How to Coach Teachers from Around the World

In any international school, teachers come from a wide variety of pedagogical training backgrounds, and bring a wide variety of pedagogical approaches, strategies, and techniques. While it’s important for a school to have a clear vision of high-quality teaching and learning–and with that, broad expectations for pedagogy–one of the great benefits of an international school is the diversity of teaching approaches. However, this can often present challenges for developing effective ways to observe and evaluate teachers–school leaders don’t want to demand a one-size-fits-all approach, but may be limited in their ability to assess pedagogical approaches different from their own. 

Meeting this challenge requires that school leaders adopt observation, coaching, and evaluation frameworks that both empower teachers to use the pedagogical strategies that they’ve been trained in, and which allow them to talk across pedagogical traditions. Fortunately, there’s been significant research and research-driven work on how to structure and conduct observations in a way that meets this challenge, and this work can be applied in the contexts of most international schools. 

The Critical Teaching Behaviors (Barbeau & Happel, 2023) framework is focused on defining, documenting, and discussing specific observable behaviors in a teacher’s planning, lesson delivery, and assessment. Because of this focus on specific observable behaviors, teachers and school leaders can identify common behaviors across pedagogical traditions and backgrounds, and create common expectations for what the best possible version of an individual teacher’s class looks like. This focus on behaviors, in other words, helps teachers and school leaders generate shared definitions of high-quality teaching that can apply to a particular teacher’s class. Not incidentally, this focus on narrow behaviors can also sidestep a morass of theoretical disagreements that, while generally healthy, can often derail faculty discussions of what good teaching should actually look like. 

Crucially, because identifying and defining specific behaviors is a process that teachers and school leaders engage in together, this process can generate consensus among a faculty for what behaviors can be shared across classrooms to create a common pedagogical baseline that still respects the diversity of pedagogical traditions present in an international school. Samuelsson (2018) defines this as a “normative consensus” that defines a shared link between values and actions; this is a stepping stone to “preference consensus,” where different parties agree that particular behaviors, having been linked to shared values, should actually be carried out. 

When there are shared definitions of teaching behaviors, teachers and school leaders have the ability to document these behaviors. This can lead to something like the Standards of Practice for International Teachers (Betts, 2023), which takes a portfolio approach to documenting teachers’ practices. However, with specific behaviors as the focus of documentation, the evidence collected by teachers and school leaders can be much narrower and more focused, which allows for more tailored coaching for each teacher. 

It’s this focus on coaching and discussion that’s crucial for distinguishing a Critical Teaching Behaviors approach to observations and evaluations from a standard “checklist” approach, where school leaders work through a set list of criteria and, effectively, assign a grade based on the checklist. When the focus is on discussing teaching behaviors in a coaching environment, teachers and school leaders alike can focus on continuous improvement, not “passing” a baseline of expected behaviors. This brings the teacher’s voice into the conversation, and can help a teacher set specific goals for improvement; these goals can be tied to particular lessons, units, and assessments for greater transparency. 

An example of this might look like a teacher agreeing that moving away from exams and towards summative projects is a strong assessment behavior. In consultation with their Head of year or Head of Department, the teacher decides to update one of their units for the upcoming year to end with a project (say, tasking students with creating a series of three videos demonstrating each of Newton’s classical laws of motion). The teacher and the Head can then decide on a series of metrics for assessing the success of this specific assessment behavior shift. Maybe that is students’ grades on associated questions on an End of Year exam, maybe it’s a change in student feedback, maybe that’s a difference in students’ grades at the end of the unit. Whatever the metric, the teacher and Head are now in a position to collect measurable, specific evidence for the teacher to reflect on. This can build into a larger structure of collaborative reflection (Reynolds, 2023) between teachers, middle leadership, and school leadership. 

One of the great strengths of international education is the diversity that students experience. A focus on specific teaching behaviors across pedagogical traditions can not only strengthen a school’s identity and contribute to its vision of high-quality education, but strengthen faculty consensus, morale, and pedagogy. In doing so, international schools can improve the student experience, student learning, and further the mission of international education as a whole. 

References

Barbeau, L., & Happel, C. C. (2023). Defining, Documenting, & Discussing Good Teaching. Critical Teaching Behaviors. Retrieved March 27, 2025, from https://criticalteachingbehaviors.org/home 

Betts, B. (2023). International Standards for Teachers: Making a Difference to Learning. TIE Online. Retrieved March 27, 2025, from https://www.tieonline.com/standards_of_practice_why.cfm 

Reynolds, T. (2023, July 19). How Schools Can Support Teachers’ Reflective Practices. TIE Online. Retrieved March 27, 2025, from https://www.tieonline.com/article/3533/how-schools-can-support-teachers-reflective-practices 

Samuelsson, M. (2018). Education for Deliberative Democracy and the Aim of Consensus. Democracy and Education, 26 (1), Article 2. Available at: https://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol26/iss1/2