Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Hello and welcome to the Coaching in Education podcast series. I'm Leigh Hatcher, in a Skype conversation with Chris Munro. Chris is a senior consultant with Growth Coaching International, and is based in Victoria. He has extensive experience in supporting and leading the development of teachers and school leaders over twenty-five years of working in government and independent schools, and in higher education. As you'll no doubt pick up from his accent, he's originally from Scotland, where he began his teaching career and performed advisory roles for education authorities there. He came to Australia in 2010.
Chris is going to deal with this question: so, what happens after the workshop? When you move from learning about coaching and how to do it, to actually enacting it in your local context?

Chris Munro:
I now know that I actually was having coach-like conversations, or coaching-like conversations, in my various professional roles long before I actually had a name for it. My formal training and reading and work around coaching in recent years has helped me to see that the best conversations I was having with my school colleagues and then latterly in, with beginning teachers and during my time in initial teacher's education, were actually successful and came up by accident, because I was using some coaching skills and techniques at the time.

So throughout my career I developed a particular interest in teacher development and adult learning, and the first in, the first formal learning that I did around coaching in schools was with Jim Knight from Kansas University, a much cited and lauded expert in instructional coaching. He was running a workshop at a conference in Melbourne about five years ago. The title of that professional learning was called Professional Learning That Honours the Professionalism of Teachers. And it was that "honours the professionalism of teachers" bit I thought, oh, I like the sound of that.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Yes.

Chris Munro:
And in my professional learning role at the time that was the hook for me, that was something different. And that was my in.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Chris, can I ask you what it did for you, I know it's not about you, but what does this do for you in how you were drawn to it?

Chris Munro:
Part of what resonated in that early learning was this notion of a partnership in learning and development. It was development that was based around the conversations that we have, and I will say a bit more about that later, but it was the conversational aspect of it, I think, that really resonated. It was about a very respectful, professionalising approach to professional learning, and as an experienced teacher and leader I knew that's what felt right for me and good for me, but often that didn't happen in the forms of professional learning that prevailed in schools.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Yes, basically, do unto others as you would have them do to you.

Chris Munro:
Yes.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Now, you've had a number of first-hand experiences of implementing coaching in school, and you now work with many others striving to do the same. What would you say are some of the starting points for coaching in education, Chris?

Chris Munro:
This is a conversation that I have increasingly with school leaders and teachers in my new role with GCI, now, and what I find there a very helpful starting point is something called the Global Framework for Coaching in Education. That's been developed by Christian van Nieuwerburgh and John Campbell, and it's based on their vast experience of working in coaching in education, and they describe four portals or entry points for coaching in education as starting ...
That's often what I use as a point of reference for starting points. And I maybe just say a very brief bit about each of those. I mean I don't want to talk about the Global Framework as such, there, and people like Christian and John talk about it much more eloquently than I would.
But in summary, we're talking about, let's start with professional practice, which is really about teaching practise as one of the portals. And that's really where I came to it, was around teaching professional learning, teacher-to-teacher collaboration and goal-setting and thinking and talking about the practice, and maybe some observation in there. And what we're really talking about is the conversational context within that portal was around teacher practice.
If we look at the educational leadership portal, we're talking about how coaching can be helpful in the range of conversational contexts that leaders have. And that might be performance review and development, it might be their own leadership skills and so on.
The other two portals that are covered in the model are often less well-developed, but increasingly so. They're emerging areas. We're talking about student success and well-being there. Possibly students as coaches, certainly teachers using coaching approaches in their developmental and goal-setting and academic conversations that they have with students. And that coaching, we're realising, can be a very helpful approach there as well.
And then the last one that they talk about in the model is community engagement, and that's probably the least developed, but in my work and thinking around coaching cultures, it's maybe the area that starts to emerge later. It's when people realise the power of these kinds of conversations and how they can utilise coaching skills and coaching approaches to improve the quality of conversations.
And the other context there is with parents, with the way their community groups, school boards, and what I would encourage schools to do in terms of looking for starting points, is to think about those coaching contexts or conversational contexts where coaching might help.
And think about what would be the desired outcomes from those conversations. How would coaching help in those conversational contexts? And that often starts to open up a really rich discussion around that school's context.

Leigh Hatcher:
I know Christian van Nieuwerburgh asks this question: If coaching is the answer, what's the question? And that's meant quite a bit to you, hasn't it?

