Rehearsal as part of the coaching process is often seen as being about ensuring absolute fidelity to a given technique or strategy. For example, coach and teacher have decided that they want to work on effective use of check for listening questions to show ensure that student attention remains on a passage during a shared reading session. They use rehearsal to refine the technique in three aspects:
1. Ask the question at the right moment in the reading
2. Give a signal to let students know that everyone needs to be ready to answer
3. Name a student to answer
In this instance, rehearsal has been used to establish an understanding of how to execute the routine. Firstly, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this has value in itself. For less experienced teachers, or for teacher who is finding sustaining student attention during this type of task challenging, this kind of rehearsal would be really useful. Leaning heavily on Sarah Cottinghatt’s recent work on mental models, this would establish the following routine model:
However, the potential of rehearsal goes further than this in two ways.
1. We can build in situational variance to give the teacher experience of responding to unexpected events that might occur within the routine
2. We can provide an opportunity for teachers to notice important aspects that are really difficult to be aware of until you are actually in the moment
Building situational variance
Let’s imagine the teacher rehearses the routine the first time through with the coach watching and it feels a little bit clunky (as the first round of rehearsal often does). Then, the second and third rounds smooth out those clunky parts. During the next round, the coach can start to challenge the teacher by adding in small unexpected events – variance. For example, the coach could deliberately play the role of a child not responding to the initial signal. Here are some points of discussion that could arise from this:
1. Non-verbal cues – which students do you think would respond to a non-verbal cue if you used one at this point to reinforce your expectation? Which wouldn’t? What might you use for them?
2. Positive narration – lets discuss the trade off between the positive culture this could create and the added time that this might take
3. Naming non-compliant students – what is the risk here? What is the advantage?
When I am using rehearsal in this way, we then re-run the round and the teacher responds, using what we had discussed. There are always plenty of variance opportunities that can be added in to routine rehearsal to add this layer of challenge and realism to a teacher’s experience of the coaching process. Building on the mental model above, we end up with something that looks like this:
Hopefully, it starts to become clear that with more and more ‘Ifs’ (as Sarah Cottinghatt spoke about at researchED national conference), we open up more and more ‘Thens’ and the mental model of the teacher starts to diversify from the routine and hopefully lead to more adaptive expertise.
Teachers noticing details
My school’s reading lead recently led the second session in a five-session sequence aimed at developing practice around modelled, shared and independent reading. As part of that, she set up rehearsal whereby all teachers planned check for listening questions and their chosen question strategy (some chose choral response, others chose naming an individual student for example). As I was walking around and listening to the rehearsal feedback, these are some of the things teachers were saying after they had rehearsed.
‘Ah, I asked the question too close to naming the student!’
‘OK so now I’m wondering how I would know if anyone wasn’t paying attention by using choral response because their non-answer could just get swallowed up in the noise of everyone else answering’
Reply from rehearsal partner: ‘Yeah but you could see from their face though!’
‘Do you think they’d have to think too long on that question?’ (answer required more than 5 words)
At the end of the rehearsal, one person even said:
‘It’s crazy how you spot those tiny little details but we didn’t think of them before we started!’
I think that really captures why this kind of rehearsal can be so powerful. As teachers, and adults, we often overestimate how successfully we will be able to transfer knowledge into action and I think that is because we overestimate our ability to project ourselves into the moment and the multitude of factors that might need to be considered. When we rehearse, there is a layer of detail that becomes apparent to us that wasn’t apparent when we were projecting. Yes, there will be another layer when we are actually stood in front of the students but I think that layers 2 (rehearsal) and 3 (real classroom situation) are much closer together than layers 1 (projection) and 2 (rehearsal).
By rehearsing, although we can never simulate every possible ‘If’ and there will always be things that we don’t notice until we are literally stood in front of students, we are able to help teachers to be better sensitised to the likelihood of routines needing to be adapted and can start to build the mental models that will, in time, enable them to respond effectively more regularly and with automaticity.
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