Mentoring Matters – Spring 2025
Wednesday 2nd April, 2025
Welcome to Mentoring Matters, Arthur Terry TSH’s newsletter dedicated to colleagues across the city who mentor and coach trainee and early career teachers. This term’s issue focuses on the probe phase of lesson feedback. You can also read our post lesson feedback guide.
As the Teaching School Hub for North Birmingham, we are passionate about the importance of mentoring and coaching. 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.
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Mentoring focus – identifying a ‘lever’
Delivering lesson feedback which is precisely matched to the needs and stage of development of the teacher you are coaching can be tricky. There are so many factors to consider and it’s hard to know what we should focus our energy and effort on.
We often talk about choosing a ‘lever’ to move a trainee or ECT’s practice forward. This is a helpful analogy, if we consider the complexity of any given lesson, observation can feel a little like watching the workings of an intricate machine.
With so many moving parts, it’s tough to decide which lever is causing which operation, and to predict the changes that might happen when we start tinkering.
It’s crucial to remember that we don’t need to fix everything in one go and that you can’t really choose the ‘wrong’ lever, as long as you are consistently observing, coaching and mentoring. That being said, it’s definitely worth considering this as a key skill for mentors. If the coach takes responsibility for narrowing the focus, it supports the cognitive load of the teacher being mentored. It can help them to ‘see the wood for the trees’ by concentrating thought in a specific area or domain.
The waterfall approach
When trying to select an appropriate focus, it can be helpful for lesson observers, coaches and mentors to think in terms of inhibiting and facilitating factors for effective teaching. Or, more simply, barriers and enablers. There’s a fairly strong consensus that there are certain aspects of teaching practice that, if not in place or delivered effectively, will actually prevent any other aspects of good teaching from having a positive effect.
It can help to think of it as a waterfall: if we were to dam the river at the top, the water will never reach deeper levels.
The classic example of this would be that there is little point in talking about effective assessment or adaptive teaching in a classroom where the students are not paying attention to the teacher, or the environment is unfocused. In this example, it would make much more sense to focus on routines or classroom management than it would to try and tackle cold-calling or adaptive teaching. We need to remove the dam at the top of the waterfall before thinking about the deeper levels.
The risk with a waterfall approach is that we can fixate on obvious issues of behaviour and never move to more nuanced pedagogical concepts. Sometimes we might need to look past immediate levers to ensure that our coachees aren’t spending all their energy addressing the top levels of the waterfall.
Lever into action step
Leverage Leadership 2.0 (Bambrick-Santoyo, 2018) talks about this skill in depth in a range of school contexts. In the context of lesson feedback, identifying the lever is tightly linked to choosing the most powerful action step. Bambrick-Santoyo distils this in simple terms:
“The smaller and more precise the action step, the quicker the growth. Be bite-size, not book-size”
When observing and trying to decide what to focus on, we want to select the area which has the highest leverage. As a final thought for this issue, we encourage you to use this simple questions from Leverage Leadership as a self-assessment tool so you can feel more confident in the levers you choose for your ECT or Associate Teacher:
“Will this help the teacher develop most quickly and effectively?”
Share your stories
This newsletter is not just about sharing our feedback and findings 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.
