Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Hello. I'm Leigh Hatcher with the Growth Coaching International Case Study podcast series. Some great stories of the difference that GCI is making in all sorts of schools and school systems.
I'm in conversation with Richard Goater, Director of Staff Development at Hale School at Wembley Downs in Northwest Perth, West Australia.
Richard is an accredited GCI coach with a career that's included teaching, pastoral care, sports coaching, outdoor education, staff development, change management, and academia. He's undertaking PhD studies in leadership development at the University of Western Australia. Richard spoke with us via Skype.

Richard Goater:
The school was established in 1858 by Bishop Hale. It was located in the centre of Perth CBD. Over time it was moved to an area near Kings Park called Havelock street and then in 1961 they moved the school out to Wembley Downs. At that time, it was just bush and sand. It was quite a visionary leadership initiative and over time the school has just developed and grown from there. And now, of course, we are surrounded by suburbs and the school has just taken it's own history from that relocation in 1961.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Your school has a teaching staff of 138 ... 1300 students. How would you describe the ethos ... the character of the school Richard?

Richard Goater:
From a perspective of the boys, what we hope to achieve is to provide them with an opportunity to excel at whatever level that is for each individual. So we try to encourage the boys to be the best they can possibly be. The other thing we try to encourage them to think outside the box, to think more about "we" rather than "I" ... to be part of a bigger global society and to realise that with the privilege of coming to a school like this and the privilege of a lot of their backgrounds they also have a responsibility. And one of the key facets and platforms for enabling that to happen is being in the service learning program, which I think has had a significant impact on the school's culture.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Just flesh out that point about the focus on the "we" rather than the "I." That is flying in the face of so much of what makes up relationships, character, the way we are, you know, world today. Isn't it?

Richard Goater:
Yeah unfortunately most of the vehicles that are available to anybody, whether it be a young teenage boy and teenage girl or an adult, most of the vehicles nowadays are focused on "I." “I'm promoting myself, whether it be on Facebook ... I'm promoting my ideals, my beliefs” ... and the issue of connectivity in a global perspective is becoming less and less prevalent.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Yeah.

Richard Goater:
We've seen that in global politics at the moment and we're seeing that in our own regional areas as well.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Could you describe to us the kind of staff you have ... especially how they develop professionally ... personally, in Hale School?

Richard Goater:
Yeah. I think the staff group overall are collegial. They are caring. They network ... we have lunch all together in the dining hall which breaks down the possibility of the silos of departments ...

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Yes.

Richard Goater:
... and allows people to have conversations with others that they perhaps might not see on a normal daily basis. I think we are always trying to do our best to have a whole school interconnected staff community and that's always challenging when we've got the junior school located away from the senior school and middle school, and the middle school slightly located away from the senior school. I hope that staff see that their growth and their development is fundamental to how we want to invest in them. And I hope they see that that's about their growth rather than about evaluating them. Those two things are very, very different.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Richard, can I ask you what sparked your interest in introducing a coaching intervention to your particular context at Hale ... especially the solutions focused approach?

Richard Goater:
It was all of a chance opportunity, really. It was not planned. I hadn't come into the process thinking that coaching was something I was going to move forward with. A friend of mine who'd received some performance feedback ... one of the suggestions was that he take up the opportunity to do some coaching and while I was literally in his room at that time and I thought "Whoa, that sounds really interesting. I'd like to be part of that." So we both went along and there I was sitting in the room absorbing what Grant had to say and listening to the GROWTH coaching model and from that point on I was very much of a fan of what they were doing but also believed that it had so much to offer in terms of working in highly complex school environments.
In terms of their training process, that was quite extensive. You have a lot of opportunity to work with other colleagues from different schools and that was invaluable. And over time they allow you to become versed in the GROWTH metaphor but then they actually encourage you to deconstruct that and not do it in a sort of glided approach.
Then after that we started learning different frameworks and solution focused was one of those frameworks and it really resonated with me even more than the growth coaching steps and pillars, if you like.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Why did it resonate with you? What's so special, in your mind, about solutions focus?

