Learning Partners:
Skills Training for Peer, Expert & Leadership Coaching in Schools

Learning Partners: powerful peer coaching

Learning Partners will bring about transformation in your school or cluster by supporting the transfer of new skills learnt in a workshop to the classroom and the strengthening of existing practices for improved teaching and learning.

Learning Partners is cost effective training in peer coaching. All teachers will receive six hours of training in the five steps of peer coaching, either in a whole day of training or in a number of shorter sessions.Once trained in the five steps, teachers become involved in peer coaching by inviting their chosen learning partner to observe them teaching. After learning partners exchange at least four visits to each other's classroom over two months or more, the learning partners may decide to advance to the next phase of the program, peer feedback. During peer feedback, teachers request that data be collected on an aspect of their practice that they wish to improve. The role of the observing teacher is to collect the requested data, compute it to be readily interpreted by the teacher and during a meeting after the classroom observation to ask some leading questions to encourage the teacher to reflect on the data and assess what use it may be to improving their teaching and their students' learning. This is a reflective coaching model. Training in the skills needed to provide peer coaching to colleagues is provided in three sessions, six hours in all. In between the sessions the trainee coaches practise their new skills on each other: collecting feedback data, asking leading questions and providing suggestions for improvement. When the coaches have completed their training, they are ready to respond to requests for coaching by teachers. The power in peer coaching resides with the teacher and there is no praise or blame so that the process remains reflective for the coachee. The vision we will be working towards together is for everyone in the school to both be trained as a coach and for everyone to be coached.

You may wish to follow this link to read an account of the Learning Partners approach to peer coaching which was a supporting paper in an online conference held in June 2006.

http://www.cybertext.net.au/inet/support_papers/s13_26.htm

Ray Daniels, CCT Consulting: Mobile: 0408 709 963 Email: ray@raydaniels.com.au
11 Sunhill Road, Mount Waverley, Victoria, 3149, Australia. ABN 19303523693