My interest in instructional coaching started in a classroom in Toronto, Canada. In my first year of teaching, I worked as a special education teacher even though I had received no training in that field. Luckily, I had a coach (although I didn’t use the term coach back then). Dee La France was an expert in teaching students with learning disabilities, and she introduced me to evidence-based writing strategies from the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. When I taught students those strategies, they achieved goals they’d never reached before and began to believe they really could succeed. I knew my students’ success was only possible because of Dee and the writing strategies she shared with me, so I decided to share them with others.
How Failure Paved the Way
I went to the University of Kansas to be certified as a Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) professional developer, and I started to offer workshops around southern Ontario. I was eager to share the strategies Dee had taught me because I had seen how much they helped my students. Reality quickly punctured my illusions. My lofty expectations for change translated into no changes at all in what teachers or students did.
My workshops failed for many reasons. I overvalued my SIM expertise and undervalued the expertise teachers brought to my workshops. My steadfast belief that strategies had to be taught exactly as they were described collided with teachers’ recognition that they would have to adapt the strategies to implement them. I kept emphasizing absolute fidelity to the teaching methods even though I had to modify them to make them work for my own students.
Perhaps the biggest reason I failed, however, was that I focused on telling teachers exactly what they needed to do without taking the time to listen to their ideas and suggestions. Because I thought I understood the research, I acted like an expert talking to novices. When teachers asked questions or suggested changes, I just pushed harder, or, even worse, blamed teachers for being resistant, unaware that my approach is what produced resistance.
During his early years of coaching in the late 1990s, Jim Knight learned that collaborating with teachers was much more effective than strictly teaching a method the way it worked for him.
I decided to figure out what was going wrong. After one particularly notable fiasco when an argument between middle school and high school teachers erupted, I decided to interview all the teachers in the workshop. This became my first graduate-student research study (2000) about teachers’ perceptions of professional development. I learned a lot.
The teachers raised many issues during our one-to-one interviews. They were overwhelmed by the many tasks they needed to complete as part of their teaching, so they wanted professional development that gave them practical tools they could use right away. Teachers resented that they didn’t have a voice in their professional development. They also knew they would have to adapt the teaching practices to work with their students even though their professional developer (me) told them not to.
After I met with a number of individual teachers to ask them what they needed and tailored my presentations to those needs, the workshops improved. The teachers I had met with were more open and positive than the ones I had not met with. When I saw the effect of one-to-one conversations, my ideas about coaching started to take shape.
Instructional Coaching What Makes It Work
From my 30 years of research on instructional coaching, I have learned many lessons about doing coaching well. I learned those lessons from coaches in the United States and abroad, from the writers and researchers I’ve read over the decades, and from mentors who continue to shape my thinking. The lessons that follow represent my understanding of what good coaching looks like.
Provide Follow-Up
Workshops, by themselves, rarely produce real change in classrooms. Teachers start forgetting what they’re learning before the workshop is over.
The issue I had in my workshops wasn’t that teachers didn’t want to implement the practices; it’s that they usually didn’t remember or understand how to fit the new practices into their already existing instructional routines. When coaches met with teachers, their support led to more implementation. Follow-up is essential.
Treat Teachers Like the Professionals They Are
The most glaring problem with my workshops was that I told teachers what to do. Since then, I’ve come to believe that when I encounter resistance, my first question should be, “What am I doing that is creating this resistance?”
For my doctoral dissertation (1999), I decided to study learning interactions. I read authors from a wide range of fields, including educational theory, organizational behavior, cultural anthropology, communication, and even the philosophy of science. I synthesized their thinking into seven “partnership principles”: equality, choice, voice, dialogue, reflection, praxis, and reciprocity.
Student-focused goals provide an objective standard of excellence—if you don’t hit the goal, the strategy isn’t working.
Coaching that is grounded in the partnership principles is not about watching the teacher, identifying their area of weakness, then persuading them to buy in to the goal the coach has identified. Rather, coaches help a teacher identify a change that the teacher would really like to see. This change might be in student engagement, achievement, or well-being. Then the coach partners with the teacher to identify teaching practices, data-gathering methods, and innovations that empower the teacher and their students to meet that goal. Note that teachers are always in the driver’s seat.
To get the schools our students deserve, we need professional teachers, and the only way to have professional teachers is to treat teachers like professionals. We can do that by seeing teachers as partners, not as empty vessels to fill.
Start with Students
When I started studying coaching in 1995, I thought the coach’s job was to persuade teachers to use teaching practices that research deemed effective. I would meet with teachers, describe the practices, and explain why they were important—and then the teachers usually would try them out in their classrooms. This worked better than the workshops, but I discovered that teachers didn’t continue implementing the practices over time.
I realized I needed to flip the approach and have teachers start with students, not with teaching practices. Creating a student-focused goal puts the students as the focus from the start. For instance, a goal could be for students to score 9 out of 10 on a rubric three times in a row on their written work. With a student-focused goal, the teacher is more motivated to sustain implementation, especially when they see measurable evidence of student success. Student-focused goals also provide an objective standard of excellence—if you don’t hit the goal, the strategy isn’t working—and an authentic way of measuring the impact of coaching.
Watch Videos of Lessons
Most people have no real sense of what they look like while they’re doing something. We all have blind spots and defense mechanisms that make it difficult to see ourselves clearly. There are many ways to gain a clearer picture of reality, but video is often the simplest.
As research has shown (Sherin & van Es, 2005), when teachers watch a video of themselves teaching, they see an objective view of their performance and are often more motivated to make changes. Motivation often entails recognizing a gap between where we are—and the video shows us that—and where we want to be. If we don’t know where we are, we often don’t see the need to change.
