We believe coaching is the most beneficial training, leading to better teaching by educators and better learning by students.
Contact UsInstructional coaches partner with teachers to help them improve teaching and learning so students are more successful. To do this, coaches collaborate with teachers to get a clear picture of current reality, identify goals, pick teaching strategies to meet the goals, monitor progress, and problem solve until the goals are met.
To put it simply… instructional coaching makes it easier for teachers to meet the needs of their students.
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High turnover rates reduce achievement for those students whose classrooms are directly affected, especially in high-poverty schools, where turnover-induced loss of general and grade-specific experience is the main driver of declining student achievement.
Teacher turnover harms the morale of the whole school; not only the students, but also the teachers who are left to carry the burden of teacher vacancies. It’s a hardship schools can avoid by providing better learning opportunities for their staff and ensuring they have the foundation and support in place for a successful year.
Let's develop a coaching program that supports your teachers.
The coaching provided by the Instructional Coaching Group is tailored for educators who are designing, implementing, or overseeing a coaching program. As such, our goal is to help educators maintain successful and long-term coaching programs.
We offer expert-led strategies for designing effective coaching programs from the start. If you’re designing a new program, consider participating in The Instructional Coaching Institute.
Learn more about the Institute
Our research has helped us identify several factors that are essential for developing and sustaining a great coaching program. We help organizations learn and implement these factors through workshops, coaching, consulting, and other forms of support.
Learn more about Professional Development
The Instructional Coaching Group's consultants have been trained directly by Jim Knight and are available to meet with districts to help create plans for developing and supporting highly effective coaching programs.
Learn more about ConsultingThe way we present ourselves to others—what we do and how we act—plays an important part in the strength of our relationships.
Workshop: Creating Learning Partnerships
Since coaching is, above all, a series of conversations, coaches need to be effective communicators. They also need to employ effective coaching skills that reflect healthy beliefs about communication.
Workshop: Better Conversations
Leadership can be divided into two parts: leading yourself and leading others. To lead yourself, you must know your purpose and principles, how to use your time effectively, and how to take care of yourself. To lead others, a combination of ambition and humility is needed—to be reliable and ambitious for change but at the same time responsive to teachers.
Workshop: Better Leaders
While every coaching situation presents unique challenges, an established process for guiding the coaching experience ensures that instructional coaches have all the tools they need to help teachers set and achieve their goals.
Workshop: The Impact Cycle
Data is important within coaching because it provides a way to identify goals and monitor progress. Goals need to be measured frequently so that teachers can determine if what they are doing is working or if adjustments need to be made.
Workshop: Gathering Data
When going through the coaching cycle, there can be so many factors at play that it’s easy to be overwhelmed. That’s why a central focus of instructional coaching is creating an Instructional Playbook to meet student-focused goals.
Workshops: High-Impact Teaching Strategies; The Instructional Playbook
When coaches flourish, it is often because they work in settings where leaders are intentional and disciplined about providing the support that is required for coaching success to occur. The opposite is also true. Without support, coaches will often struggle to have any impact at all.
Workshops: What Administrators Need to Know; Evaluating Instructional Coaching
Does your coaching program meet the 7 Success Factors?
Let's design a research-based plan for developing or improving your coaching program.
“We initially attended the Teaching | Learning | Coaching Conference in Kansas City last October to develop our coaching skills with our newly appointed task of evaluating teachers. We were very concerned—being district office administrators—at entering a building and having meaningful dialogue with our teachers concerning their teaching practices in a way that would produce fruitful partnerships. Our experience at the conference and in our roles since has been such a joy as a result of some of the practices we have applied since the training.”
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