Chris Munro:
It has. And again that's often the question I come back to, and Christian's been kind enough to lend us that question.

Leigh Hatcher:
I know Christian van Nieuwerburgh asks this question: If coaching is the answer, what's the question? And that's meant quite a bit to you, hasn't it?

Chris Munro:
It has. And again that's often the question I come back to, and Christian's been kind enough to lend us that question.

Leigh Hatcher:
It's a great line.

Chris Munro:
It's a great one. Simple and very effective, a classic and very powerful coaching question. I remember grappling with that in my own school context.
In my last school, when we grappled with that, and it does take a while, the question was around how we could facilitate more purposeful conversations about teaching practice, but with the caveat that that had to be in a safe space. It was about, how can we encourage teacher reflection and action? We can talk about it but how do we move to doing something different.
A really big one for us was really around that notion of knowing really well that traditional forms of PD, professional development, were often done to teachers rather than with teachers. It wasn't always around what their priorities were. So, I was curious about how coaching might help us get more impact from, but also more discerning choices of PD from teachers.

Leigh Hatcher:
What are some of the factors that come into play here, Chris, considering the human organisational factors at work in a school setting in particular?

Chris Munro:
One thing we know really well in the work that I've done myself, at my own previous schools but also others that we work with, is that we have to take account of the context where this work is being done, because it's relational. We should really start by considering the human factors first.
Really, when we talk about coaching, we are asking people, or we're creating a mechanism where, teachers are invited and leaders are invited to think deeply and talk about their practice.
And that notion, to some, in itself, can be potentially threatening, or certainly confronting, because there aren't often that many situations where we're invited to do that. Sometimes that prevailing backdrop of performativity and measurement and judgement of teachers in some systems are at least a teacher, or a leader's previous experience of less positive and productive conversations in teaching about their practise might not create the most receptive audience.
So we really consider that that background and baggage first. I think a key to that is to be very clear about our intent, and to be very genuine about the follow-through to demonstrate that the coaching process, and those who are doing the coaching are trustworthy. We really start with that human side of it first of all.
But again, people only realise that once they've gone through the process. You can't just say "trust me, I'm a coach." We've got to actually walk the talk. That's as leaders and as coaches, so that takes a bit of time.

Leigh Hatcher:
And give them a bit of space to do it, I suppose.

Chris Munro:
Definitely. So that speaks to some of the organisational or practical kind of issues that we need to consider. You might think this sounds great or this sounds really empowering, hopefully you do, and these are professionalising conversations that we want teachers to be having. But on a practical level, creating the space or the opportunity for coaching is one of the challenges. It really is.
I think the way around that is to start to consider coaching as a new form of professional learning. It's not an add-on, it's a way of doing things and if seems an add-on you don't get much traction, so we need to address that, we need to address it very honestly.

Leigh Hatcher:
You're listening to the Coaching in Education podcast. I'm in conversation with Chris Munro. When Chris talks about being practical, what does a school need to do to kick off a coaching culture?

Chris Munro:
The word context comes up over and over again. At our recent conference, we had in Melbourne a few months ago, we were joking afterwards that that word, context, was probably the most-used word in the whole two days, because everything we're talking about here has to be put against that backdrop in a school and a situation, right down to the classroom level and peer-to-peer level.
I’ll maybe using a phrase here that my colleague, a former school colleague, Sophie Hunter, used in her case study presentation at the conference, and it really resonated with me and captured the issue here.
She spoke about the need to consider the school's professional learning architecture. That term, the professional learning architecture, really struck me that this is a form of professional learning that sits in amongst everything else we do. When I did it in school, I would have called it the glue that holds all the other forms of professional learning together.
There's lots of metaphors you could use there, and analogies that you could use. But to think about how will coaching complement other approaches to teacher learning that you have already, to take a solution-focused approach and think about what's working already, what's helped when we've tried to change how we've done things in the past, when has that worked and what was it we did that helped that work, how we work with people in the school
And we're talking about other things that often exist there already, the antecedent conditions, as well as that architecture. Do we have professional learning communities? How effectively do they operate? Do we already do peer observation? Are some classroom doors already open? On the back of that, what might we stop doing or do differently to create that space or opportunity to get coaching moving, or identify starting points?

Leigh Hatcher:
What are the key pieces of advice you'd offer for anyone looking to introduce coaching in their school? Just a few bullet points. Chris?