Identify PEERS Goals
Teachers are more likely to make meaningful improvements when they set goals. In the early days of my coaching, I partnered with teachers to create SMART goals because that was common practice at the time. However, SMART goals weren’t all that effective. They didn’t address whether goals were easy to attain or whether they were emotionally compelling to teachers. And they weren’t necessarily student focused. The teachers often focused more on the acronym than on the goal itself.
After reading the research about effective goals, I summarized the literature into a new acronym: PEERS. PEERS goals are
- Powerful. They will have an unmistakably positive effect on students’ lives.
- Easy. No goal is easy in a complex classroom, but the easier it is for a teacher to implement a practice to hit a powerful goal, the more likely that teacher is to meet the goal.
- Emotionally compelling. The more a goal matters to a teacher, the more likely it is they will meet it.
- Reachable. Effective goals have a clear finish line, enabling teachers to confidently identify practices that will help them reach that goal.
- Student focused. Student-focused goals target measurable improvements in student engagement, achievement, or well-being.
To get the schools our students deserve, we need professional teachers, and the only way to have professional teachers is to treat teachers like professionals.
Gather Classroom Data
To set goals, the teacher needs data to establish a clear finish line and monitor progress toward those goals. They can gather behavioral data by assessing time on task, student responses, and instructional time; they can gather cognitive data by asking students to provide feedback on how they’re experiencing learning; and they can gather emotional data by using something as simple as an exit ticket.
To better understand student achievement, I learned how to use data-gathering tools, such as checks for understanding, brief constructed responses, and various kinds of rubrics to assess student acquisition and transfer of knowledge, skills, and big ideas. I share many of these strategies in Data Rules (Knight & Faggella-Luby, 2024).
Ask Good Questions
As I watched videos of coaches at work, I realized we needed more powerful questions to help teachers move through the coaching cycle. After talking with many experts and testing dozens of questions, I identified a few especially powerful ones (2014): If this class were going exactly as you’d like it to go, what would you see your students doing? What would you have to change to make this class closer to your ideal? Which change would you feel most confident making? If you made that change, what would be different for your students?
I have found that coaches benefit from developing a list of favorite questions and then using those questions in all kinds of situations, inside and outside of school. Better questions lead to better conversations, and better conversations lead to better lives.
Have Better Conversations
In terms of communication skills, listening is also crucial. Internally, good listeners stay focused on conversations and set aside their assumptions and mental distractions. Externally, they look like they’re listening, and they don’t interrupt or complete others’ sentences. A good coach makes eye contact, turns their body toward the teacher, and makes sure no object, like a laptop, sits between them and their conversation partner.
I wrote about other communication habits, such as fostering trust, building emotional connections, finding common ground, and being a witness to the good, in Better Conversations (2015).
Use the Impact Cycle
For more than 10 years, I refined a process coaches could use to help teachers set and meet student-focused goals. I used what I refer to as “lean design research” to conduct multiple iterations of coaching cycles (2018). That work led to a three-stage coaching process I call the Impact Cycle.
During the Identify Stage, the coach and teacher gain a clearer picture of reality by watching a video of a lesson or gathering data in some other way, such as interviewing students. Then the teacher, with help from the coach, identifies a goal and a practice the teacher will implement to hit the goal. Simply put, the teacher, in partnership with the coach, identifies where their students are, where they want their students to be, and what they’re going to do to help them get there.
During the Learn Stage, the coach helps the teacher prepare for implementing the new practice. This usually involves reviewing and adapting a checklist of the practice or co-constructing one. The teacher also observes the practice in action, either by watching a video, observing another teacher implement it, or seeing the coach model it.
During the Improve Stage, the teacher implements the new strategy. The teacher and coach then evaluate the effect on student learning. At this stage, you can modify the goal, the way you gather data on progress, or the way you teach the practice—or you can choose a different practice altogether.
Create Instructional Playbooks
Sometimes, the main obstacle to effective implementation is that teaching practices are described in ways that are hard to understand or apply in the classroom. Around 2012, I started experimenting with instructional playbooks to address this problem (Knight et al., 2021). Instructional playbooks contain three communication tools that coaches and other professional developers can use to help teachers learn new practices:
- Tool 1: A list of high-impact teaching practices coaches can share with teachers to help them hit their goals.
- Tool 2: One-page documents that summarize the key elements of a practice, along with the research and support for its use.
- Tool 3: Checklists that help teachers implement practices effectively.
When coaches create instructional playbooks, they deepen their own understanding and create tools to help teachers do the same.
Provide System Support
Coaches will struggle to flourish in the absence of support from school administration. Leaders need to understand what instructional coaching involves and why the coach-teacher partnership behind it matters. Principals should promote coaching in their school and advocate for coaches to have time to coach. Coaching programs should have an evaluation system designed specifically for coaches and should clearly communicate what coaches do and don’t do.
What’s Ahead
When I started this journey 30 years ago, I thought the challenge was helping teachers implement effective practices. I now know the most important challenge is helping teachers grow as professionals to improve outcomes for students. I’ve learned that workshops alone rarely lead to meaningful change, that telling people what to do is less effective than partnering with them, and that coaching works best when it starts with students and is guided by clear goals, data, dialogue, and reflection.
That learning continues today. I’m currently studying fast-track coaching (2026), a process that condenses the Impact Cycle into four conversations. Four meetings won’t always have the same effect as a six-to-eight-week coaching cycle, but when time is short, teachers still deserve a process that honors them as professionals while holding the promise of real improvement.
I’m also studying the intersection of coaching and artificial intelligence (2025). AI can support coaching, but only when guided by an expert coach; on its own, it cannot offer the kind of partnership teachers need to make lasting improvement. That kind of improvement only happens when educators work together to help students succeed. That has been true for the past 30 years and will probably remain true no matter how the tools of coaching continue to evolve.
