FLD Shorts - Episode 3 - Rachel Lofthouse

Welcome to Future Learning Design Shorts. Join me, Euan McIntosh, and him, Tim Logan, as we don our intellectual scuba gear, plunge into the educational abyss, and resurface with treasures from the minds of education's finest.

We're going to draw on over 200 hours of archives from the weekly 60-minute conversations I have with educational makers and shakers.

These shorts, for our time-poor friends, will distil and dissect all that wisdom for you before the last sip of your coffee break. Well, Dr. Rachel Lofthouse is someone who I have never met, but I follow and see popping up on X, formerly known as Twitter, all the time. And not always in a comfortable, life is great kind of way. I think she, to put it mildly, gets a hard time from some of the educational extremes of X. It was interesting, the podcast starts there. I think that's because most of us will know Rachel's work from there. I'm so glad that you went past it relatively quickly. For me, you know, Twitter is famously the place of extremes and not really the place to do serious thinking. Doesn't give you enough space to do serious thinking, or enough time, or even visibility of who you're having the debate with. So, you know, I think it's good that we move past that because what then emerged in this conversation were some really rich, I would say, takeaway ideas for people, things that people could actually work on tomorrow. The first one was really interesting because, um, the first thing I want to pick up on is not actually what came up first in the podcast, more towards the end. And it's this idea of coaching, which is— you were right, Tim, to point out there's this whole market has appeared. And I don't know where it came from. It is everywhere.

Business.

And there's a lot of people with, you know, certificates of coaching in this and approval or accreditation in coaching in that. And I've never been too sure of what it all means and the value of it. And people sometimes come to me and to our team asking for coaching. And I have to say, like, we don't really do coaching, but we'll spend some time with you and it will still be valuable. And she said this thing that really struck home that maybe explains why there's this need, particularly among senior leaders, for coaching. And it was this, she said, before coaching, we had staff rooms. And I thought, yeah, that, that's— I've not seen a good, busy, whole school staff room in maybe 20 years in visiting hundreds of schools. And just when you, you take that metaphor of the staff room, what she's really saying is people don't talk anymore, um, or they don't have the time.

They don't have the time. Exactly. Yeah. Or the space, those, those shared spaces. But yeah, the time as well.

And I think the, the shared spaces, and we obviously do a lot of school design, and every project, when you go in the initial visit, you have to go and have lunch at some point. And, um, when you go into those cafeterias, or restaurants as some schools like to call them now, it's normally one of the most depressing and sad places ever because they're not really made— ironically, they're not really made for eating food or easily getting hold of some water or doing anything easily, actually. They're noisy, hot, They're often, if they're in a temperate climate, they're kind of dull places to be. If you're in a tropical climate, they're often a bit hot and sweaty, not air-conditioned enough, and noisy above all. It's just not a place where you can have a conversation, let alone do any work. And yet I do remember back in the day that, you know, when I was a kid, I used to see teachers in the cafeteria all the time having their dinner or their lunch and having a chat with each other. And then standing up and monitoring us kids and having a conversation. I always wondered, you know, what are they talking about? And you raised the same point. I think we must have been brought up in the same era. Teachers having random conversations all the time, it seemed, and you wondered what it was about. But actually, it was— that was the stuff of professional learning development, little incremental gains every day, because you're constantly rubbing up against teachers from different disciplines, different skill sets.

Exactly. But not because you planned them. And I think that's the point, And that's one of the things that Rachel talks about is that, is this instrumentalization of, and the way that we've kind of boxed everything off into this, this thing needs to happen in that space at that time, and this thing needs to happen in that space at that time. And that's not how life works. And that's, you know, so you get the, some of the most interesting and important and inspiring, insightful, useful conversations coming up in unexpected places like over dinner.

Well, I think that the serendipity happenstance kind of thing has gone, as you say, because there's this efficiency that people are— efficiency is kind of squeezing out any opportunity for serendipity to happen, right? That comes down to timetabling in schools, working teachers a little bit harder, making sure that their total time is being used to teach, but then often not having time off at the same time as your colleagues to plan together, to play together. And then when you do that creative work, that creative work has to be scheduled, so you need a meeting to do it. And I know from my own days, you know, when I schedule a meeting to do some creative work, it maybe isn't the right time. I may be not feeling particularly creative. I may be shattered and actually just want a cup of tea and a break. So that happenstance is really important. But I think there's something more sinister as well in the background, which is this kind of part of the market, the marketization of things. You've got an increasing number of small and medium-sized sort of mom-and-pop type consultants with their neatly packaged version of whatever thing you're doing, of reading or phonics, of classroom routines or PBL or inquiry or whatever. And they are laying it out as this kind of simple, concrete, just do this and it will work. Here's the program, here's the system that makes things work. Do it this way. It's research-informed. Use these principles, not those principles. These work for you. And so teachers are kind of being told from all corners that there is a right way of doing things and there is a wrong way of doing things, and someone else is going to tell you which one is which. And, you know, lo behold, you have an independent opinion as an educator as to whether it works or not for you, because that's not in the interest of these really loud and, and, um, on Twitter hugely popular independents. And very few people question the rationale behind that, except for your Dr. Rachel Loftus.

