If your coach is a glorified resource finder, your coaching model is broken
Every district has them: instructional coaches with packed calendars, beautifully organized resources, and warm relationships with teachers. And almost no impact on classroom practice. It’s not the coaches’ fault. The coaching model itself is usually designed to feel supportive not to actually change what teachers do. If you want different reading results, you have to demand a different kind of coaching.
Why Most Coaching Doesn’t Stick
- Coaching is voluntary, so the teachers who most need it opt out.
- Coaches are pulled in too many directions, assessment, scheduling, family communication leaving little time for actual coaching.
- Coaching cycles are vague: ‘meet, observe, debrief’ with no specific instructional target.
- There’s no measurement of whether teacher practice actually changed.
- Coaches are seen as evaluators or, worse, as substitutes when teachers are absent.
What Effective Coaching Actually Looks Like
1. Job-embedded and ongoing.
Coaching is not a 60-minute meeting. It’s a multi-week cycle: pre-conference, modeling, co-teaching, observation, debrief and repeat. Two cycles per teacher per semester, minimum.
2. Targeted to a specific instructional practice.
Not ‘general support.’ One precise target: explicit phonics instruction, decoding instruction, comprehension routines, etc. You can measure that. You can change that.
3. Anchored in shared knowledge.
Coaches and teachers must share a mental model of effective instruction. If the coach is operating from the Science of Reading and the teacher is still rooted in balanced literacy, the coaching conversation will go nowhere.
4. Held to a results bar.
Coaching impact is measurable: changes in teacher practice (observable in walkthroughs) and changes in student outcomes (visible in data). If coaching produces neither, the model needs to change not just the coach.
| Job-embedded coaching is the single most powerful, evidence-backed lever for changing teacher practice. It is also the most under-resourced and under-protected role in most schools. |
Three Questions Every Leader Should Ask Their Coaching Team
- What specific instructional practice is each coach driving this quarter?
- How many full coaching cycles has each coach completed this semester?
- What’s our measurable evidence that teacher practice has changed?
If your coaching team can’t answer those clearly, you don’t have a coaching program. You have a friendly support office.
Coaching is not encouragement. It is the deliberate, structured, evidence-anchored development of teacher practice. Get it right, and it is the highest-ROI investment a school can make. Get it wrong, and it costs you years.
| CSAS designs and implements structured coaching models rooted in the Science of Reading and trains your in-house coaches to deliver them. Connect with us for a complimentary coaching audit. |