attend and they've said you use your time professionally how you want to and that means that if you are working let's say you are part of the early years team rather than having to have a meeting every week of that team and that meeting has an agenda and the outcomes are fed up into the school system if that team want to use some time for coaching conversations they are at liberty to do that if they want to then have a meeting and discuss some of the things that have come out of the coaching conversations they can bring everybody together so part of it is without doubt about deciding what you have to let go and if you are a mentor of a new teacher the chances are you have already got some time allocated to that so the decision then as a mentor is what can I do with this time to best effect and of course there will be some things that the regulations say you have to do but then there'll be there'll be some space around the edges and the kind of conversation that you have to a large extent is up to you so if you choose to have a co-coaching type conversation in the space that you have already designated to you that's up to you I was in a meeting this morning so I'm doing a research project in Leeds where I live with teachers from a whole load of schools and we're using a different model of coaching called dilemma based coaching and at the beginning of the year the project is all about inclusion at the beginning of the year most of the teachers were saying the biggest problem we have is lack of time and then we've started to develop a dilemma based coaching approach with them and the conversations that they're having with each other have got them to the point that they appreciate there isn't much time but it's less that there is a lack of time and more that they need to choose how to use their time differently so for example they've also decided some of them they don't need as many formal meetings because they get more thinking done in coaching conversations it's more productive so it's how do you use your time that's true and if you have like one or two more minutes to answer the last question okay so we have a question from Emmanuel coaching should happen casually in a weekly meeting what teacher plan and self-evaluation okay there's quite a lot underneath that question so the first thing is what we're talking about here is relatively informal co-coaching where it is unlikely that the coach if you have a coach designated has lots of qualifications in coaching then they should be really have a great deal of expertise and if you've got real expertise in coaching then you need to make sure you make the best use of it so there's something there about deploying that carefully and strategically as a resource making those decisions what we're talking about here is a little bit less formal and it's about saying just as colleagues you can have these sorts of conversations about the difference that the one thing I would say and I probably haven't said it properly here is that coaching should be something that you you are happy to to be so if I, Mariela, if you said would you like to be coached Rachel I should be able to say not today but advice I shouldn't be forced into a situation where today you will be coached I have to have some discretion on the other hand as people begin to use co-coaching type conversations what we tend to find is that often it becomes what we would call a way of being so it changes most of your interactions with other people you tend to ask better questions of your colleagues you tend to give a little bit more time to let them think you tend to hear them better your listening skills have improved because you've understood the value of a coaching type approach so you can have a coaching way of being where this is how we relate to each other here but if you say to somebody we're going to designate some time to coaching someone should have the discretion to say I don't want to be coached or actually they should also have the discretion to say have you got some time to coach me so it should usually be by consent rather than every week you are expected to be or you're put with somebody and you have no choice I think there should be a degree of consent in it it should be more like a conversation from what I understand it's about how we are with each other great thank you Rachel very much and thank you everyone for participating in this webinar I will post again in the chat an evaluation form for this webinar so if you have 5 to 10 minutes to fill it in we would appreciate it very much thank you everyone and see you in a future webinar have a nice evening thank you