Exactly. Yeah, nothing, nothing gets my goat more than words like right, wrong, and truth on the covers of teaching books. It's just—

yeah, it's simple and effective. That's the other lie. Um, so, you know, the— I think that the pod is 100% worth a full listen. Why? Because it might well be the first time that you have ever heard from Dr. Rachel Loftus in more than 120-odd characters, and it's beautifully eloquent and explains a lot around what you can do as an individual teacher, as a head of department, or as a school leader to maybe create more room for that serendipity. Give people more time, supervise them a bit less, give them slightly less direction, and instead give them time to chat and to be creative together. I guess what I would also say is that a good coach.

That's exactly what a good coach does, right?

Yeah, but you don't have to pay $230 an hour for it, right?

Not necessarily saying you do, but, but there is a value in that idea of carving out some space for some time to not be so goal-directed, right? And that is some of what coaching does in— at its best, I think, is like it creates that space where you can bring what you need. And, you know, actually a lot of the benefits and the outcomes of good coaching comes from the person being coached, not from the coach, right?

I think there's another pragmatic thing here, which is that, you know, not everyone can afford a coach, and I think that's right, you know, definitely there. But everyone can afford the self-discipline, um, to stand up for that hour that you close off in your day to anyone else. Exactly. You make it yours.

True.

And I think that we're maybe, as a, as a group of people, teachers, we're kind of keen to please quite often, and so we give up our time far too easily. We don't value our time enough. So I often call it blocking your diary so that when you do have that time, you use it for advancing yourself as a person, and not just doing more marking or more preparation or more PowerPoint or whatever it is you've got to prepare for the next day, but actually on you as a person. Because that hours on that, you know, reaps far more rewards than just schlepping out another hour of prep for the following days. Um, she mentioned something else really interesting that I really want to pick up on, and it connects actually to something you did, a podcast with Gary Steger, um, that we've talked about in the shorts as well. And it's, um, this idea Gary said, you know, school shouldn't be training for kids. And what Rachel says is actually she didn't like the word training for educators. Um, and I agree, I hate the word training, and people keep referring to some of what we do as training when it's anything but. There are some parts of being an educator where, yeah, you need training. There are certain nuts and bolts that need learned, uh, 1 1 2, easy stuff. But there's also the creative philosophical side of it, the, the craft of it, which is more 1 1 3. It's not logical, it needs practice, it needs time, and it needs that mentoring from someone who can help you understand whether you're on the right track or not, right? Someone who's been there, done there, got the t-shirt before, and can give you that great kind of advice. And she talked about, um, in particular people entering new positions or entering into a new context, a new school, maybe they're changing grade level, teaching a wholly different group of kids. Those people, it's not just a nice to have, but mentoring is vital in her view. And I just, I cheered. I was walking along the pavement, uh, on my daily walk, this is, and literally went yes out loud because that kind of transition phase is a really dangerous place for people. There's a good relatively recent statistic that somewhere between 30 and 50% of leaders new in post are deemed to have failed within 2 years. It's a huge proportion, even if you take the lower end of it. And one of the reasons that they're deemed to have failed is because they didn't really listen to the people around them. And mentoring— Rachel talked about mentoring almost from an expertise position, but you can also have reverse mentoring where young new starts reverse mentor the boss and give ideas on how they might communicate a little bit better But it left me with a question, something maybe for people to consider as they listen to, uh, this little segment of the podcast. So she talked about that when you've got a really good coach, they often switch seamlessly between coaching and mentoring. And, uh, when she said that, I was aware that that's exactly what, what I do, what our colleagues do when they're sat one-on-one with people. But it's really hard to get away with it because not only do you have to be incredibly sure of what you're doing and on top of what you're doing to be able to make that switch, but the coachee also has to know that that switch is going to happen. Yeah, that it's not, it's not a kind of, um, sit down and spill your, your brain and your emotions out and I'll listen, and then when the hour's up, it's up. It's this idea that you're going to do that, but then I'm going to actually offer you advice because I've— I'm a mentor and I'm going to give you ideas and the first steps you might take. And that's a very different relationship. And it left me with a question. So very rarely this happens, but in fact I can count on, on one finger how often it's happened. So for the first time, we did a coaching session with a group of leaders. And after one session, they said, yeah, we don't want to continue anymore. Because we don't need it. We've actually moved on now. And we don't feel this is the right, we don't need this support. Now we need to do something else. We're not sure what that is. And it left me with the question, can you ever fire a coach? Can you ever fire a mentor? Are you ever in a position to have enough expertise in what you were working on to then say, I don't need this anymore. Because surely you don't know what you don't know. And that thought made me think that that's exactly actually what a lot of Dr. Rachel Loftus's work is about. It's about helping people understand that they don't know what they don't know. There's always another way. There's never the right way. There's always going to be another way. And I think it's— if I were going to write her mission for her, I think her mission is to help people see all the different ways that we can create meaningful learning experiences for young people.. And for that reason, it's a rich 50 minutes. It's worth getting your pen out and taking some notes as you go through and maybe even revisiting a second time. Dr. Rachel Loftus, fabulous pod to come. Here's a little excerpt.

