This blog post explores:

• The challenges Professional Development Leads typically encounter when training new and more experienced coaches
• How the Steplab Coaching Programme supports coaches’ ongoing development

Ahmed’s Story

Ahmed is about to launch Instructional Coaching in his school. He’s attended some online training, and has been working wit...

Every school we know of that has ‘successfully’ implemented Instructional Coaching changes something about their coaching programme every single year. Implementing instructional coaching isn’t a finite challenge that you can eventually complete. Instead we argue that, like teaching, implementing Instructional Coaching consists of ‘persistent challe...

Coaching & Diagnosis

Part 2: Single Steps & Change Sequences

In these posts on diagnosis in coaching, I argue that we should move away from a focus on the next highest-leverage step, and towards the idea of a coaching curriculum.

In part 1, I introduced the two differing cases of Paul and Gillian and argued that:

• Effective coaching is abo...

Coaching & Diagnosis

Part 1: Solving Problems & Setting Goals

The central idea of Instructional Coaching is deceptively simple. As a coach, we watch a teacher in action, help them to select a 'high leverage' change (Bambrick-Santoyo, 2016) - a teaching strategy that will make a big difference to the learning of their students - and work wi...

"This job you’re doing is so hard that one lifetime isn’t enough to master it. So every single one of you needs to accept the commitment to carry on improving our practice until we retire or die. That is the deal." - Dylan Wiliam

As teacher educators, it's important to be clear about our aims:

• Teacher change...
• ...contributing to improved studen...