In addition to the booklet leading the school development plan, three new booklets are henceforth available :
Transforming teaching-learning process :
- Leading teachers’ professional development
- Supporting teachers to raise performance
- Accompanying teachers : coaching and mentoring.
What the booklet Leading teachers’ professional development is about
As a school leader your leadership role implicitly includes providing support to teachers to enable them improve their practice (including leading teacher professional development). This is not straightforward because there are certain constraints (including budgets) that are not within your control. However, there are opportunities for you to maximise teachers’ effectiveness through school-based support strategies, which is the focus of this booklet.
What you can learn in this booklet
The resources, activities, pauses for thought and case studies in this booklet will help you to :
- Know how teachers’ professional development can impact on school improvement and student learning outcomes
- Generate some ideas to help your teachers assess their professional development needs
- Plan, monitor and enable professional development of all teachers.
Download the booklet Leading teachers’ professional development (pdf, 1.14 Mo)
What the booklet Supporting teachers to raise performance is about
In an ideal world, all students would achieve good learning gains each year in school, helped by teachers who knew about the latest learning theories and how to apply these to each individual student’s needs. The teachers would be able to do this with the resources provided by the school and despite whatever else was happening elsewhere in their lives.
However, we do not live in an ideal world. Teachers are human beings who sometimes find themselves working not at their best. If they are aware of this, they may only need a small amount of support to improve – but the problem is when the teacher does not realise they can do better and student learning is suffering. This is a sensitive issue that needs careful handling, but is part of the role and responsibility of a good school leader.
In this booklet you will learn how to gather evidence about teacher performance and explore some ideas to improve it by using planning supportive development activities. Your teachers are the biggest determinant of student achievement and therefore your influence in promoting teacher performance will directly impact on student learning and outcomes. As a school leader you can enable teachers to have more impact by supporting them to raise their performance.
What you can learn in this booklet
The resources, activities, pauses for thought and case studies in this booklet will help you :
- To assess teacher performance
- To plan to improve the performance of individual teachers
- Some ideas on how to conduct constructive meetings with teachers about performance
- Some ideas to use to maintain the performance of teachers
Download the booklet Supporting teachers to raise performance (pdf, 905 Ko)
What the booklet Accompanying teachers : coaching and mentoring is about
Most of us have at some point in our lives benefited from the generosity of a friend or family member who has listened to us as we have struggled to come to terms with a challenge or a problem. In a professional context, such support and guidance is often referred to as coaching or mentoring, and in this booklet you will learn to distinguish between these two approaches. You will understand some of the skills and techniques associated with coaching and mentoring, and how to use them in your conversations with teachers, students and their parents and/or guardians.
Increasing international evidence demonstrates that leaders can significantly improve the performance of their organisations and communities through coaching and mentoring (for example, Barnett and O’Mahony, 2006). Research, for example in India, highlights how coaching and mentoring can enhance the effectiveness of classroom teaching and how as a school leader you can employ these techniques to improve teaching and learning in your school (National University of Educational Planning and Administration, 2014).
By applying such strategies, leaders can significantly improve the performance of the individual being coached or mentored, while contributing to the success of their organisation. School leaders rarely have control over the resources, but they do have the ability to create a school culture that values everyone in the school and emphasises the importance of relationships and provides support to teachers. Practising coaching and mentoring in your school and sharing the skills with colleagues will contribute to richer relationships between teachers and students, which will directly impact on the quality of learning and achievement.
What you can learn in this booklet
The resources, activities, pauses for thought and case studies in this booklet will help you to :
- distinguish between mentoring and coaching, and how both can be used to support staff learning
- have conversations with members of staff that improve teaching and learning in your school
- plan and deliver coaching and mentoring sessions with agreed outcomes
- consider the benefits of a coaching culture in your school.
Download the booklet Accompanying teachers : coaching and mentoring (pdf, 1.1 Mo).
These booklets are open educational resources (OER) developed by a group of teacher educators to support school leaders who accompany their staff’s Professional Learning and Development (LPD) within their institution with a view of enhancing the conditions and quality of learning in the school. It also draws on the work carried out by TESSA and Apréli@ in French-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa, separately or jointly, as well as the resources resulting from this work. These booklets are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence.
