The Complete Guide to Instructional Coaching

In the education and teaching industry, the latest buzzword is 'instructional coaching'.

Many companies are investing in their executive teams through executive coaching. These coaches help top employees and management teams in unlocking their potential.

Similarly, schools and colleges are now realising the importance of coaching teachers. Instructive coaching will enable these teachers to be world-class leaders in educative services.

What is instructional coaching?

Instructional coaching helps teachers, principals and such other learning providers grow. It can help them become leaders in the teaching industry. Instructional coaching involves making teachers better at teaching and delivering education.

Instructional coaching is not based on the opinions and judgments of the coach. It relies on methods and practices that are proven to work in schools.

Schools do organize training programs for teachers. But they are usually fixed intervals and happen once or twice a year. These training sessions are often standard. They include many teachers in a single workshop.

In contrast, coaching teachers is very personalized and an ongoing process. Within a single school, teacher’s coaches often focuses on small groups of teachers. This focus helps in designing better outcomes for student’s learning process.

Read: Instructional Coaching by Lucy Steiner, Julie Kowal

Who is an instructional coach?

An instructional coach helps teachers improve their current teaching methods and practices. Teacher's coaches are agents of change in educational institutions. They work towards the professional development of schools.

They observe the entire learning system in a particular school and identify gaps. They identify what the students and learners need. Then they customize the activities to bridge these gaps. They provide resources that will help teachers develop and improve their classroom practices.

A teaching coach is not someone who has all the right answers. A good instructional coach first understands your problem. Then they help to come up with solutions that suits your needs.

A good teacher's coach is well-versed with teaching practices and methods. It is not necessary to be a teacher to be a teaching coach. But having some teaching experience helps in getting you started.

As a teacher’s coach, your focus is on teaching methods. But, along with teaching practices, a good teacher's coach also focuses on the student’s needs. They then match these goals with the aims of the educational institute.

Thus instructional coaches act as a quality control checkpoint for educational institutes.

Four things that must happen for you to succeed as an instructional coach

Elena Aguilar is a Transformational Leadership Coach. She talks about the four things teaching coaches need to do well at their job.

School Culture

Instructional coaches work with teachers. But their job will be easier if the school has a growth mindset. Consider schools that are already used to working towards growth and development. They will work with instructional coaches better.

A growth mindset recognizes that there is always room for improvement. Your job is to help the school improve and not highlight mistakes. For that to happen, the school must be ready and willing to improve!

Room for teamwork

Instructional coaching can’t happen in isolation. Coaches work with teachers in their natural environment, which is in the classroom. Instructional coaches must have the chance to take part and work along with teachers.

Schools must have a well planned strategy for their growth and improvement. This helps in making room for joint effort.

Principal’s view of coaching

You can't work as a teacher’s coach if the principal of the school is not on board with your plans and ideas. There must be a close relationship and partnership with the principal of the school.

It takes a lot of trust to know that the coach will not take over ‘their’ school. That the coach will in fact work along with principals to ensure complete success. Once a principal believes in you, they will help you in building trust with other teachers.

Your own development as a coach

For you to coach teachers, you must be a life-long learner yourself! You can ask about the opportunities you can have to learn on the job. This will ensure you stay up-to-date and improve on your practice as a coach.

When the teachers see you work on yourself, they believe in your aim to make learning better. You thus gain their trust and goodwill.

Victor Welzant, an expert on education and training talks about something very important. He says that working on improving your own practice can be very rewarding. It can remind you about why you love being an educator in the first place.

Ways you can fail at being an instructional coach

• You have little understanding about how teaching works
• You do not provide knowledge about research-based methods of teaching in classrooms
• You provide materials to teachers and staff members which are not what the students need.
• You don’t attend classroom sessions to understand and examine teaching methods.
• During classroom sessions, you compromise the teacher and take over the session.
• You do not design personal, professional, and educational goals of teachers and students.
• You don’t use evaluation sheets to examine the plans for achieving goals
• You do not follow up with teachers and principals about their plans for improvement.
• You do not organize your records and documents.
• You believe that you need not spend time and effort in improving your own practice

Read: 10 Coaching Strategies for Instructional Coaches

Qualities every instructional coach should have

• They inspire trust in others
• They never stop learning
• They lead by example
• They believe in servant leadership
• They encourage others to learn and grow
• They encourage leadership and a growth mindset at all levels
• They have a strong vision for the school and its teaching environment
• They involve everyone in the process
• They address the elephant in the room
• They encourage others to take risks
• They take part in challenging tasks
• They learn from their mistakes
• They help teachers deal with their worries and fears
• They are in for the long journey

Read: Edutopia’s excellent resource on instructional coaching

Dealing with teacher resistance

Teacher resistance is a normal part of an instructional coach's job. They often see coaching as a process in which your faults will be found and fixed. So, the entire process gets a negative flavour. The aim should be to see that coaching does not fix the flaws but celebrates the opportunity for growth.

You want the schools and teachers to accept you in your role as an teaching coach. For that, they must feel comfortable with you.

One way of bringing in a comfort level is to assure and put them at ease. You have not come there to list their shortcomings. Make them realise that your goal is their professional development.

Teachers may have years, even decades worth of experience in teaching. Of course then, it is not easy for them to have some ‘outsider’ come and tell them how to improve.

Jim Knight is an instructional coaching expert. He says, “Because our identity is so tightly connected with what we do, we struggle with the idea that there's room for improvement.”

He suggests a brilliant way to build trust and gain acceptance from teachers. Ask them about their goals and problems. What keeps them up at night?

It can be students who are otherwise obedient but aren’t that excited about learning. It can even be the pressure to cover the syllabus on time.

These issues are not a result of a personal wrong but because there are gaps in the educational system. The good news is, we can fix these gaps, along with the support of the teacher.

Teachers might fight against instructional coaches as they sense their roles getting questioned. It is very easy to think like that because instructional coaching is still not out there. These misconceptions are can arise.

To succeed, coaches must build a relationship with teachers and principals. They should also involve other important people who are a part of the learning universe.

Teachers are great! They have vast knowledge and wisdom. We all have memories from our student days and our teachers have been remarkable in their own way. You remember some for being good listeners, some for being creative teachers. Some for being amazing souls!

Teachers help us learn and we often overlook the fact that teachers need learning too. Often, there is a bad match between the skills and abilities of a teacher and the needs of the students.

That’s where you step in as an instructional coach. You build up that trust that helps put teachers at ease. Your role is not to criticise them, but to help their existing knowledge and abilities go a step further.

Teachers improve their teaching practices and students receive high-class learning environment. Parents are happy to know that their children are benefiting in a school they placed their trust in.

Principals receive higher goodwill from the community. Instructional coaches set this cycle in motion through their practices. It is a win-win for everyone!

Why should schools hire you as a teacher's coach?

Any school which has a growth mindset will understand that teachers need coaches. Instructional coaching will help schools see meaningful changes in their system.

Most importantly, schools should hire instructional coaches so that teachers can grow. The growth and development of teachers will result in growth of the school. Teachers will be able to improve their teaching practices. They can learn new methods of teaching and improve their current practices.
Teachers help others learn and they need to learn as well!. A teacher's coach will help improve their skills and abilities. This will help them improve as an education provider.

Next, schools can improve how their students learn. An instructional coach will help the