In this #coachbetter episode, Kim chats with members of the team from the Association for the Advancement of Instructional Coaching in International Schools (called AAICIS), where Kim is currently serving as the Executive Director.

The organization is celebrating its one-year anniversary by reflecting on its achievements since its launch in March 2024. The discussion highlights the unique support AAICIS offers to international school educators interested in or currently working in instructional coaching. The team shares how their all-volunteer, all-remote group has advanced coaching practices tailored specifically to the international school context.

Listen to this episode to hear about all the work this amazing team has accomplished, including:

Their successful launch in March 2024
An update on their research (to dig deeper into this check out episode 262 with Jordan Benedict)
Their free resources, and what’s coming next
The support they provide for coaches, leaders and schools – and why this might be valuable for YOU and your school!
How to connect with AAICIS
Developments on their growing team

If you’re looking to join a supportive community of instructional coaches and leaders in international schools around the world who are as passionate about instructional coaching as you are, this episode (and AAICIS) is for you!

Connect with our Featured Guests on LinkedIn

Kim

Amy

Andrew

Maggie

Pana

Cary

Tico

Tina

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Show Notes

We’re celebrating a year of AAICIS together here on this call and with all of you who are interested in the development of the Association for the Advancement of Instructional Coaching in International Schools. We’re just going to talk about some of the great things that happened over the last year and let you in to what AAICIS is doing, how it works, how you might consider joining us, being involved, being engaged, potentially bringing your, your school to us, and getting connected with this community of coaches and leaders who are so passionate about the development of instructional coaching in international schools.

(For more about how AAICIS got started, check out our episode from March 2024 “Introducing the Association for the Advancement of Instructional Coaching in International Schools (AAICIS)”)

Launch in March of 2024 – Amy

We had launches at a couple conferences strategically. Dave Curran and I were at Learning2 in Paris, and we had the chance to run on a full day pre-conference, and we basically promoted AAICIS during it. It was actually really exciting because it was the first time we felt like we could talk to a bunch of other people about it and the excitement in the room. We had administrators and coaches alike in our session. It was a well attended session, and several of the schools that attended that session joined us as founding members, and it was a really exciting way to kick off the start. Kim, you were also launching at the same time at the EARCOS Teachers Conference.

It felt very like a random serendipitous moment that we realized that L2 and the EARCOS Teachers Conference were on the same weekend. So while we did a virtual launch globally, we were able to do those face-to-face in-person launches at those two conferences, which is really exciting.

AAICIS Research: Landscape of Instructional Coaching In International School Schools – Kim

In March we started the first ever landscape study of instructional coaching in international schools. We distributed that survey for the first time at those two conferences and the comms team did an amazing job sharing that out globally. We also had our partner organizations share that out through their distribution methods.

It was a very successful study with 89 respondents reaching all of the regions in the international school community. From that, we have unpacked quite a lot of very impactful data.

There is a previous episode on this podcast with Jordan Benedict, who is a member of our research team, where we talk about some of the highlights from the research. So if you’re interested in hearing more about that, I’ll make sure to link it up here and in the show notes.

And from that, we:

wrote a white paper that’s available for free that you can grab on our website at aaicis.org.
wrote a book chapter in the newest handbook of research on international schools through IGI global.
are now conducting focus groups with people who participated in the research and who wanna dig deeper into some of those conversations with us.

We’re going to keep doing more research around this area. So if you’re in an international school and you want to know what instructional coaching looks like, how it works, what makes it work best, our research is the place where you can get international school specific info.

Resources – Andrew

One of the first resources was the conditions for success. I was in a different school and it had been my second year as an instructional coach there, so I decided to use the conditions for success as a template to audit the coaching program. It was a self-assessment for me, but also for the community I was in. It brought to the surface a bunch of strengths that I don’t know that I would’ve named on my own. It also very specifically helped me identify the types of areas that needed a lot more support.

My supervisor, my leaders were very enthusiastic about coaching, but not particularly experienced, and it helped us have a common reference point for what we should be talking about. It became a third point to guide conversations. – Andrew

It would’ve been even more valuable had I gotten someone to facilitate the conversation between a principal, a senior leader and me. So if you’re in a school and you’re wondering like how to use it, reach out to someone from AAICIS to be the mediator of that conversation so that all the people involved can just be participants. There’s so much richness in there, so many opportunities to have a common language, see things from different perspectives, bring things to the surface in an unthreatening way. I had no idea when I first read through that, you know, six page document, uh, how powerful the process of going through that could be.

