Delivering on the promise

 

Mr Graham Hoult International Coach Federation Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

 

Mentoring and coaching are well documented powerful tools to personal and professional growth and development. This conference is an exciting opportunity for practitioners around the world to share their experiences, their wisdom and their inspiration around the theme and to continue to spread the very powerful coaching process into our schools and colleges.

As this conference will attest, there is a lot happening in education and coaching. Many participants will be unaware that there is an ongoing dialogue in relation to this issue. Each month a group of coaches from around the world meet to discuss their work in the field of coaching educators. They meet through teleconference technology, under the auspices of the International Coach Federation, the sponsor of the project. The Federation is the professional association of coaches globally, with over 10,000 members in over 80 countries. It provides accreditation for training programs, certification for individual coaches, and has established a code of ethics for the profession. We, as members, continue to grow and develop as coaches through our professional interaction with our colleagues. I established this group in 2004 and have the pleasure of hosting it each month. They coach in a variety of educational settings. Some, not all, come from a teaching background. All are committed to coaching as a profession and bringing their expertise into the education sphere. Each month, I have my passion fuelled as I hear these wonderful coaches share their success stories. For these dedicated professionals, coaching is neither fad nor fashion. On a daily basis, they are developing and supporting key educators all around the world. I invite all attendees to this conference to contact us and consider joining either through contacting the author (through the online conference manager) or through our website: www.coachfederation.org.

It is in the role of host of this group of coaches that I write this paper. I do have a concern in relation to this topic and it is that we don't do what has happened so often before - rush headlong into a good idea without the training, planning or resources required for it to be successful, attempting to deliver the benefits entirely on the cheap, and finding that, in no time, people are disillusioned with the outcomes. As a teacher, principal, further education institute director and educational bureaucrat over 25 years, I regularly was frustrated by instances of this approach. Some of the first powerful research about coaching appeared in the 1980s. I look back on that period and think of some of the activities that were loosely based on the coaching paradigm. All were dropped after a short period, as people found they ‘didn't work', ‘took too much time', or ‘weren't directive enough'. In my experience, the issues were that people weren't trained in their role, had little or any personal experience of coaching, and/or were trying to do too much with too few resources. I see warning signals that this is happening again.

I am not arguing that all coaching and mentoring should be delivered by certified coaches or mentors. This is unrealistic cost-wise and unnecessary in the sense that good work can occur with people less trained or skilled than that. However, I do believe that the training should be available to all that take on mentoring or coaching on any regular basis, and that the training should be accredited or delivered by certified coaches. This will take time as the need/demand may exceed the availability. However, there is already a lot of talk around the world of the huge variation in quality of coaching.

People who offer to take on coaching should be ‘coached to coach' following their initial training- it is the height of hypocrisy not to do this, for it fails to demonstrate or model the fundamental coaching paradigm and philosophy.

Mark Davies provides an excellent outline of the critical challenges we face in embracing the coaching culture. Coaching and mentoring have become the growth industry of the new millennium and for good reason - they are effective. Put simply, organisations wouldn't be paying for anything in the current economic climate without a clear and strong Return on Investment (ROI). Nor would people volunteer their time if there weren't clear positive outcomes. Yet, far too often, we hear of people asking why coaching doesn't lead to any real change. These people, particularly principals, report feeling supported by their coach but are not sure what they do beyond giving them some good ideas and a sense of empathy. Mark Davies identifies the issue: ‘ Coaching is to do with learning from within, where a coach helps the coachee to reflect on their work and helps them to find their own answers to their own issues'. Poorly trained or prepared coaches fail this test time and time again, yet it is integral to the coaching process. Ask, don't tell. This is tough stuff for many learning this process and that is why ongoing support through coaching is so crucial.

Davies identifies another challenge in ‘ how to deliver the time that such processes require within the constraints of a traditional school framework and timetable'. The school that I have seen tackle this best has, over two years, carefully created a new culture in the school that supports the teachers' professional learning through teachers coaching each other, informally and formally. For example, the first 15 minutes of each staff meeting is spent in coaching pairs. The results have been dramatic. This was a change management program where new coaches, as they learnt the process, were coached by an external coach initially, and then internal coaches, to embed their training and understanding.

Finally, might I take up Davies' question of: ‘Should school leaders follow the business example of having an executive coach?' One of the learnings about coaching is that, as a generic skill, it is often better delivered by someone who doesn't have the same background and experience as the coachee. Helping people reflect on their work and helping them find their own answers to their own issues can be more difficult if you are aware of the issues yourself. By being unaware of the issues, you often ask the questions that allow the coachee to see new perspectives that can be so valuable. Of course, so much of the school leader's role is not education specific, anyway.

 

Mr Graham Hoult B. Ec. Dip. Ed., ACC, is a certified coach through the International Coach Federation (ICF). He took an active role in the establishment of the ICF in Australasia, as well as instigating and hosting the Special Interest Group, ‘Coaching Educators', via a monthly international teleconference, from which much of the inspiration of this paper has been generated. Formerly, he was a teacher, principal, and educational administrator with the Victorian Department of Education, in Australia. Mr Hoult has written extensively on the subject of coaching and education, including Coaching Educators: Fad, fashion or valuable new approach to developing and supporting our key people? IARTV Occasional Paper No. 93, Dec. 2005.

Join the online discussion for all supporting papers from Monday 19 June to Sunday 26 June 2006.