Richard Goater:
On the surface, solutions focus coaching is easy but what underlies it is a mental model that for many people in Western societies is very, very challenging. It's not just simply about, and simply making steps towards your best hope. It's also about understanding where you are and what your strengths are ... what you bring to the table. And they refer to these as counters in the solution focused model. And it's looking at just a couple incremental steps, nothing big, and it's continuing that narrative about that progress. The thing that I have found over time is that as people engage in that process all sorts of other things happen in terms of their growth and development that weren't planned. So they take that metaphor into other places, they take that strength into other places and they do some things that certainly weren't in the narrative ... weren't in the conversation when we're sitting down together.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Yeah. So, more overarching, what in particular attracted you to the GCI model of coaching, Richard?

Richard Goater:
When I actually did it ... you know, Grant is pretty charismatic and engaging and he brought to the table lots of other information about teams, organisations ...
Grant is one of the senior managers in Growth Coaching International. He has been involved from the grass roots, if you like. I guess it's going back 15 years now. He was one of the people, certainly in Western Australia, who started to introduce that concept into schools. In a similar way to solution focused coaching, on the surface it's easy and you could track through the ladders of development of the coaching conversation on a superficial level. But underneath that there is a requirement for the participants to be doing lots of different things, deep listening, emotional engagement, developing trust. All of those things allow coaching to be a very powerful tool. And it also allows it to be practical and obtainable.Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Yes.

Richard Goater:
It's about being open and listening intently ... being engaged, being connected, and allowing that person to think and discuss and feel what's important for them and how they want to engage moving forward.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
You're listening to the Growth Coaching International Case Study podcast series. I'm in conversation with Richard Goater from Hale School in Perth. So Richard says this coaching model is practical and obtainable. So, what's it meant in practice to both students and staff?

Richard Goater:
I'll start with the students. Coaching has an impact on a staff culture so it has an impact on people's vitality, the learning that they can undertake in an organisation with colleagues, their level of commitment. And it allows them together to have greater sort of reciprocity from one another and stronger relational dynamics. And I think that's the key. A lot of research, a lot of work at AITSL and other places looks at the school leader and it looks at the teacher. But the bit in the middle which is where the teams are operating, coaching allows learning organisations and learning groups to develop and from that strength it then has an impact on boys. So that's the first thing.
The second thing about boys is you can use solution focused frameworks and coaching frameworks directly with students. And one of the stories or the narrative that I remember acutely is one boy who was literally half way out the door from having to leave the school. And I was asked to sit with him and try and work through some issues. All I did was use the solution based framework and that caused a whole array of other positive parallel activities and behaviours for him. So the best hope for him was something to do around getting his locker organised and himself organised within the boarding house. We talked about a couple of steps moving towards that best hope and some of the skills he had shown at home on the farm that enabled him to be organised and tidy. And he got such a sense of success from sorting that out and sorting himself out in the boarding house that he decided to make a couple of other steps into a few subject areas that he enjoyed. So he spent some time trying to organise his files and be organised when he walked into his classes the next time around.
I had those teachers come to me a week or so later and query me about what had I done in terms of presenting some sort of discipline framework around making this boy engage in those subjects in that way. I had no discipline framework at all. All we talked about was what that best hope was.
But a few years later he graduated and both his mum and grandmum were in my office with Gay, who is the lady I work with at that stage, and they were all in tears about the fact that he'd made it through and succeeded in this school system and had a good platform for moving ahead. So that was one little, sort of, vignette and I've used solution focused and GROWTH coaching frameworks for other boys and other situations.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
I love hearing the impact of that kind of thing ... so practical.

