How your Professional Conversations can Lead to New Learning

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Kris has worked as an accredited executive coach has an extensive professional background in educational leadership. Her areas of expertise are in professional learning, workplace learning and action research. As a person with a passion for supporting others to be the best they can, Kris bases her work on bringing together ‘the head, the heart and the hand’ to combine the best of current research with a practical, contextualised and empathic approach. Kris has a personalised style that is warm, insightful and practical.

Kris has experience in developing and facilitating professional development activities for newly appointed leaders and aspiring leaders, including mentoring, teambuilding and change. She has co-authored and delivered a course for trainers of mentors across the state in the public sector. Kris continues to co-write and facilitate online courses for school leaders. Her professional background in schools, policy areas, project management and partnerships and her familiarity with current research provide her with an appreciation of the issues and contexts faced by many of her clients.

Kris has been a school principal, education consultant, researcher and advisor. Kris has a particular interest in developing high performing teams, in building organisational capacity for change and in effective, continuing workplace learning for professional growth.


Kris Needham:
‘Conversations’ is a bit of a buzzword at the moment. There’s a lot of around about the power of conversations in the workplace, the power of the language we use, the way we talk to each other and what we talk about, and a growing understanding of the way conversations themselves can function as a learning mechanism. And what we’ve seen over the last 12 months is an important publication from AITSL (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) where they commissioned Helen Timperley to write a very comprehensive report on professional conversations and improvement focused feedback.

Helen Timperley is a New Zealand academic who is an acknowledged expert on the way teachers learn and said she has produced this very important paper, which is freely available in the education sector and again, a lot of people have picked up this paper and are thinking about the term ‘professional conversations’ and what it means. And I really believe it's important that we get some clarity on these terms because we talk a lot at Great Coaching with school leaders and others in schools about the coaching conversation and what that means and people say to us ‘well how does this fir in with what I'm reading about professional conversations?


Leigh Hatcher (presenter):

So, define for me – what is a professional conversation?

Kris Needham:
Well, interestingly, this has been a developing concept over the last several decades. The most influential person who started this going was Professor Judith Warren-Little of the University of California, Berkeley, and her interest was in looking at collaboration in schools because we know that's when teachers collaborate there are very powerful outcomes for the capacity to support student learning. So Judith Warren-Little was looking at what's going on in schools where there was a high level of teacher collaboration. In highly collaborative schools she found that teachers were having very concrete and precise talk about teaching practices, not about particular students in the classroom, not about what they actually did superficially in the classroom, not about the texts that we using but about the teaching practice itself. And when they were having these conversations they were exploring in-depth the process of teaching, of pedagogy as the call it, and they were problem solving together and through that getting insights into student learning. So Judith Warren-Little was the first one who identified the process of a conversation as being a learning vehicle for teachers.


Leigh Hatcher (presenter):

It assumes a particular relationship between those teachers doesn’t it?

Kris Needham:
It does. It assumes that there is a readiness to share, to bring a certain degree of trust and that they believe there is something to be gained from the process and are open to the process.
Trust is really important because part of the process involves challenge - and if you are going to challenge somebody that needs to be in a climate of trust.


Leigh Hatcher (presenter):

And Judith Warren-Little has not been the only person to pick this up in the education sector?

Kris Needham:
Well interestingly (the idea) then traveled across to the UK with Louise Stoll who had done some work in States and Canada, she was the one who took it further and she looked at how the conversation functions - what's going on in this conversation that leads to the new learning as a result? And her terminology for this was a ‘learning conversation’. And she, also like Judith Warren-Little, saw these conversations happening around the table with groups of teaches together with their heads over some sort of teaching issue but she saw that through the process of talking together they were actually making meaning together. So there was new learning taking place because they were pudding their own learning on the table, making it visible for everybody and so others could sort of access that if you like. And out of this came and the new learning and, importantly, from that came some sort of change in practice - they came away from those conversations with an intent to do something a little differently. So that was Louise Stoll’s teasing out of what we can track happening through such a conversation. Another one of the things Louise Stoll identified happening in these conversations that that was critical to the success of them was that people come to them with what she called an ‘inquiring mindset’. So in other words, bringing curiosity and a willingness to understand to the table. It is in a little bit difference to bringing your own opinions and wanting to advocate for those opinions – what you need to bring, according Louise Stoll, is a sense of what am I missing in my understanding of these and what might others around the table be missing. So there is a curiosity and a sense of enquiry where we genuinely want to explore ideas.


Leigh Hatcher (presenter):

So, Kris, how are these conversations similar to, or perhaps different from, coaching conversations?