Founding Member School Support – Kim

When Andrew was talking about unpacking the conditions for success and having someone outside of your school help facilitate that conversation, that’s actually another one of our achievements from this year because all of our founding members got four hours of support from someone on the AAICIS team to help them unpack the conditions for success, the principles of practice, and anything else they might might needed in building their instructional coaching program in their school. So what Andrew is describing, we’ve actually been doing over the course of this year with our 10 founding member schools.

The whole process of having someone support the conversation between the coaches and the leaders, that is one of the key foundational pieces that was really essential in the development of AAICIS, is that we wanted to start that conversation between the coaches and the leaders. – Kim

Resources – Maggie

Download our free resources from from our website at AAICIS.org.

We have two more documents that we are working on at the moment:

Standards for Coaches

The Standards are about to be sent out via a survey to our AAICIS members to get some feedback.

At the moment we’ve divided our standards into three big buckets called:

Ignite
Engage
Empower.

Ignite includes:

Knowledge: that we would expect a coach to have in curriculum development, but also the skills of being a coach as well
Systems: coaching is embedded within a school system
Growth: focusing on new methods, innovation

Engage includes:

Partnership: relationships that are being built in schools.
Collaborator, a partner, um, perhaps they’re co-teaching, perhaps they’re responsible for professional development.
Data: how data is driving coaching cycles and how data can be used to measure the impact of coaching in schools.

Empower includes:

reflection: on success, on growth that has happened in the school as a result of coaching.
capacity building
goals, perhaps future goals.

We’re also working on a document to help schools develop a coaching program. We’ve divided this one into three phases. An overview of each phase is:

Phase 1: vision and the purpose, the culture of the school leadership, and making sure that the school leadership is on board, providing time and support for the coaching program.

Phase 2: coaching model

Phase 3: support and sustainability

Look out for both of these two documents in the coming year.

Everything gets shared out to our AAICIS community for feedback before we publish. So if you want to be part of the process of developing this, become a member of AAICIS because that’s who we ask for our first round feedback before we share anything out.

All of these resources are really useful and practical. So many times you’re on this path and you’re thinking we’re the only ones here and we’re in the middle of the jungle. And actually it would be so reassuring for teams to recognize we’re here and we’re not the only ones here, and there’s a path forward. – Tico

Monthly Community Coaching Calls – Andrew

The community calls are based on the very simple idea that coaches wanna talk about coaching with other coaches. – Andrew

We meet once a month, and the format’s pretty simple: there’s a little bit of input at the beginning, but really the bulk and there’s around the topic really the bulk is breakout rooms where people in groups of three or four can talk.

One of the things about being a coach in international school is it can be a really lonely experience and we don’t always know if the thing we’re doing is normal. Is the situation I’m encountering is just in my head, or do other people have a similar related experience? – Andrew

Connecting with other coaches about these types of things made me feel like, oh, I’m not crazy, or, oh, like, yeah, this is hard. Hearing from other people how they think about this and that helped me adapt or apply what they’re thinking about in my context.

We’re all volunteers, so for me to be part of the team that plans these meetings, it’s a wealth of professional engagement that I couldn’t really pay for. – Andrew

Amy and I are on the same team with Dave and Rena and we’ve never met in person, but I feel like these are my people. So that spirit that we feel on the planning committee, we’re also trying to offer for folks just as they show up maybe one time or maybe each time throughout the year.

This is how I feel like we do our best work, being connected and inspired or motivated or picked up when we’re feeling down. The community calls are a place that encapsulates all of that. – Andrew

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Show Notes continued…

Mighty Network community, 24/7 job alike – Cary

All members o become a member of our network (on a platform called Mighty Networks).It’s a place where coaches can ask questions and then receive answers at any time outside of community calls to meet the needs of our global community.

Recordings from events that we’ve hosted are also shared in this community so coaches can do professional learning on their own time too.

Our community is a safe space to be vulnerable and ask other coaches for advice or information or just sharing. It’s a very active community.

Leaders Speaker Series – Amy

The Leader Speaker Series really parallels the coaching community calls in that people might feel isolated in their roles and oftentimes like leadership roles in schools aren’t even consistent , let alone who supervises coaches or maybe who sets those programs up.

