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This section was beneficial as a quick primer and reminder of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t I like School? At the heart of effective coaching processes is a shared understanding between the coach and teacher.
Include your staff in the selection process: It’s important for teachers to work on techniques which solve problems that they themselves recognise. Crucially this creates a plan of specific action steps that form the basis for each subsequent session in the cycle. With 19 years of teaching and leadership experience in primary and secondary schools, I can confidently recommend this book to all teachers regardless of their experience. Embark on a programme of Instructional Coaching with individual teachers or small groups, or use your existing teams to drive the process through a calendared cycle of meetings. WalkThrus provides the all important reference point, supporting discussions about what the teacher is doing in the classroom, matching perceptions with reality, and what they might work on to improve their practice.Our most popular resources are based on the well-known Bambrick-Santoyo ‘5Ps’ approach: Praise; Probe; Problem; Practise; Plan ahead. WalkThrus offers the perfect answer - well-catalogued techniques accessible on any platform, to support coaches to give tailored guidance, matching solutions to the problems teachers experience. Primary and secondary teachers in their 3rd/4th year of (QTS) teaching who are either new to WalkThrus or have experience of using them in their practice.
And if you’re thinking of using collaborative work or wanting to enhance oracy activities within lessons, then the final section entitled ‘Mode B teaching’ (based on Sherrington’s previous The Rainforest of Learning) includes ideas on enquiry projects and open response tasks.
WalkThrus is an external, online platform that provides teaching focused strategies, broken down into granular steps, that complement our approach to developing High Quality Learning Environments in all our schools. As coaching expert Jim Knight says, it’s vital that coaches have knowledge of a range of techniques so they can offer guidance to teachers without redefining teaching techniques on the fly.
However you will always have new staff joining and some colleagues who will need some additional support. Finally, leaders with responsibility for CPD in their schools will find the ‘how’ part of the book invaluable. The WalkThrus books are supported by an online PD toolkit, which is now used by 2,000 organisations in 35 countries. Each session is focused on one area of practice and the strategies that have the highest leverage in the classroom. The first WalkThru of this section explains the ADAPT approach (Attempt, Develop, Adapt, Practise, Test), Sherrington and Caviglioli’s recommend method for implementing WalkThrus.The WalkThrus toolkit includes coaching session planning tools that can be linked to any technique, prompting discussion around the 5Ps. Following the break-out success of Teaching WalkThrus Volume 1 (2020) and Volume 2 (2021), Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli present the third instalment of their five-step instructional coaching techniques.
The ‘what’ part of Teaching WalkThrus is divided into six sections, each containing a “core selection of ideas to provide good coverage of common issues and practices”. Alternatively, this programme would also be suitable for teachers looking to get the best out of their students and work towards mastery. We find that this has huge impact on the quality of coaching and training sessions and all related observation processes. WalkThrus help the coach and teacher to keep focused on the key elements of teaching techniques during a lesson and during their coaching conversation. All modules have been selected or developed by colleagues across Meridian Trust and are bespoke to the needs of the Trust and those working in or supporting our SEN, primary and secondary schools.Working across a system of sixty schools, WalkThrus has transformed teachers’ approach to their craft. This cross-phase programme focuses on developing teacher excellence through the use of WalkThrus, an evidence-informed framework for teaching development which contains the best of the profession’s practices. More importantly perhaps, while colleagues who teach younger children will benefit from the vast majority of the WalkThrus, I struggled to find specific examples that primary teachers would directly identify with. The book covers important practical techniques in behaviour and relationships; curriculum planning; explaining and modelling; questioning and feedback; practice and retrieval; and Mode B teaching. Still, in spite of that, Teaching WalkThrus has easily become my go-to reference from the many educational titles lining my bookshelves, and I have no doubt it will be for any who read it.
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