Coaching Mental Models: Connecting Purpose, Problems and the Playbook

When you integrate mental models into your coaching, the deeper insights that accrue strengthen a sense of purpose, enable accurate predictions, and harness personal power. This presentation will show-and-tell how to coach a teacher to identify learning problems in their class, and to assemble techniques into effective clusters — thereby surfacing previously hidden beliefs about classrooms. By combining a visual playbook with the freshly discovered mental models new levels of effectiveness become possible.

Matt Stone

Director of Education & Operations, Teaching WalkThrus

Building a healthy school culture through coaching conversations

This workshop explores how coaching can enhance wellbeing, connection, and leadership in your school community. As technology rapidly advances, we must choose how to amplify our humanity and foster a healthy school culture. The answer lies in fostering deep relationships through conversation – the antidote to separation and overwhelm. By embedding coaching skills in daily interactions, connection is amplified, and support becomes second nature. Discover how quality conversations impact school culture, use a coaching model to initiate conversations and choose the right help, and understand The Connection Hierarchy to support others. Learn how conversations can transform relationships and build a healthier school culture.

Quinn Simpson

Cofounder, Graydin

Resilience in Change & Uncertainty

Join us for an inspiring session with Sean Swarner, the first cancer survivor to summit Mt. Everest and complete the Explorer’s Grand Slam. Defying a prognosis of only fourteen days to live, Sean’s story is a profound testament to resilience and the human spirit’s capacity to overcome the impossible. In this session, he will share strategies for turning adversity into strength and how to harness resilience in the face of life’s greatest challenges. His message of hope and triumph will inspire you to rethink what is possible, making this a must-attend for anyone looking to push their own boundaries.

Sean Swarner

Speaker/Author

Shifting the Load: Building the Capacity of Teacher Leaders

Invest in building the capacity of your teacher-level school leaders to effectively address staff concerns involving professionalism and/or instruction through simulation, role play, problems of practice, and other coaching methods. Through year-long “leader learning,” designed and led by school administrators, department resource teachers strengthened their conviction and competency in handling issues that require responses both immediate and ongoing.

Allison Wilder

Magnet Coordinator, Poolesville High School/Montgomery County Public Schools, MD

Dan McKenna

School Administrator, Poolesville High School/Montgomery County Public Schools, MD

The trouble with the name: a unifying theory of everything in Coaching

Coaching, in many different forms, has been adopted by many schools as a way to improve teaching and learning, pedagogy, wellbeing, self-efficacy, efficiency, performance, leadership and flourishing.  Some very interesting work has also been done on using a coaching approach to effect organisational change.

 

Yet the experience varies so much that two people are rarely talking about the same thing when the word “coaching” is mentioned.  If coaching is to have the sort of beneficial effect that the profession, indeed that humans in society in general, need, some clarification is essential: at present, the confusion caused by labelling many different forms of help or support as the same single word, is already damaging.  Worse than this, some very helpful forms of coaching are being serially misrepresented to their significant detriment.  Will coaching be considered a fad, alongside various recent fads in education, in the years to come?

 

People will learn to: 

 

  • Distinguish between the many different types of coaching
  • Highlight the strengths and the context-specific effectiveness of those different types of coaching
  • Clarify when and how each type might help, and in what ways
  • Explore when and how the same type of coaching is represented in different ways
  • Reconnect all those forms of coaching to their roots

Iain Henderson

Director of The Bridge and Co-Director, Festival of Education, Wellington College