In 2011, the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande was eight years into practice. His complication rates compared well with national data, and they had stopped coming down. So he asked Robert Osteen, a retired surgeon he had trained under, to come into the operating room and watch him work. Osteen watched from a step stool and filled a notepad with things Gawande hadn't noticed: his elbow rising as he worked, and an operating light that had drifted for about half an hour without anyone catching it. Nobody had told Gawande he had a problem. He went looking for a coach because he was good at his job and wanted to keep getting better at it.[^1]
Who gets the coach
Most schools with an instructional coach have more teachers than that coach can reach in a year. A full cycle takes weeks, from naming a focus to the return visit (What a Coaching Cycle Actually Looks Like), and a coach can only run so many at once. So someone decides who goes first.
The answer is nearly always the same. New teachers come first, because they have the most to learn and the least to fall back on. Next comes anyone having a hard year: a class that hasn't settled by October, a new grade level, a lesson that keeps going sideways. Those are fair calls. With one coach and thirty teachers, you put the coach where the need looks greatest.
Run the schedule that way every year, though, and it starts to say something.
What the schedule teaches
If the only teachers who get coached are new or having a rough stretch, being coached starts to look like a sign that something is wrong. A teacher sees the coach heading into a colleague's room and draws a conclusion. The colleague knows it. So when the coach offers a visit to a fifteen-year veteran, the offer can land as a question about what went wrong.
Three things follow. Teachers stop asking for coaching, because asking sounds like admitting trouble. The teacher who is being coached spends part of every conversation managing how it looks. And the strongest teachers in the building go years without anyone watching them teach, so the people with the most to show their colleagues are the ones nobody sees.
It also pulls coaching toward evaluation. When a cycle starts because somebody noticed a problem, it is a short step to the cycle becoming part of the problem's paperwork. From there, teachers do what anyone does in an evaluation and show the version that looks good. Coaching vs. Evaluation covers why the two jobs need to stay apart.
Experienced teachers keep getting better
For a long time, the usual reading of the research was that teachers improve quickly in their first few years and then level off. If that were true, putting all the coaching into new teachers would make sense on its own terms.
In 2015, John Papay and Matthew Kraft went back to that question with nine years of data on the same teachers and a better method for estimating how much each one improves with experience. They found the fast early gains everyone expected, and then evidence that teachers kept improving after that, more slowly, with the clearest signal in math.[1]
A year earlier, the same two researchers asked why some teachers improve more than others. They followed math teachers in a large North Carolina school system and compared how much each one improved over time with how teachers rated their school's working environment on a statewide survey, including peer collaboration, principal leadership and professional development. After ten years, teachers in schools at the 75th percentile of those ratings had improved 38 percent more than teachers in schools at the 25th percentile.[2]
Both studies measured improvement through students' test-score growth, which is one narrow view of teaching. The second one shows where teachers grew more. It can't show that the school caused it, and the authors say so. Even so, neither describes a profession where growth stops in year three. They describe experienced teachers who keep getting better, and more so in schools that pay attention to their work.
Coaches tend to see the same thing in the room. The strongest teachers often want the mirror most, which What Instructional Coaching Actually Is touches on from the coach's side.
What it looks like for a teacher who is doing fine
Coaching a strong teacher runs the same way as coaching anyone. The difference is where the focus comes from. It's usually a question the teacher has been carrying for a while.
Picture a fourth grade teacher in her sixteenth year. Her math talks go well. She has also noticed that the same five students answer most of the questions, and she isn't sure what the other twenty are thinking. That becomes the focus. The coach visits during a math talk and counts who speaks, who writes, and who turns to a partner. They talk it through. She tries one change: every student gets thirty seconds to sketch an answer before anyone raises a hand. Two weeks later the coach comes back and counts again.
Nothing was broken. She got a look at something she couldn't see from the front of the room, which is the whole subject of What to Look For When You Watch Someone Teach. Her colleagues also saw a sixteen-year veteran working with the coach, which may do more for coaching in that building than any announcement.
If you decide who gets coached
Coach hours are the real limit. A school can believe every teacher deserves coaching and still run out of weeks. These moves work inside that limit.
Say who coaching is for, and show it. Ask a respected veteran to go first, and to mention it at a staff meeting. Gawande's story carries weight because he didn't need a coach and got one anyway.
Keep coaching off support plans. When a teacher needs a formal plan, call it a plan and let the person who evaluates run it. If coaching is how a school responds to concerns, teachers will read every coaching visit as one.
Give everyone a lighter version. One focus a semester, one visit and one return conversation for every teacher may do more for a building than a full cycle for a few. The trade is depth, and it's worth choosing on purpose.
Let the teacher choose the focus. A goal the teacher picked gets worked on in a hard week. A goal handed to them reads as a verdict.
The strongest teachers in the building are often the ones nobody has watched teach in years.
What eduimpact is for
We built eduimpact around the coach-hours problem. It doesn't coach anyone, and it doesn't stand in for the visit or the conversation afterward. A teacher brings a lesson, a moment or a question in their own words, and eduimpact helps them think it through, drawing on the school's own documents when they're relevant.
In a school, coaches mark whether eduimpact's replies landed, which is how the school shows it what good teaching looks like there. Nobody grades or evaluates the teacher. The coach's hours still go to visits and conversations, where a person is needed. eduimpact is for the weeks in between, for every teacher on the staff, including the sixteen-year veteran with a question about her math talks.
Papay, J. P., & Kraft, M. A. (2015). Productivity returns to experience in the teacher labor market: Methodological challenges and new evidence on long-term career improvement. Journal of Public Economics, 130, 105-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.02.008 ↩︎
Kraft, M. A., & Papay, J. P. (2014). Can professional environments in schools promote teacher development? Explaining heterogeneity in returns to teaching experience. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 36(4), 476-500. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373713519496 ↩︎