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Approaches

Coaching Approach

Why we built coaching the way we did — and why it holds up.

Most school software treats classroom visits as a compliance exercise: open a rubric, assign a score, file it, repeat next year. That model measures teachers. It rarely develops them. When we set out to build coaching into the platform, we started from a different premise, one the research has been converging on for two decades: teachers improve fastest through frequent, low-stakes, growth-focused coaching that is kept separate from evaluation. This document explains the approach we took, the evidence behind it, and why an administrator can stand behind it.

The shift: from evaluating teachers to growing them

Section titled “The shift: from evaluating teachers to growing them”

A coaching cycle is a structured, repeating partnership between a coach and a teacher: set a goal, observe practice, agree on a concrete next step, and come back to check how it went. Unlike a one-off PD workshop, it is individualized, sustained, and anchored to what actually happens in the room.

The field’s dominant frameworks all describe the same loop with different emphases:

  • Jim Knight’s Impact Cycle (Identify → Learn → Improve) — the most widely referenced model in K-12, built on PEERS goals (Powerful, Easy, Emotionally compelling, Reachable, Student-focused).
  • Diane Sweeney’s Student-Centered Coaching — goals anchored in student outcomes rather than teacher behavior, run in short ~4–6 week, unit-aligned cycles.
  • Cognitive Coaching (Costa & Garmston) — non-judgmental conversations that build a teacher’s own self-directedness.
  • Bambrick-Santoyo’s Get Better Faster — a tight, weekly rhythm of observation plus a single bite-sized action step (“see it, name it, do it”).

Across these, the research consensus (IES, TNTP, Learning Forward, the New Teacher Center) is remarkably consistent:

  • Coaching contact should happen at least every other week, not once a semester.
  • Feedback should land in hours, not days.
  • Improvement comes from one or two high-leverage action steps at a time, not a long list.
  • The components only work together — observation, feedback, action steps, and follow-up as one connected thread, not piecemeal.
  • After roughly 20–30 observations at a school, aggregate patterns should inform where to invest next.

We designed the coaching cycle directly around these findings.

The firewall: coaching is not evaluation

Section titled “The firewall: coaching is not evaluation”

This is the single most important decision we made, and the one administrators should understand first. The research here is unanimous — Sweeney, Aguilar, IES, the Instructional Coaching Group: coaching only works when the teacher trusts that it is safe. A teacher will share a struggle with a coach they would never reveal to the person who signs their evaluation.

So we built a deliberate wall between the two:

EvaluationCoaching (our default)
Scored rubric ratingsEvidence and growth, often unscored
Lives in the personnel fileConfidential between coach and teacher
Drives employment decisionsDrives development
Requires teacher sign-offNo formal acknowledgment required
Admins see everythingAdmins see frequency and trends only

The practical rule the field uses — and that we encoded — is a split between content and activity metadata. The substance of a coaching conversation (what a teacher is working on, where they are struggling, the notes and goals) stays between coach and teacher. The fact and shape of coaching (who is being coached, how often, on which focus areas, in aggregate) is visible to leaders. We reuse the time window for reporting; we never co-mingle coaching content with a teacher’s evaluation record.

This matters even when the same person does both jobs — and they often do. Forty-one percent of U.S. schools have no dedicated instructional coach, so principals and assistant principals default into the role. We solve that the way the best platforms do: through separate observation types with different visibility rules, not by forcing rigid role separation.

The coaching cycle, in our tool

Section titled “The coaching cycle, in our tool”

We turned the loop into a connected workflow where every step links to the last:

  1. Assign — an admin or coach pairs a coach with a teacher.
  2. Set focus — they choose focus areas from the teacher’s instructional framework.
  3. Observe — the coach conducts a walkthrough using the forms already in the system; it auto-links to the coaching assignment.
  4. Act — from that walkthrough, the coach sets concrete, bite-sized action steps (we follow Bambrick’s guidance and gently warn when a coach piles on more than a few at once).
  5. Follow up — the next visit checks whether the action step took hold.
  6. Track — the system shows growth across the cycle: visit frequency, action-step completion, and shifts in focus over time.

Because every walkthrough, action step, and follow-up is tied together, a coaching engagement reads as one story rather than a pile of disconnected visits.

Multi-year cycles, configured per district

Section titled “Multi-year cycles, configured per district”

There is no national standard for how long a teacher’s support cycle should run — states range from annual to six years, and many districts vary the length by a teacher’s performance level. So we made the cycle structure configurable per organization. A district can name and sequence its own stages; one common pattern, for example, runs Year 1 – Coaching (non-evaluative, growth-focused), Year 2 – Support (transitional), and Year 3 – Evaluation (formal), with a separate probationary track.

This also lets the same primitive serve new-teacher induction — the one area with real statutory structure (two-year, year-tagged mentoring in states like California), where a beginning teacher is paired with a mentor and advances through cycles of inquiry. Year 1 / Year 2 cohorts map naturally onto our cycle stages.

What leaders can see — and why it’s enough

Section titled “What leaders can see — and why it’s enough”

Administrators don’t need to read coaching notes to lead a coaching program well. What they need is program health, and that is exactly what our reports surface, all on the firewall-safe side of the line:

  • Dosage and reach — how many teachers were actually coached, how many active cycles, how many visits.
  • Equity of distribution — whether coaching is spread fairly across teachers, schools, and grade levels, or concentrated in a few rooms.
  • Follow-through — action-step completion rates, so a heavy caseload with low completion becomes a conversation, not a surprise.
  • Focus and trend — what coaching is emphasizing and how visit volume moves over time.

We made one deliberate, evidence-aligned choice in how these numbers are read. Comparable platforms, and the coaching literature, report coaching by date range — “how much coaching happened this school year, this fall, this term.” So our reports let leaders scope every figure to a school year, a term, or a custom window, and every metric counts real activity in that window — a teacher counts as coached when they actually had a visit or an action step, not merely because a relationship exists on paper. That keeps the numbers honest: they describe coaching that happened, not coaching that was assigned.

One thing we intentionally do not headline is a direct line from coaching to test scores. Vendors love that claim; the research does not support it cleanly. We report what coaching genuinely controls — frequency, reach, equity, and follow-through — and leave causal claims about student achievement out of the dashboard.

Why an administrator can stand behind this

Section titled “Why an administrator can stand behind this”

Put simply, this approach is what the evidence recommends, implemented honestly:

  • It follows the established frameworks (Knight, Sweeney, Cognitive Coaching, Bambrick) rather than inventing a process.
  • It honors the non-evaluative firewall that every serious source names as the precondition for coaching to work — protecting teacher trust while still giving leaders the program-level visibility they’re accountable for.
  • It emphasizes frequency, fast feedback, and small action steps, the levers with the strongest research support.
  • It supports equitable distribution of coaching and the multi-year, induction- aligned structures that improve new-teacher retention (the New Teacher Center ties high-quality induction directly to keeping teachers in the profession).
  • It is measurable without being invasive — leaders can demonstrate that coaching is happening, reaching the right people, and being followed through, period by period, without ever reading a confidential coaching note.

That combination — research-grounded practice, a real trust boundary, and honest period-based measurement — is the case for following this process. It develops teachers, it earns their trust, and it gives leaders the evidence to show it’s working.

Sources & further reading

Section titled “Sources & further reading”