So the mentoring is, for me, is essential. And as I say, it navigates the institutional and the individual needs at a particular point. Coaching, you could say, well, wouldn't coaching just be doing the same thing but maybe with a slightly different process? And the argument, of course, would be yes, to some extent. Especially if a school is dedicating an amount of money or time or people to the process of coaching, then of course the school is doing that for the motive that it will help, not just help the individual, help the school. So perhaps one of the ways to think about coaching is that it's often used at a point, not so much of induction or new starters, but that it's really about enabling change. And enabling growth. So rather than just maintaining the status quo, perhaps what coaching can do is create the opportunities for change and growth. And that doesn't mean that there's a single way to do it right. It also doesn't mean that we always privilege the individual over the institutional, because an organization adopting a coaching approach, the assumption we can make is that they're looking to grow through developing and supporting the people who are being coached. There's all sorts of interesting other kind of ways of looking at it. So it would not be the case that you could argue that, well, you need a mentor, you know, for 6 months, and then you need a coach for 6 months, although that might work for one individual. It's not necessarily the case that the mentor and the coach have to be different people, although that might work in some cases. So the other way of looking at it is more that the difference between mentoring and coaching is a stance, and there's a degree of fluidity, and that they exist on a spectrum, and that actually I think if you are a really capable mentor/coach, you can switch between those two stances as is appropriate to the individual, the context, the moment, and what they are trying to achieve. So if you're switching between two stances, what does that mean? Well, I think it means that in coaching you're acknowledging that the growth is most likely to happen from the point at which the individual being coached sets the agenda, where they start to identify the things that they're curious about, interested in, aware of, the aspects of their role that they want to acknowledge as being significant to them, and also the tensions in their role that they acknowledge as significant to them. And it's exploring those moments, those opportunities, that perhaps switches you more into a coaching stance than a mentoring stance, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that's, I, it really does make sense. I find that really useful as a frame, but also just to kind of throw an additional piece into that frame. What about the idea of a coach not needing to have professional expertise in order to be a good coach? Because that's something I've always wondered about. Because as you mentioned with the previous answer about the commercialization in a way of, of coaching and, you know, it's everywhere and the idea that someone not from education, not from teaching, doesn't understand a staffroom or a school or, you know, any kind of educational background can be an effective coach in an educational setting. I don't know, what do you think about that?

There's a whole host of things associated with that expertise and where the expertise lies and also the way that we name things. So, and again, my thinking is shifting a little bit on this at the moment. I do think we need to be careful about who we name as coaches or who claims the name of coach.

Okay.

I think there's a difference between saying, I am a coach, to saying, I use coaching approaches in my role. So I might be a mentor and I use coaching approaches sometimes in my role. I might be a leader or a colleague, or I might be, you know, a governor, and sometimes I use coaching approaches in my role. But that doesn't necessarily mean I can claim the title of coach. They might have the title of coach for other reasons, but I think there are, you know, there is a difference. I don't claim the title of coach, but I would say I use coaching across a whole host of my, if you like, working practices, a whole host of them. I think to be able to say that you are a coach requires that you have some kind of credible qualification and expertise that is validated by others. Now that doesn't have to be a really formal industry, you know, nominated accreditation. It could be something that is quite specific and it's come through a particular training route, you know, that you— and you've demonstrated that you have acquired a set of skills and expertise that allows you to work effectively as a coach with others. But I do think that to call yourself a coach, you need to have— be able to say, this is where my credentials lie. So, you know, that, and I might be the right or wrong kind of coach in this setting or for you, but this is where my credentials lie. But of course, none of that stops us more widely in education saying the coaching approach helps in certain types of contexts.

Yes.

Thanks for joining us, and you can listen to the rest of the episode linked in the description.

And don't forget to dive into the show notes and get your free weekly email of inspiration from The Provocation, joining thousands of education leaders, innovators, and creative people who want to start their week thinking differently.