Instructional coaching is the practice of a teacher working regularly with a coach on a small, specific aspect of their teaching — observing, discussing, practising and reviewing it until it changes. It is the most reliably effective form of professional development we have, and the most commonly misunderstood.
A working definition
Instructional coaching is sustained, one-to-one, classroom-focused support aimed at improving a specific element of a teacher's practice. A coach and a teacher agree a narrow goal, gather evidence from real lessons, discuss what that evidence shows, plan a concrete change, and then check whether the change worked.
Three features distinguish it from almost everything else schools call professional development:
- It is continuous, not an event. Coaching happens in cycles across a term or a year, not in a single INSET day.
- It is specific. The goal is not "improve questioning" but something like "increase wait time after open questions to three seconds".
- It is grounded in evidence from real lessons — what actually happened in this teacher's classroom, not what good teaching looks like in the abstract.
What instructional coaching is not
Much of the confusion around coaching comes from conflating it with three other things schools do.
It is not appraisal
Appraisal is a judgement made about a teacher, usually tied to pay, progression or capability. Coaching is a developmental relationship. The moment a teacher suspects that what they say to their coach will resurface in a performance review, honest conversation stops — and with it, the coaching. Schools that succeed with coaching separate the two explicitly, and say so out loud.
It is not mentoring
Mentoring is broader and more pastoral: a more experienced colleague supporting a less experienced one across the whole of their professional life. Coaching is narrower and more technical. A mentor helps you navigate the school; a coach helps you change one thing about how you teach.
It is not lesson observation
Observation is a method of gathering evidence. Coaching is what you do with it. A great deal of observation in schools produces a form, a grade and a filed document — and no change in anyone's teaching. Observation without a coaching conversation is data collection, not development.
Why it works: what the evidence says
The strongest evidence base for coaching comes not from coaching studies alone but from the wider research on what makes professional learning change practice.
Helen Timperley's Teacher Professional Learning and Development: Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2007) remains the most useful synthesis available. It examined which professional learning actually improved outcomes for students, and found consistent characteristics: it was sustained over an extended period rather than delivered in one hit; it was focused on the link between teaching and student outcomes; it engaged teachers' existing beliefs rather than talking past them; it drew on external expertise; and it happened in a school culture that supported it.
Instructional coaching, done properly, satisfies all five. That is the essential reason it outperforms the one-day course.
John Hattie's work in Visible Learning (2009), synthesising many hundreds of meta-analyses, points in the same direction from a different angle. Hattie's central argument is that teaching improves when teachers can see the effect of what they do — his often-quoted instruction to educators is to "know thy impact". Coaching is the mechanism by which a teacher gets to see their impact on something specific, soon enough to act on it.
Timperley also draws a distinction worth holding onto: between professional development, which is something done to teachers, and professional learning, which is something teachers do. Coaching is squarely in the second category.
What a coaching cycle looks like
A workable cycle has five stages, and takes two to four weeks.
- Agree a goal. One thing, described precisely enough that both people would recognise it happening. This is the step most often rushed, and the one that determines whether the cycle works.
- Gather evidence. Observe a lesson, or review a recording, looking specifically at the agreed goal rather than at everything at once.
- Discuss what the evidence shows. Not "that was a good lesson", but "here is what happened at 14 minutes — what were you thinking?"
- Plan and practise a change. Something small and concrete enough to do in the next lesson. Where possible, rehearse it before teaching it.
- Check whether it worked. Return to the classroom and look at the same thing again. This closes the loop, and is the step most often skipped.
Notice how much of this depends on the quality of the evidence in stage two. A coach who can only describe a lesson from memory, or from notes taken while also trying to watch, is working with far less than a coach who can point to what actually happened.
Why coaching programmes fail
Schools rarely abandon coaching because it does not work. They abandon it for practical reasons that are worth anticipating.
- Time. Coaching consumes senior leaders' time in large quantities. A programme that requires a deputy head to observe forty teachers three times a year will collapse in the spring term.
- Goals that are too broad. "Improve behaviour management" cannot be coached. "Give the instruction, then scan the room before starting" can.
- Confusion with accountability. If coaching notes feed appraisal, teachers manage their coach rather than their teaching.
- Inconsistent coaches. When ten leaders coach to ten different standards, teachers receive contradictory advice and lose confidence in all of it.
- No shared model of good teaching. This is the deepest problem. If the staff have never agreed what great teaching looks like, every coaching conversation starts by relitigating that question.
Getting the foundations right first
That last point is the one we would emphasise most. Coaching is a mechanism for moving teachers towards a shared standard. If no such standard exists, coaching becomes an exchange of opinions between two professionals who may sincerely disagree.
This is why we built Setting The Standard the way we did: it establishes a common, evidence-informed understanding of what effective teaching looks like across an entire staff, so that coaching conversations afterwards start from shared ground rather than personal preference.
It is also why Learnalyze exists. The practical constraint on coaching is almost always the cost of gathering good evidence from real lessons, consistently, at scale. Analysing lesson video against a defined framework removes that constraint — every teacher can receive specific, evidence-based feedback on their own lessons, and leaders can spend their limited time on the coaching conversation rather than on the observation that precedes it.
Where to start
If you are introducing coaching, we would suggest this order:
- Establish a shared model of effective teaching across the staff, so everyone is coaching towards the same thing.
- Separate coaching from appraisal, explicitly and publicly.
- Start with volunteers rather than the whole staff. Coaching spreads by reputation.
- Keep goals narrow enough to be embarrassing. Specificity is what makes change happen.
- Protect the time, and be realistic about how much of it senior leaders have.