Chris Munro:
The notion of implementing coaching is context-dependent. That's the biggest ... It sounds really obvious. Often, we're doing these things and we go and visit other schools, we go up to others who've done it, we listen to a podcast. That'll give me the steps the silver bullet to do this. The biggest learning for me in doing this and talking to other schools has been that you need to think about your own antecedent conditions. How do you know that to be true, and how might coaching help? That's the starting point.
A few other points ... Implementing coaching evolves in context over time, and I think that's a good thing. If you want it all to happen overnight, you think about the other innovations and changes you've made in school, that's probably not realistic. As people experience the benefits of coaching, they start to see other opportunities to apply it, and so that notion of a culture starts to emerge.
Another big learning, and I learned this the hard way, trying to do this in school, was that people learn most about coaching by experiencing it. As I said earlier ... That isn't about saying "trust me, I'm a coach, trust me, this is good for you, trust me, you will find this empowering."
And expect people to jump on board, you'll always get early adopters and willing volunteers who do, and that's great, but people need to experience good coaching in order to get it. And the need for that good coaching is really important.
So the last point that I would make is that other than that clarity of intent and authenticity being really essential, and the trust, but some form of training, and some way of building your internal coaching resource, that then helps to carry this forward, is really really important.

Leigh Hatcher:
I'm sure you've seen this practically at work in so many contexts, to use that word again. Does any one particular context, or person, or school stand-out for you? Tell us about that.

Chris Munro:
The stand out ones for me are the ones closest to me, and my most recent experience ... in the last school I was in I developed, along with colleagues, a coaching model. As I said our starting point was about teacher practice and teacher classroom practise and so on. It was all voluntary to start with. So, we looked for this coalition of the willing and one of the people who jumped on board there was actually an e-learning leader, digital learning leader, in the school, a very common position.
He's happy for me to use this example because he's now one of the biggest advocates of coaching in the school, but he would freely admit that he came as ... To say "a cynic" would be too strong. He'd nudge me for saying that. A sceptic, with dose of healthy scepticism. Very experienced teacher, passionate about his work, but had seen lots of these things come and go in the past.
I was inviting involvement and a new way of talking about our practice and learning, and he thought there might be something in it. So he came along cautiously. Now, if you know e-learning in schools, and those kinds of positions, they can very easily become Mr. and Mrs. Fix-it. Everybody comes to them with all their technical problems and really that's not the core of the role. The core of the role, and his sense of frustration in his role when he came to coaching, was around role clarity. It was around, how can I help people enhance teaching and learning in the classroom? He wanted to be seen more as a service to help people develop their practise rather than a fixer, or a tech fixer.
He came to coaching, and I actually coached him on that: on his role clarity, on how he would develop strategies to adopt a different stance. On the back of that part of his development was then to do more coaching training for himself. And long story short, this impacted on his own practice but also on the practise around the school, because he started to adopt less of a fixer-instructor-trainer role, and developed more of a coaching role, where he asked more questions and gave less advice.

Leigh Hatcher:
That's interesting.

Chris Munro:
He only gave advice when that's something that that person genuinely needed to meet their goals and their learning. It was a real change of stance and a real light bulb moment for him. So he went through, if you think of it, those portals: starting with his own practice, moving to changing his leadership stance and role through coaching.
The biggest bit for me, that makes this story a powerful one, is that he then started seeing the other portals, the student well-being and engagement portal, creak open for him, to the point where he came and asked permission, and he got the "why on earth are you asking permission”, to use this coaching stuff with the students.
And I thought, yes! It was one of those moments where I thought, brilliant. This is what we mean by coaching culture. This is first stirrings of what might be a coaching culture. He then started to apply coaching skills with these Year 12 students, because, again, he saw that conversational context, and he saw how it might be improved by adopting a coaching stance, where the students would take more ownership of their own learning and their own goals, and so on. And that then started to spin out into student achievement, well-being, and so on, talking to other staff.
That story kind of embodies that notion of how those portals, once you start somewhere, start to creak open other portals. And there are lots of other stories of individuals.

Leigh Hatcher:
I mean, what a difference it's made to him, and many people around him. It's another great story in our series.
Chris, thank you so much indeed for joining us. Chris Munro.

Chris Munro:
Thanks, Leigh. Appreciate the time. Thank you.

Leigh Hatcher:
You've been listening to the GROWTH Coaching International Case Study podcast series. Check out some of our other inspiring podcasts, just like Steve's in this series there atwww.growthcoaching.com.au.