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The Teaching and Learning Programme explained

Developing an effective communications strategy

Effective systems of communication will give credibility to the role of the Subject Learning Coach and bring a more cohesive approach to the way in which you use their expertise to drive up standards in teaching, training and learning.

Good communications are essential. Staff were initially sceptical about the value of the Professional Training Programme for Subject Learning Coaches. But not any longer!

Margaret Woodcock, Quality Manager
City College, Manchester

Some ways in which a Subject Learning Coach can work

  • Holding regular meetings with Subject Learning Coaches to develop a shared understanding of their role, to define expectations and to agree and monitor outcomes.
  • Explaining the role of the Subject Learning Coach to the management team and to staff as a whole, championing the work of the programme.
  • Keeping Subject Learning Coaches up to date with national and local initiatives to inform their practice so that they can make links to other key drivers.
  • Supporting the development and dissemination of Subject Learning Coach newsletters, briefings or bulletins that outline the Subject Learning Coach role, the value of coaching, the usefulness of the resources and the purpose of the subject coaching networks.
  • Helping to maintain the profile of Subject Learning Coaches by providing them with regular slots to update quality and curriculum managers with the outcomes of their work.
  • Funding the development of virtual learning environments to house the teaching and learning resources and to capture any modified or additional activities that staff develop.
  • Celebrating and promoting success stories.

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Championing a clear focus on teaching, training and learning

The work of Subject Learning Coaches is beginning to have a profound effect on improving the quality of teaching and learning. However, if this momentum is to be sustained, managers will need to ensure that the strategies and approaches employed become part of the ethos of the organisation. Your role is essential in driving this forward. By championing a clear focus on teaching and learning, you will reinforce the key role of the Subject Learning Coach and the core business of your organisation — to make learning as engaging, purposeful and successful as possible.

Too many professionals lock themselves in an empire. The Professional Training Programme for Subject Learning Coaches opens up the doors and gives everyone the opportunity to enhance their teaching, training and learning.

Wendy Graveling, Business Subject Learning Coach
HMP Morton Hall, Lincolnshire

Examples of how managers have helped to do this

  • Bringing Subject Learning Coaches together with others involved in promoting teaching and learning — such as advanced teaching practitioners, initial teacher trainers and those responsible for delivering staff development — to design a combined teaching and learning toolkit of practical and innovative approaches that all staff can use.
  • Holding teaching and learning fairs which enable Subject Learning Coaches and others such as Skills for Life and key skills teams to showcase their resources and to model approaches and strategies.
  • Facilitating short ‘taster’ sessions by Subject Learning Coaches often at the beginning of curriculum meetings — some of these have been subject specific and others used to demonstrate cross-cutting themes within the resources that are relevant to all, such as:
    — approaches to active learning
    — strategies to support differentiation
    — methods to challenge and stretch learners.
  • Running whole-staff development teaching and learning days that enable teachers to evaluate, develop and customise subject resources to meet their context and the needs of their learners (posting the end-products on the intranet enables everyone to access them).
  • Setting clear guidelines for embedding the teaching and learning resources within schemes of work and lesson plans highlighting how Subject Learning Coaches can help staff to do this by running formal and informal lesson-planning sessions.

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Fostering collaboration

In order to maximise the impact of Subject Learning Coaches, managers need to put the Teaching and Learning Programme and the Subject Learning Coaches at the heart of their workforce development strategy. Subject Learning Coaches are a means of supporting your organisation’s development plan and the priorities you have identified in relation to learning and skills.

Coaches foster the spirit of collaboration, which helps to break down any insular working practices in teams. Carefully managed, Subject Learning Coaches can also improve collaboration across teams and programme areas. In multi-sited organisations, or where providers work in partnership, the role of the Subject Learning Coach has led to improved co-operation, more consistency in processes and approaches to teaching and learning, and the creation of formalised mechanisms for exchanging and developing resources and ideas.

In order to make the most of your investment in the programme, it will therefore be important to make sure that the Subject Learning Coach role does not merely exist as a separate ‘bubble strategy’. You’ll need to make the role an integral part of your quality improvement strategy and you’ll also need to link the role to other aspects of your provision that have a clear focus on improving teaching, training and learning. Such a collaborative approach enhances synergy at both the strategic and the operational level and should lead to greater organisational coherency and consistency.

There’s been a shift in the managers’ ways of thinking… Great co-operation and trust have developed. People work together more effectively, to the same aims. There’s now regular more formalised sharing of practice within and across organisations, which didn’t happen before.

Tony Whitehead, Learning Support Co-ordinator
Oakfield Solutions, Newcastle upon Tyne

How some managers have helped to foster collaboration

  • Becoming the nominated member of the management team with specific responsibility for supporting and mentoring the Subject Learning Coach or Subject Learning Coaches, providing time for the exchange of ideas, issues and solutions.
  • Facilitating working partnerships between Subject Learning Coaches and other champions for change such as advanced teaching practitioners and those leading on teaching and learning, Skills for Life and e-learning.
  • Using the Subject Learning Coach to support quality improvement by helping staff in a non-evaluative way to address any particular issues that may have arisen as a result of feedback from formal lesson observation.
  • Supporting Subject Learning Coaches to work collaboratively across a range of providers, as some small work-based training providers have done — for example, in pooling the expertise of a dedicated full-time Subject Learning Coach to drive forward peer coaching and in the use of specific teaching and learning resources.

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