Leaders Meetup – Tico

There’s often little support provided for leaders to navigate the path of developing a coaching program. So we’ve created a community for leaders to come together as well, providing some really great guidance and professional learning for leaders in our member schools around instructional coaching. The leader speaker series is really a place to fill their cup and to have leaders have a place where they can go and learn specifics about instructional coaching from a leadership lens. – Amy

It’s so amazing that our AAICIS team is so global. We’ve got people working behind the scenes, everything we’ve been sharing about our teams working remotely, teams that are working asynchronously, teams that are connecting across continents. We know that our team has put in so much time and thought behind the scenes and I’m just really grateful to be a part of it. Our teams are like our people, we may maybe have never met, but it’s really built a strong community within our AAICIS team and, and it’s growing and expanding globally, which is really exciting. – Amy

The speaker series is a really beautiful, wonderful, useful professional development with the topic that we set. The big difference is we don’t really set the topic for this meetup. Behind the scenes we have a topic in our pocket, we have some provocative questions in our pocket. But really we start the meeting right away with, I’m facilitating this, I’m not here as an expert and what do we wanna talk about? And often there’s something folks wanna talk about.

The last one was based on the research we’d done with AAICIS and all the data that we’d gathered together. The research identified the connection between if we don’t have clear objectives and what success looks like and kind of that mission statement, then it’s really hard to be successful. But the connection was with also then what data are we gonna gather to see whether or not we’re being successful?

And it spurred for a lot of schools a question about: are those objectives the ones we’re really measuring the success on? It’s really organic with some predictive ability of what topics are kind of out there and, and are hot. We had five different schools represented, all of them leaders, all of them talking to each other and supporting each other.

These Leader Meetups are super supportive. It’s not really just about the knowledge that was shared. It was all of a sudden you have all these other relationships where people are making commitments to connect with each other and follow up and talk to each other about how they’re doing. – Tico

The fact that we are so global and so separate as international schools, it’s amazing that we have these times where we can come together and learn from each other in a way we may never have been able to do before because we’re not all in the same region in the world. This is a global conversation. So these schools can be from all over the world. – Kim

Communications – Pana

What we’ve been really trying to do is take all of the good work and the ideas that every single member of AAICIS has been working on and to spread the love. Through our social media presence we’re wanting to build community, to bring together more coaches and leaders who are supporting coaching and then extending that community, which then extends support, which ultimately brings together more ideas, more growth, and more sustainability, which is what we’re all about. – Pana

Hopefully we can continue growing our, our network, our community and just becoming a stronger network of global coaches and leaders who are interested in investing in coaching and creating sustainable coaching environments.

Connect with us:

Our newest member – Tina

Way back in November, I met Pana at one of the conferences where I presented about our coaching journey. At my school, I’m the one who’s trying to build a roadmap of developing our coaching program, but I know that I cannot do this by myself. I need the help of my leaders. I need help from outside. I need to be able to learn from people that are advocating for coaching programs.

When I saw AAICIS and met Pana, she is someone I really admire, and Kim was one of the people I have learned from. Many of the things that I’ve been practicing are from Kim. I’ve been following Maggie for years.

The people that are at AAICIS are the people that I really respect in the field of instructional coaching. All these people that are here are the people that I know have been advocating for instructional coaching in the context of international school, because that’s what I’m missing. – Tina

I have learned and experimented with a lot of frameworks but they are not relevant for the international school context. When I joined AAICIS I realized this is what will help me grow. Our school should connect with these people because these are not just for coaches, this is also for leaders and coaching will never be successful if it’s not a partnership between coach and leaders. – Tina

Wrap Up

Thank you so much Tina, that I just like, I’m an expanding heart emoji in my body right now. That was so amazing and I really appreciate everything that you said and you shared and you have summed up this conversation and our work so nicely. I’m not even going to bother doing any other things that I was thinking about doing. I think that was just a fantastic way to end this podcast. So I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone on the call and everyone on the AAICIS team, even who’s not on this call, there are only more amazing things to come because our mission is to build a community of supportive coaches and leaders where we learn from each other to build best practice in our unique international school context. And that’s what we’re doing and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.

So if that resonates with you, if that is something you want to be part of, please come join us.

Learn more about AAICIS on our:

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If you’re curious right now, you have questions, please reach out. You can leave a comment below, join our #coachbetter Facebook group, or find us on social media at Eduro Learning and send me a DM. I’d love to support you on your coaching journey. See you next time!

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Celebrating the One-Year Anniversary of AAICIS [278]