By Valary Oyugi – Leadership Coach

“Hi I will be visiting your school on Thursday for coaching support. Are you fine with this day?” This was the first phone call I made to the school leader days after the first Leadership Academy. In her response she said “Yes its fine, but let me know what you will be coming to look for so that I can prepare.” This was a clear indication that the school leader had no experience of what it means to be coached and that she was instead used to supervision, hence the anxiety before our session.

When we began our coaching session, we had a debriefing session that was at first done with a lot of tension for fear of being negatively evaluated, which was not the case. I had a conversation with the school leader to demystify coaching with emphasis on offering support.

In the month after the workshop, the school leader called me requesting a visit to their school. This showed a great change in mindset because the leader now understood how beneficial coaching is and was ready and willing to offer the same support to the teachers in her school which she later did very well with the support of Dignitas. The shift in mindset was the first of many positive changes that took place in her school. She had just lost all her class six, seven and eight pupils to a nearby public school due to factors such as uncooperative staff, poor school fee payment by parents, staff turnover among other factors. Two months after joining the program these were her words,

“I like the way I currently relate with my teachers; I see them as my colleagues, and we work as a team. We give each other feedback and our school is improving day by day. Through the debriefs we have been able to learn a lot and this knowledge is helping us to improve how we do our things in school.”

At the end of the six-month program, the school emerged as one of the best implementers of the learnt practices, practicing learner centered learning in their school, coaching teachers and teachers having peer to peer coaching to improve instruction, relationship between teachers and pupils improved. Additionally, teacher to teacher relations got better and the school went an extra mile of having their own communities of practice within the school and emerged as one of the best data driven schools in the cohort among other achievements.