HSAEL News

Normalising coaching feedback at our academy

The principle of having ‘another pair of eyes’ is deployed in many high stakes situations. Pilots fly in pairs using ‘the four eyes principle’ so two experts can agree on the best course of action for an aircraft before it takes place. Before the handing in of a Masters dissertation, another pair of eyes proof reads the work to provide a fresh outlook and correct any spelling mistakes that have become normalised to the writer by the sheer exposure to the project. In medicine, ‘two pairs of eyes’ in the form of the surgeon and their assistant has emerged as conventional in the 21^st century as a crucial quality control method.

In education, however, and specifically in the classroom, this concept is not practised or viewed as commonplace. A teacher would often only have a second pair of eyes in the room during their termly Performance Management observation. The extra pair of eyes, if not received regularly in a classroom, is then viewed as an intrusion; someone checking up on you, criticising, interfering and judging. Don’t they know you’ve just taught a five-period day that included 8L and 9M?

At HSAEL, we are proud of our open-door policy which works two ways. The first, teachers should regularly observe other colleagues to learn from best practise. Secondly, teachers should regularly receive feedback on their practice because (to quote Dylan William) ‘every teacher can improve not because they are not good enough but because they can be even better’.

Whilst we began making strides providing our teacher colleagues with regular actionable feedback last year, our initiative never became as embedded as we had hoped. As a staff body, we talked about the difference between being nice and being kind to one another; we talked about what we would want our colleague to do if we had metaphorical spinach stuck in our teeth. We looked at case studies of successful, high functioning organisations such as Netflix and Google which pride themselves on giving and receiving high quality, actionable feedback. We talked about being courageously compassionate to one another. Whilst everybody agreed in CPD that dropping regular coaching steps was the right thing to be doing to propel our school forward, we struggled to embed the initiative long term.

So, as we came back to school in September, we set ourselves a challenge to normalise the concept of another pair of eyes in our classroom- 500 coaching steps by Monday 30^th September with the additional incentive of a Clock Mill versus Lock Keepers showdown, our two sites battling it out via the Microsoft Forms Coaching Form of who could drop the most steps before the end of the month.

Every member of staff contributed from the Senior Leadership team down to the new Teach Firsters, a key lever in this normalisation. Anyone can be the second pair of eyes as there will always be something in the classroom you haven’t seen that another teacher can.

To further normalise this concept, live coaching took place too. That meant pointing out to a teacher the area of their classroom where low expectations had become normalised over the course of the lesson; not because the teacher was doing a bad job but because two pairs of eyes in the classroom was better than one. From waving to the teacher at the back of the classroom and pointing at a mini-whiteboard you had used to write “Issue more positive points to Haleemah” or “Give Pavan a second warning” to prompting the teacher there and then to reset their room with language like “Sir this lesson is looking really wonderful and focussed by I think we could make it even better by making sure everyone is sat up proudly like a leader”.  

Our teachers genuinely welcomed the intervention. Rather than waiting until the end of the lesson to open their inbox and find the coaching form ready for them to reflect and consider for the next lesson, the live support uplifted their classroom culture there and then. It modelled the exact language required to initiate the change in behaviour required from the students. It left them feeling like someone had their back because they had spotted a way to help them and make their lesson even better.  

It was the opposite of intruding, of meddling or patronising. It showed that, as colleagues we are on the same team. When I am not teaching, I am here to help and support you and vice versa.

We hit 520 coaching steps just after 30^th September. The Lock Keeper’s victory will be celebrated by a Domino’s pizza order during Monday’s CPD during the Book Look to reward our teachers with the reminder that two pairs of eyes are always better than one.