Comhrá & Coffee: Starting a Coaching-Informed Community of Practice in Your School

Have you ever thought about setting up a community of practice within your school, or collaborating with another school to share ideas? In this two-hour session, we will explore three interrelated ideas: using a coaching approach for professional learning and conversations, building a community of practice, and the story of how Cómhrá & Coffee came to life.

Cómhrá & Coffee was a coaching-informed community of practice based on a simple but effective idea: create a space for teachers in similar contexts but different schools to have productive conversations, share and build ideas to address their shared challenges, and do so in a relaxed and informal setting. The initiative also helped to foster lasting relationships between teachers across schools.

This session is suitable for school leaders and teachers from primary, post-primary, or special schools. While our project was supported by the Teaching Council’s Féilte bursary, this session will demonstrate how you can initiate and sustain a similar initiative in your own context with minimal resources.

Bio of Facilitator: Coran Swayne is the Administrative Deputy Principal at East Cork Community Special School and a former teacher and Assistant Principal II at Scoil Chill Ruadháin. He lectures in Educational Leadership and Coaching in Education at University College Cork. Coran has published articles, including peer-reviewed work, on educational coaching and is currently undertaking a PhD exploring how coaching cultures develop in primary schools across a range of jurisdictions.

Venue: Cork Education Support Centre
Format: Face-to-face