Using teacher coaching to support the teachers identified as needing assistance was selected by 64% of professional development leaders as one of the reasons they had implemented teacher coaching in their organisations. No respondents identified supporting teachers who needed assistance as the only reason for adopting teacher
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coaching as a professional development approach. Most commonly, respondents suggested they had implemented teacher coaching in order to support teachers identified as needing assistance, alongside teach coaching that supported implementation of a particular, strategy resource or programme, or teacher coaching used to support newly qualified teachers. There were no statistically significant relationships identified between this variable and any other variable presented in the national questionnaire.
All four programme leaders interviewed in Phase 4 discussed the concept of teacher coaching being used in order to support teachers who were perceived to be “struggling”. For a small minority of teachers this was due to formal complaints being laid by other staff, students or parents. In these cases the reasons why teacher coaches were needing to work with a staff member were evident in the details of the complaint which was written down and discussed by the teacher concerned and senior leaders. Teachers who were involved in a competency process of this nature were required by the Ministry of Education to have support and guidance for a specified period of time. Coach 4 described the challenge of working in these kinds of situations:
You get people entrenched in behavior, sometimes I get called in to do pre-competency and those are very challenging because the reality is people live off their memories, and the school is trying to get rid of those teachers, but they’ve left it too long and the teacher is trying to stay, that’s actually when it becomes challenging – because really you are meant to create a miracle. (Coach 4. Phase 2 interview)
Both the programme leaders and the coaches also discussed situations in which teacher coaches were required to coach teachers who had been identified by their colleagues as needing assistance and had been recommended to the teacher coaches, Coach 3 explained:
These interventions arise through various needs, that is where communication comes in, you could be alerted by the Principal, newly formed Directors of Learning or any teacher could come to me. (Coach 3. Phase 2 interview)
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In these situations it was less evident how those staff who had identified a need for another teacher to be coached were reaching these conclusions and if any structured evaluation method was being used. Coach 4, who was an external coach employed by schools in order to work with teachers identified as needing assistance, discussed the challenges of working with schools in this way, they explained:
Every school has got its own idea and what they mean is just fix that person, that’s the definition, that’s what they see as coaching. In some schools I never know what I am going into, they want you to fix this person and then next time it is someone different and you get half way through and it changes. (Coach 4. Phase 2 interview)
Coaches 1, 2, 3 and 4 all highlighted the challenges of working with experienced teachers who had been identified by other staff as needing coaching support, Coach 1 explained:
There is a big difference between teachers that have invited you in and those that haven’t. Those that have invited you in have got an investment in the idea of the project, they want strategies, they want to know what’s going on in the room and the others kinda of feel that it is a bit of an imposition. (Coach 1. Phase 3 interview)
A final context in which teacher coaches were used to support teachers identified as needing assistance was described by Programme Leader 1. In their school they had developed a ‘Year 10 project’ in order to “get coaches into teachers’ classes”. In this project, identified Year 10 students were observed by teacher coaches who then provided coaching support to their teachers. Programme Leader 1 perceived this project had worked in terms of allowing teacher coaches into a wide range of teachers’ classes. However, Coach 1 raised the issue that when working with teachers who had been directed to be part of this project then the teacher coach had a time allowance allocated to them, whereas the teachers had not been given time to be coached.
The findings of this study have shown a significant number of school leaders in New Zealand secondary schools are employing ‘expert’ coaches from their own staff, or
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‘external’ coaches in order to support teachers identified as needing assistance. It is evident from the data collected that a range of staff may recommend their colleagues to receive teacher coaching. It is less clear from the data how staff are reaching these conclusions. Feedback from the coaches suggests that situations with teachers involved in a competency process or those recommended by other staff create greater challenges for coaches to engage with the teachers concerned, compared to teacher coaching contexts that involve newly qualified teachers, or those in which teachers have requested teacher coaching support.