Learning Through Team Coaching and the Classroom: What Each Teaches Me About the Other

_{Photo by Daniel Newman on Unsplash}

There is a particular kind of professional challenge in walking into a classroom of children you have never met and being expected, within minutes, to create the conditions for learning. I am a supply teacher and this is the daily reality of supply teaching. However, it is also, I am repeatedly reminded, not unlike stepping into a team as a coach where the relationship is not yet there, yet the dynamics are already in motion, and whatever matters most is rarely immediately visible.

Attending Tatiana Bachkirova’s webinar earlier today organised by Paul Lawrence got me thinking of this parallel. What she offered was not a set of techniques, but something more demanding: an invitation to reconsider where we place our attention as practitioners. Rather than focusing primarily on those we work with, she urged us to examine how we are in relation to the team.

In practice, it requires a disciplined awareness of what she described as the “undercurrents” within groups. I understand this as the often unspoken dynamics that shape how individuals show up, relate, and learn. In my work as a teacher and team coach, these undercurrents are always present, but rarely articulated and we certainly have to deal with their very real impact. They include pupils’ prior experiences with supply teachers, the implicit hierarchies within the class/the school, the emotional residue of earlier lessons, and the broader culture of the school. None of this is formally available to me as an outsider. Yet all of it is active and I can feel it.

What becomes apparent, then, is that teaching in this context cannot rely solely on delivery. It demands a kind of attunement that is closer to coaching: a willingness to “work blind” at first, sensing into what might matter before it can be named with any certainty.

Bachkirova’s emphasis on awareness were a useful invitation and resonated strongly. The quality of the work, she suggests, improves not through the application of better tools alone, but through a more refined perception of the reality one is entering. In the classroom, this means holding multiple layers together simultaneously: the curriculum I have been asked to deliver, the institutional structures I must navigate, and my own stance as an educator and whether else shows up. Crucially, it also means recognising the limits of my understanding and being OK with this. I am there for a day only and won’t understand fully but I can choose how attentively I meet them.

This has practical implications. I find myself engaging, almost instinctively, in forms of rapid “contracting” similar to what we habitually do as coaches. Alongside this, I prioritise establishing individual recognition within the collective: learning names quickly, noticing small behaviours, and signalling to each pupil that they are seen not only as part of a class, but as a person. This oscillation between the individual and the group mirrors a core tension in both teaching and team coaching.

It also challenges a persistent tendency within educational settings to treat learners as a homogeneous body, even while professing commitment to individual needs. What team coaching brings into sharper focus is that cohesion does not require sameness. Rather, it depends on the capacity to hold difference without collapsing it.

Another of Bachkirova’s cautions against the “seductive” nature of simple solutions, is also present every day. In unfamiliar classrooms, the appeal of relying on pre-existing strategies or behavioural “toolkits” is strong. Yet these can quickly become a substitute for thinking. I go back to the contracting. I try to make the invisible visible and share with the learners what my idea of a successful classroom is whilst simultaneously inviting them to challenge be or to build on what I suggested (here’s Kantor again).

To teach, or to coach, in a way that is responsive rather than procedural requires resisting that seductive mindset of being ‘in control’. It requires staying with the uncertainty of the situation long enough for a more appropriate response to what comes up.

Underlying all of this is a more question about who we are when we enter these shared spaces. Bachkirova speaks of the “multiple selves” we bring into our work, and the ways in which these may be received by others. For me, this raises the possibility that moments of tension or irritation are not merely obstacles, but sources of information – just data. If approached with curiosity rather than defensiveness, they can reveal something about the relational field we are part of.

What I am beginning to understand is that the boundary between coaching and teaching is more permeable than I had assumed. Both involve entering complex human systems, both require responsiveness to what is emerging rather than adherence to what was planned, and both ask, at their best, for a form of ethical attentiveness to those we work with. Maybe our curriculum planners aren’t intending for this to exist but I see teachers doing something similar to what I’m doing in so many classrooms I walk into. The relationships are everything.

For me supply teaching, in this sense, becomes less about “covering” a lesson and more about how one inhabits a temporary but consequential role within a group. If the children leave the day having learned, felt safe, and experienced themselves as recognised, then something meaningful has been achieved.

This is not an easier way of working, certainly now ‘blueprintable’. But it is, I would argue, a more honest one.