Richard Goater:
In regard to the staff, there is so much around our sort of western culture in terms of challenges for us as professional communities. And one of the biggest challenges when I'm sitting down with staff members is to readjust their lens. And staff get two boxes when they get feedback. One of those boxes is a box full of affirmation and another box is a box where there is some critique. I've literally had one lovely girl ... 26 pages of glowing affirmation and on the last page on the 27th page there were two lines that critiqued some of her practice and they were the only two lines that she focused on. So changing that perspective and looking at the box of affirmation which is usually three or four or five times larger than the box which contains a critique is a real challenge. But that's the start of that coaching process to get a solution focused mindset and framework.
The more recent example I've been coaching a bloke called Stephen and he's looked at a very specific aspect of what he wants to develop. It is slightly outside of the classroom but I've had colleagues of his come to see me and say, "Wow, he has got a second wind. He is really enthusiastic. He is really engaged." What he has done has really inspired him to not only excel in that area but also excel in other areas. And again, it is similar to an example I gave before with a student - that those coaching frameworks, they have to develop parallel lives which weren't discussed and weren't focused on in that narrative at that time but have allowed people to develop in different ways.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
What an impact. How are you sustaining this in the school? How would you say you are sustaining this model and the benefits of it, Richard?

Richard Goater:
The model we have put together over a number of years, we have done it slowly and we've been very careful about the change management process.
I think one of the key things is we involved our staff earlier on, particularly some departments which people knew well and had a very popular head of department. In the history department, we asked them to be sort of crash test dummies, if you like, over time. And then I asked Craig to actually just stand up in front of the whole staff group and say, "What was it like? What happened there? Did it work?" Without any prompting, he gave a great expose of the experience that he'd had as a result of the formative process.
That's been a really important part, having key staff who have valued and have a high degree of kudos in the professional community here. Having them involved as coaches and then over time become accredited coaches. And also, encouraging observers so in our particular process a participant selects two observers and they work together over time and have conversations about practice. They don't coach one another per se but they engage with one another and have conversations about what good practice means for them. And that's been really powerful as well.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
What would you say your next phase will be? Where are you going to take it from here or what would you like to see happen?

Richard Goater:
At the moment we have spent a bit of time putting the model online which will mean it will be a lot easier for people to access. They can access it on their mobile phones or their iPads, or whatever. That'll be an important next step in terms of making it accessible to people, to be able to put their thoughts down at any given time. We continue to develop the model and at the moment we've got the support of staff and staff see that as a valuable contribution to data development. In our particular model in terms of coaching and formative reviews, the line manager doesn't have a role and we think that that's important because as soon as the line manager does have a role that becomes evaluative rather than a growth platform. So, we're intending to continue to develop it, refine it, look at the working parts, and hopefully over the next 18 months to 2 years just tweak aspects of it to make it even more user friendly.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
The fact that we're having this conversation means that you are quite a champion for the GCI model. Why would you say you are such a believer in all of this, Richard?

Richard Goater:
That's a really good question. The challenge for schools, I think, is that we've moved from ... In the 1950's it was really reasonably simple organisational structures and processes and dynamics and then it got complicated and now it's got highly complex and even to some degree chaotic. Everybody has an opinion about schools and I think there's a degree of fatigue ... the staff about ongoing change whether it be from the Federal government or the state government or one group or another always wants to add their little bit about what's in the best interest of students and education in Australia.
In order for staff and schools to be able to manage and grow within complex environments, they need to be really highly connected. And coaching is a platform that enables people to connect deeply with one another, to talk about practice and to be able to rely on one another's opinions when challenged with really complex issues. And schools ... you don't get many organisations that are as complex as schools because of the unique issues around teenage development and parenting, etc. etc.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
Yes.

Richard Goater:
So I think that's a really, really important aspect. Coaching enables a platform of connection. Coaching enables a platform for trust and development. And coaching enables a platform for growth within those complex environments.

Leigh Hatcher (presenter):
I love hearing these stories in the case study series and the difference it's making across the board at so many levels. Richard, thank you so much indeed for your time and onward and upward.

Richard Goater:
Thank you very much. See you. Bye.

Leigh Hatcher:
You've been listening to the Coaching in Education podcast series. I'm Leigh Hatcher. Have a listen to a range of other inspiring stories in this series. They're at www.growthcoaching.com.au

Resources referred to in this podcast:

• AITSL provides national leadership for the Australian State & Territories in promoting excellence in the profession of teaching & school leadership.