Coaching as a form of professional development continues to grow in popularity,particularly in the UK and the Netherlands, but also more widely in Europe. There are a considerable range of coaching resources and training available from commercial sources and universities. They have broad similarities as they draw on a common ancestry of counselling which privileges trust and they have an onus on the ‘client’ having the personal resources to pursue change. Evaluative research on coaching, from a variety of contexts, has been positive (e.g. Costa & Garmston, 1994, Veenman et al. 2001, Goker, 2006). However the literature (e.g. Bergen et al., 2000, Simkins et al., 2006) also contains some suggestions that coaches are not always putting into operation all the principles of their training programmes and that much coaching may indeed slip into a more general support role (more akin to supervision or mentoring). A normative resonance has developed around coaching – you do the training, use the tips and tools and you are doing coaching. In the UK context at least there is a little sign of a rich language through which to describe and self-evaluate coaching practice. This paper reports part of a 2 year funded project aimed to improve coaching practice. This data and wider literature (e.g. Timperley & Parr, 2008) have been used to distill and validate six dimensions of coaching: 1. Who initiates lines of discussion? 2. The stimulus used - video, observation, judgement etc.; 3. The scale of discussion - critical incident, episode, whole lesson etc.; 4. The tone; 5. The time reference (prior planning, the lesson, future lessons etc.); 6 The interaction function e.g. question, explanation, evaluation, challenge etc. In Y2 of the project teachers are being given descriptive feedback on these dimensions, based on analysis of video transcripts, as part of a process of improving their coaching practice. The questions pursued are: 1. Which of the six dimensions of coaching are internalised by teacher coaches as they develop their practice? 2. How does their coaching change over time and what impact does this have on the coached teacher? 3. What elements of the dimensions characterise effective coaching?

This is a modified design experiment methodology (Cobb et al., 2003) in which researchers and teachers work collaboratively to improve an intervention. However it is informed by a socio-cultural view, as we regard the use of tools (which includes concepts) as a critical process in shared knowledge development in an organisation (Boreham & Morgan, 2004). In the first year of the project, coaches in 4 regional clusters, video recorded their coaching practice as part of this process. This led to the development of the dimensions which have been validated by the teachers. In the second year we have set up a feedback process, around the dimensions, to inform individual and organisational learning. Data collection has been through: Teacher intentions recorded in templates; Video recording; Field notes; Interviews of coaches and coached teachers. Analysis is progressive, tracing the influence (or not) of the dimensions through the coaching episodes and teacher reflections.

Even in the first year some teachers rapidly adopted some of the dimensions that we developed in analysing their practice, particularly tone, time reference and scale, but they also reported some conflict between reflection-in-action and action itself. They also showed great interest in anonymised comparisons of the dimensions between different coaching pairs and they began to hypothesise about 'cases' in coaching and develop a stronger theoretical framework for their practice, such as the importance of relating the detail of lessons to bigger principles of practice or theory. We expect to be able to offer a basic 'language' for coaching so that coaches can be more analytical and deliberative in their own practice and to be able to communicate about that practice with others. We also expect to be able to make connections between coaching practice and school cultures based on other data in the project from senior leader interviews.