Skip to content
Master Teacher

Our Approaches

Coaching Approach

Why we built coaching the way we did, and the research behind it.

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 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): a cycle 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 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 around these findings.

The firewall: coaching is not evaluation

Section titled “The firewall: coaching is not evaluation”

Sweeney, Aguilar, IES, and the Instructional Coaching Group agree: 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 separated the two:

EvaluationCoaching (with its own Form Set)
Scored rubric ratingsEvidence and growth, often unscored
Lives in the personnel fileLives on the coaching assignment
Drives employment decisionsDrives development
Requires teacher sign-offNo formal acknowledgment required
Admins see everythingReports show frequency and trends; only the coach writes action steps

The practical rule the field uses is a split between content and activity metadata. The substance of a coaching conversation (what a teacher is working on, the action steps, the coach’s notes) lives on the coaching assignment. Only the coach writes action steps, the teacher sees their own steps, and the assignment’s notes are shared only between the coach and the administrators who oversee the program. The fact and shape of coaching (who is being coached, how often, on which focus areas, in aggregate) is what the coaching reports show. Action steps and coaching notes carry no scores, and they are not part of an evaluation’s rating.

This matters even when the same person does both jobs, as it does in schools where a principal or assistant principal is also the coach. Rather than force a separation of roles, the tool lets a district give coaching visits their own Form Set, without the reflection and acknowledgment steps that formal evaluations require.

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. Visit: the coach conducts a walkthrough using the forms already in the system; it appears on the coaching assignment’s timeline.
  4. Act: from that walkthrough, the coach sets concrete, bite-sized action steps (following Bambrick’s guidance, the tool reminds a coach that smaller sets are easier to act on once a visit has four or more steps).
  5. Follow up: the next visit checks whether the action step took hold.
  6. Track: the Growth Trajectory shows the cycle over time (visit frequency, action-step completion, and shifts in focus).

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 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 the coaching reports stay on the activity side of the line:

  • Dosage and reach: how many teachers were 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.

The reports read these numbers by date range: “how much coaching happened this school year, this fall, this term.” Leaders can 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 had real coaching activity in the period, not because an assignment exists on paper. The numbers describe coaching that happened, not coaching that was assigned.

One thing we do not headline is a direct line from coaching to test scores. The research does not support that claim. We report what coaching 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”

This approach follows what the evidence recommends:

  • It follows the established frameworks (Knight, Sweeney, Cognitive Coaching, Bambrick) rather than inventing a process.
  • It keeps the non-evaluative firewall that the sources above name as the precondition for coaching to work: protecting teacher trust while 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 to keeping teachers in the profession).
  • It is measurable without being invasive. Leaders can show from the reports that coaching is happening, reaching the right people, and being followed through, period by period, without opening individual coaching notes.

That combination of research-grounded practice, a trust boundary, and 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”