Coaching for Adaptive Expertise: Developing the Missing Step Between Knowing and Doing

Earlier this evening I watched an InnerDrive and Teacher CPD Academy flash webinar introducing the new book Coaching for Adaptive Expertise: Developing Teachers Who Make Better Decisions, by Sarah Cottinghatt, Haili Hughes and Adam Kohlbeck delivered by the authors themselves.

As Haili introduced the book, the underpinning philosophy and reasoning immediately resonated with what I often see.  Teachers can be introduced to genuinely useful techniques in CPD and become capable of using the technique, but still struggle to apply them effectively.

The missing element is not always knowledge or implementation. It is often decision-making.

Knowing, deciding and doing

The authors’ framework distinguishes between four connected aspects of adaptive expertise:

• Understand: possess the knowledge needed to make sense of persistent problems.

• Do: develop a repertoire of effective and efficient teaching techniques.

• Decide: select the best course of action using situation-sensitive mental models.

• Improve: continue developing through an adaptive mindset and metacognition.

Professional development often concentrates on understanding and doing. A teacher learns about a technique, sees it modelled and practises using it. However, if the deciding stage remains underdeveloped, that teacher may use a good technique at the wrong time or for the wrong reason.

Adaptive expertise is where knowledge of efficient routines is combined with a teacher’s capacity to adapt thoughtfully when the situation requires it.

The book focuses on strengthening this decision-making element through coaching, helping to consolidate and deepen teachers’ expertise so that, even under the high cognitive load of a busy classroom, they can select and apply techniques intelligently, adapting them to situation in front of them.

The seven stages of coaching for adaptive expertise.

The book presents a seven-part coaching sequence, running from Stage 0, Set up coaching, through to Stage 6, Sustain the step.

The webinar explored Stage 2, Study the problem, in greater depth. With Sarah Cottinghatt outlining the importance of surfacing a teacher’s mental model to help establish what the problem actually is before reaching a solution.

To help surface the teacher’s mental model of a specific classroom situation, the coach focuses on:

• the teacher’s goal;

• the actions taken and events observed;

• the perceived cause-and-effect relationships;

• the factors that drove particular decisions.

  
  

Sarah reminded us that mental models are difficult to examine for two related reasons. Firstly, mental models are often tacit. They operate implicitly, meaning that a teacher may not be fully conscious of why they responded in a particular way or may not be able to articulate the reasoning behind it. Secondly, they are hidden from the coach, who cannot directly observe the teacher’s thinking and will inevitably interpret the same situation through a different mental model shaped by their own experience.

Adam then took us through an example from the book of how to surface the mental model through coaching. Importantly, the conversation focuses on a particular classroom situation rather than trying to analyse an entire lesson.

The coach helps the teacher reconstruct their thinking by exploring four components:

• Goal: What were you trying to achieve in that situation?

• Actions and events: What did you do, and what happened?

• Cause and effect: What effect did you notice your action having on the pupils?

• Decision drivers: What led you to choose that particular response?

The teacher should initially be given the opportunity to recall and explain the situation themselves, with the coach helping to fill in details where necessary. Exploring the decision drivers is particularly important because many classroom decisions are made automatically in response to cues. Giving teachers the time and space to explore and articulate why they acted as they did can help to make this otherwise tacit reasoning visible.

The emerging mental model can then be mapped on paper, using a circle for the goal, boxes for actions and events, arrows to show perceived cause-and-effect relationships, and dashed lines to represent the factors driving particular decisions.

By mapping the teacher’s thinking on paper this gives both people something concrete to examine together. It reduces the need to hold the whole sequence in working memory, which makes it easier to identify patterns or problems. It also helps the coach and the teacher agree on what happened. Importantly though, it can also depersonalise the feedback: coach and teacher are working together to improve the map and the decision-making it reveals, rather than treating the teacher as the problem.

Going beyond a toolkit

Although the webinar offered only a brief glimpse of what the book contains, it provided a powerful reminder that, for professional development to have a sustained impact, it must go deeper than simply equipping teachers with an expanding toolkit.

Techniques matter, but teachers also need the mental models that enable them to recognise when, why and how particular techniques should be used or adapted.

Coaching for adaptive expertise offers a powerful way of supporting this development. If professional development is to continue influencing practice after a session or coaching cycle has ended, it must develop teachers who do not simply reproduce strategies, but make increasingly well-informed decisions within the complex reality of the classroom.

I’m now very much looking forward to reading the rest of the book and considering how its ideas might strengthen my own work supporting teachers.