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A wider horizon - extending practices of coaching and mentoring to enhance educational outcomes
Sometimes it is worth lifting our gaze and wondering what we can learn. Many of us in education are familiar with how mentoring and coaching are used in our own settings. If you are a teacher there is a good chance that you have been mentored as you commenced your own career journey, usually by a mentor with direct experience and a working knowledge of both the role and context we were stepping in to. You may have mentored others in a similar vein.
Coaching has perhaps been less available to the majority of the profession, although it does go through phases when its use is more common. Anthony Grant (2013) reminds us while ‘coaching’ might imply a ‘monolithic’ activity the term refers to a diversity of practices aimed at generating individual or organisational positive change. He was writing about a variety of professions, but this is no less true in education.
There are core skills in both coaching and mentoring, and a focus on the quality of focused and purposeful discussions is often the bedrock of training in each activity. Coaching and mentoring in education are often used in alignment with a professional development programme, or to meet the needs of an individual facing specific work challenges. It is easy for our thinking to become siloed – we have been trained and we adopt certain habits. We are confident in coaching and mentoring for certain purposes, but we overlook how else they might be valuable. We start to use terminology as catch-all phrases rather than think carefully about how we can be more nuanced in understanding and practice if we think more carefully about how they are named or detailed.
In Issue 14 of CollectivED working papers we focus on ‘Extending Practices in Coaching and Mentoring’. We include contributions from schools, further education and university settings. We offer research and practice insights from the England, Scotland, Australia Germany, Canada and the USA and Vietnam. We consider models, practices and resources which create opportunities to sustain and refine coaching and mentoring. We recognise that coaching and mentoring practices are not static and instead evolve.
Issue 14 includes the following research papers:
• ‘An exploration into the links between coaching practices, coaching cultures and the emergence of ecological agency in schools’ by Jasmine Miller
• ‘ONSIDE Co-Mentoring: “Breaking down the last vestiges of hierarchy” to promote professional learning, development and well-being’ by Andrew Hobson
• ‘Putting context into coaching; creating an understanding of the value of contextual coaching in education’ by Trista Hollweck and Rachel Lofthouse.
Our think pieces are:
• ‘Taking an ecological view of student (peer) mentoring’ by Alison Fox, Catherine Comfort, Tina Forbes, Louise Taylor, and Natalie Mott
• ‘Are we instructional coaches or simply coaches now? The changing role of instructional coaches during unpredictable times’ by Antony Winch
The practice insight papers are:
• ‘Sustaining internal coaches: the role of supervision’ by Rebecca Raybould
• ‘Teaching about sexual and social consent through peer-coaching dance’ by James Underwood, Truc Thanh Truong, Dorcas Iyanuoluwa Fakile, Beatrice Balfour, Sogol Zaman, Nguyen Huong Tra and (Elly) Li Tai
• ‘The language and practice of student support for one another: Diverse options for diverse purposes’ by Tina Forbes, Alison Fox, Catherine Comfort, Louise Taylor, and Natalie Mott
We also include a book review by Sam Crome of The Coaching Habit, by Michael Bungay Stanier, and an introduction to the practice of thesis mentoring and links to online resources by Dr Kay Guccione.
As we continue to grow the CollectivED working papers archive we can see that each paper fulfilling what Thomas (2011) refers to as sources of ‘exemplary knowledge’ because they can be perceived in the context of authors’ experiences (what Thomas refers to as another’s horizon) but used in the context of one’s own (where the horizon changes). We believe these paper help extend and nuance our understanding of the potential and practices of coaching and mentoring in education. They offer new insights and help to create necessary expansive horizons in our diverse educational landscape.
References
Grant, A. 2013. The efficacy of coaching, in Passmore, J., Peterson, D.B. and Friere, T. (Eds), The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of the psychology of coaching and mentoring, Wiley-Blackwell, UK
Thomas, G. 2011. The case: generalisation, theory and phronesis in case study, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 37 (1), pp. 21-35
You can view CollectivED Working Papers Issue 14 on our website.
Professor Rachel Lofthouse
Rachel Lofthouse is Professor of Teacher Education in the Carnegie School of Education. She has a specific research interest in professional learning, exploring how teachers learn and how they can be supported to put that learning into practice.
