The one skill that successful educators have in common

Ask questions, without knowing the answers

Mr. Tell has not retired yet, but is close to it. The teacher is relying on (and still enjoying) his Guru Role.

His body language says that he's in charge of the room. You can hear him telling the students stuff from the teacher’s book, and from his university education.

He is telling stories from his personal experience connected to the stuff in the teacher's book. The teacher’s deep-rooted attitudes and opinons are apparent even when they are not politically correct, nor shared by the students.

You get a sense that this teacher has treated his students like this for a long time. Certainly he has all this lesson, probably all last term and indeed it seems so natural to him that it’s likely to have been going on for many years.

You get the impression that this teacher knows what was right, and he knows that he is right.

However, the students are doing whatever they can to stop the teacher from telling them what's right all the time.

You notice that the students attitude is less than productive, they are disrespectful and their behaviour is occasionally disruptive. The teacher deals with these disruptions through an authoritarian approach, which includes threats and punishments.

"Change is inevitable, especially in an educational environment", Martin Richards

​Some of the reasons why a coaching approach to education is necessary:

• We can rely on the fact that living and working conditions in the world change, have always changed and will continue to change, and probably change faster, and faster.
• Education is the way communities have developed for preparing the next generation for their living and working lives, learning from what's been done before. Now we need to prepare for what is to be done tomorrow.
• Educators in the Education System are continuously looking for the best ways to get the best results for ourselves, now and in the future.
• Any healthy, well-functioning system uses feedback to learn from its own results.
• Coaching (the art of questioning) is an empowering way to learn from results in order to deal with continuous and accelerating change
• Coaching moves the communication focus from "Tell" to "Ask"
• A coaching approach is a natural addition to headteachers' skillset.
• A coaching approach is a natural addition to a teachers' skillset.