Kris Needham:
This is really getting to the nuts and bolts of it. There are so many definitions of coaching out there, sometimes it's hard for people to get a sort of school-wide understanding of what coaching is. And so that’s where we at Growth Coaching like to encourage people in schools to say well if you are working in this area let’s get a shared understanding of what coaching means to you in your school. And we have a definition of the work with - coaching conversations as defined by Dr Christian van Nieuwerburgh ‘s book Coaching in Education and the definition goes like this: coaching conversations are a one to one conversation focused on the enhancement of learning and development through increasing self-awareness and a sense of personal responsibility where the coach facilitates the self-directed learning of the coachee through questioning, active listening and appropriate challenge in a supportive and encouraging climate.
So that’s the definition that's very wordy because its had to gather in all the complexity of what defines the conversation. But basically if we can just nail a few things that are really critical to a coaching conversation we are looking at something which is focused on learning, so the intent is to learn something from this conversation, we are looking at increased self-awareness - what's the bigger picture about my learning, where am I now, where do I want to go? In coaching conversations, we are for using a heightened level of questioning and a heightened level of listening on the part of the coach. It also takes place in the context of trust and high support and indeed we could say rapport, which is the responsibility of the coach to develop. But the really, really critical thing about coaching is that it's self-directed learning, facilitated by the coach - so it's not directed, it's not about imparting information, it's about the coach as a facilitator somebody else's learning and that involves setting up the conditions for that learning to take place and for the ah-ha moments to happen - by magic almost.


Leigh Hatcher (presenter):

So you are on drawing the answers out of one is coached, instead telling them directly?

Kris Needham:
Correct, and through those answers being articulated the person being coached comes to that understanding and awareness and that's how the ah-ha moments unfold. So we've got a big overlap in our definitions if you like, of what is a professional conversation or a learning conversation and what is a coaching conversation. Now they both take place in a trusting environment, they both lead to some sort of learning and to some sort of change but if we could say that coaching conversations are a particular type of professional conversation where there is a more deliberate intent for that learning where the self-directed learning is held to be really critical and where there is a lot of emphasis placed on action following up as a result. Whereas our professional conversations, they can be more directive if you like and a bit less structured, they can be bit messy like a normal conversation so we often interrupt each other or talk over the top of each other, all that can be happening so coaching is a much more focused and deliberate sort of conversation I believe - but shares many of the same attributes.


Leigh Hatcher (presenter):

I’m sure there are educators and school leaders listening to this thinking: so how can I do this? So if they're interested in these forms of conversations how can they make more use of them in their education contexts?

Kris Needham:
Well, as ever, awareness is the thing and this isn't just in schools either, right across the board really there is a very groundbreaking bestseller which came out a few years ago from Harvard academics Kegan and Lahey.
The book was called How the way we Talk can change the way we Work and they proposed that leaders can actually increase the leadership capacity through the way they use language as leaders of organisations. So it’s that awareness I believe on the part of the leader that the conversation itself has so much to offer and these conversations are happening in formal settings, in meetings but they are also happening as we pass each other in corridors or as we walk out to the carpark together – there’s opportunities there.
The next thing on top of that is a certain skill set and certainly we've seen in the last few years here at Growth Coaching International, for instance, an enormous increase in the demand for our workshops on how to give and receive effective feedback because people realize the power of the feedback conversation. But it’s actually a highly skilled conversation so the awareness of the need to be giving more feedback to each other is the there but then people take it a little further and say ‘well how can I learn to do this well?’ So learning a little bit more about what coaching involves, a bit more about inquiry mindedness for instance, using coaching structures like the GROWTH structure, or skills of coaching - getting really a direct questioning and listening - and also being able to sort of adopt the role of a coach which we called the Coach's Way of Being. It's about emotional intelligence but it's also about being totally present in the conversation for what said, what's not said, for really being intensely in there as a coaching and facilitator. And that's not as a normal conversation.


Leigh Hatcher (presenter):

But a good conversation…?

Kris Needham:
Oh yes that’s when the rubber hits the road when that’s really happening. And the third thing that’s happening here of course is practice – so we can have the awareness and we can have the skills, but how are we going to make time for this? Time is always the enemy of teachers in schools. So leaders need to be thinking about how they can create time, create structures, for collegial teams to meet and really good reasons for them to meet, really solid projects that they can learn from as they are working in them. The sort of professional learning that will enable them to have these conversations – rather than just sitting passively in a workshop for instance, and perhaps even bring their own coaching skillset to that and support others in the school as they learn about coaching so there is some density of coaching expertise. You know there’s lots of opportunities to not only be in formal coaching conversations but to inject a little bit coaching into the other conversations we have around schools - in everyday life. We call that a coaching approach – so I am bringing myself as a coach to all the things that I do.



References:

  • Kegan, R. & Lahey , L.L. (2002)- How the way we talk can change the way we work: Seven languages for transformation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
  • Stoll, L.. (2012). Stimulating learning conversations. Professional Development Today, 14 (4): 6-12
  • Timperley, H. (2015). Professional conversations and improvement focused feedback: A review of the research literature and the impact on practice and student outcomes. Available from http://www.aitsl.edu.au/professional-growth/research/professional-conversations
  • Warren Little, J. (1982). Norms of collegiality and experimentation: Workplace conditions of sachool success. American Education Research Journal, 19 (3): 325-340
  • van Nieuwerburgh, C. (Ed.) (2012). Coaching in education: Getting better results for students, educators and parents. London: Karnac.



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