Our newest book, Coaching WalkThrus, is for anyone who has responsibility for helping teachers get better - coaches, mentors, team leaders, senior leaders and even teaching assistants. It’s designed to be a practical companion for schools, colleges and systems that want to build realistic, sustainable coaching into their professional development programmes.
Helping teachers navigate the complexity of the classroom takes a balance of support and accountability — it can be a challenge to get this right. Teachers improve when leaders and coaches work shoulder to shoulder with them to seek out learning problems, work on tried and tested solutions, model and rehearse techniques until they’re ready for the classroom, and help make changes stick.
Coaching WalkThrus is a collection of 70+ step-by-step visual guides, grounded in our extensive fieldwork with schools, designed to help coaches do the job well, with both humility and purpose.
Coaching WalkThrus is presented in four sections:
WHY? brings together key ideas that underpin the coaching guides in this book.
HOW? outlines the design decisions, structures and processes that make coaching realistic and sustainable.
WHAT? includes nearly 50 techniques for coaches, organised across the six phases of the WalkThrus Coaching Process.
SCENARIOS offers practical guidance for navigating common situations you might encounter as a coach.
The WalkThrus Coaching Process is an iterative process designed to build knowledge, motivate staff, develop teaching techniques and embed practice. Each phase builds on the last, supporting a realistic and sustainable approach to developing teachers individually or in teams. The core headings of the book form this framework, pulling everything together. The aim is to enact meaningful coaching, balancing the personal, cognitive and technical dimensions of professional development while making the most of our Teaching WalkThrus toolkit. It’s a flexible process, not a rigid model, capturing the spirit of respectful, collaborative coaching.
Most coaching books explain principles but don’t always show what they look like in action. Coaching WalkThrus contains more than 70 step-by-step visual guides that translate research and fieldwork into usable tools. It balances the personal (solving problems teachers care about), the cognitive (helping them think clearly about practice), and the technical (sharpening their use of techniques). It’s not abstract theory - it’s a playbook designed to change what happens in classrooms when no one is watching.
