Mentoring Matters – Autumn 2024

Welcome to the first issue of our new publication, Mentoring Matters, Arthur Terry TSH’s newsletter dedicated to colleagues across the city who mentor and coach trainee and early career teachers.

As the Teaching School Hub for North Birmingham, we are passionate about the importance of mentoring and coaching. There is an increasingly strong base of evidence that suggests mentoring is not just beneficial for the practice of the person being coaching and the mentor but directly improves outcomes for the children in the mentor’s classroom. We want you to maximise those benefits.

We want to offer enhancements and support to mentors across the city because your work is so crucial to your school and the profession at large. We will aim to keep Mentoring Matters to a 5 minute read.

In this issue:

Mentoring focus – what should my conversations feel like?

Whether it’s initial teacher training or early career mentoring, the responsibilities of mentors and coaches are significant, and the amount of training, support and scaffolding you receive are extensive. While this is often a great benefit to schools and teachers, we can all be forgiven for getting a little “lost in the woods” or overwhelmed by amount of content to cover and the number of micro-tasks to complete.

Sometimes, Mentors will express their frustrations with this feeling – with all the jobs to do, where is the time for me to discuss, coach and engage with the personal side of my mentee’s development? In our role as a mentor and coach, we have to ensure that we engage with the personal needs and emotions expressed by the teachers and trainees we are supporting. The trouble is, with so much training and content, it’s easy to lose sight of what our conversations should feel like, and how they should make us and the person we’re coaching feel.

Active listening

There are steps you can take to address this feeling and ensure that you are meeting those softer needs that could easily be neglected in the bustle of school life. The first, and in the eyes of many experienced teacher developers, most important of these is active listening. Carol Wilson explains that one of the key features of the active listener is:

“Listening behind the words and between the words; listening to the silences; using your intuition; prompting the coachee to explore; facilitating the coachee’s self-learning and awareness;”

You can learn more about active listening in our training video. By hearing with sincerity and attention, we can increase the mutual benefit of our coaching, and better address the needs of our trainees.

Three point communication

Three point communication is another concept that can help us to maintain a focus on the personal, particularly when delivering feedback or broaching sensitive topics. In conventional ‘two point’ communication, the mentor would talk to their mentee about them, their practice and their decisions – typically sitting on opposite sides of a metaphorical table. This can inadvertently lead to defensiveness, conflict or an adversarial atmosphere that are detrimental to reflection and learning.

This dynamic is broken down in a three-point communication model. In 3-point communication, a mentor and their mentee would sit together on the same side of the metaphorical table. Together, they would discuss and critically analyse a third entity. Examples of what that third entity might be include:

• An activity that has been used in a lesson,
• The impact of the deployment of a strategy on students’ experiences,
• The amount of progress students have made or not made,
• The quality or depth of learning that took place.

By separating the issue from the person in this model, we can discuss what might be tricky or challenging concepts without the emotional consequences of a two-point discussion. This can help to foster trust and build the right feeling in our conversations.

Three-point communication in coaching means two colleagues sitting together to discuss and hopefully solve an issue, rather than an expert telling a novice what they have done wrong.

In this five-minute podcast, Michael Grinder explains the differences in more detail. Oli Caviglioli and Tom Sherrington included 3-point communication in their Teaching Walkthrus guide, and the above image (shared on social media by Caviglioli) makes the concept really clear.

Our five-step guide to delivering feedback

Many of you will have recently been through our Tier 1 Mentor Training for ITT. As part of that package, we introduced our 5 Step Guide to Post Lesson Dialogues. We want to take this opportunity to encourage all our mentors to use this resource to support their coaching and increase the personalisation of your feedback.

The model is intended as a supportive scaffold, not a prescriptive checklist. We encourage you to adopt these five steps faithfully but to adapt them flexibly, to support your style and your coachee’s needs. Sometimes, the full model could cause the same sense of being lost in the woods that we referred to earlier in the issue. Over time, your coaching should become more and more fluent and distinctive. As you feel this happening, instead of using the full model to support your conversations, it might be helpful to refer to this abbreviated diagram:

By stripping the model back, and removing some of the scaffolding, you can liberate yourself from the micro-tasks while maintaining fidelity to the approach. You should feel empowered to make decisions based on your professional judgment and the contextual expertise you have about your school and your mentee.

Share your stories

This newsletter is not just about sharing our insights with you. We are always excited to gather feedback and stories from our mentors. If you have a success story or a case study related to mentoring and coaching on either the ECT or ITT programmes, we want to hear from you. Get in touch to set up a time for a conversation: jgavin@atlp.org.uk

Thank you for reading Mentoring Matters, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need support, or if you have suggestions for how we can continue to improve the experience  or support package for mentors.

Mentoring matters and your work makes a difference, not only to the teachers you support, but to the life chances and educational experiences of thousands of children. We could not do it without you.