One of the deepest desires of educational leaders and instructional coaches is to support lasting, meaningful growth in the teachers they partner with. That growth isn’t just about knowing more—it’s about doing more, and doing it differently. It’s about transformation. And at the center of transformation is a deceptively simple idea: praxis.
Praxis is the process of learning, reflecting, and applying. It’s where theory meets real life, where ideas are molded, tested, and reshaped to fit the unique realities of a teacher’s classroom. In instructional coaching, praxis isn’t a side note—it’s the point.
When coaches and leaders facilitate learning experiences that honor the principle of praxis, they do more than deliver information. They give teachers time and space to wrestle with new ideas, reshape them, and make them their own. Much like a child playing with modeling clay, teachers in a partnership-driven workshop can poke, stretch, and experiment with strategies until they see how those strategies might take shape in their own rooms.
Praxis is not about replication; it’s about transformation. It’s not about memorizing a routine and reproducing it step by step. It’s not about creating carbon copies of the facilitator’s vision.
Instead, praxis is about authentic, personal engagement with new ideas—engagement that leads to real change.
In practice, this could mean a teacher spends hours crafting guiding questions that reframe the direction of a unit. Or it might mean a teacher hears a new instructional strategy, reflects on its alignment with their values, and ultimately decides not to use it—because that, too, is praxis. As long as reflection, intention, and action are present, the learning is real.
To get there, though, we need to acknowledge something that is too often overlooked: praxis cannot happen in a top-down environment. It requires true partnership.
Coaches must create a space where teachers are free to explore ideas and even to say no. This is why the partnership approach to coaching matters so much. Partnership is built on equality, voice, choice, and dialogue. It is a stance, not a strategy. In that space of mutual respect, teachers can deliberate, adapt, and act on what is most relevant to their students and themselves. As Richard Bernstein once noted, praxis requires “choice, deliberation, and decisions about what is to be done in concrete situations.” In other words, praxis lives in the messiness of real classrooms—not in the tidy bullet points of a PowerPoint slide.
A coach guided by praxis is always asking one essential question: What does this mean for this teacher and their students?
Everything flows from that inquiry. Coaching conversations that honor praxis don’t just explore big ideas—they focus on application. The theory may be there, but it never stands alone. It’s always tethered to the teacher’s needs, goals, and context.
When coaches honor praxis, they support teachers in making decisions that are meaningful to them. The goal is not to impose a method, but to engage in a conversation that helps the teacher discover how a new approach might—or might not—work in their setting. Praxis turns coaching into a thoughtful, iterative process, grounded in real challenges and driven by the teacher’s own thinking.
This work requires courage. It’s much easier to default to scripts and one-size-fits-all answers. But true instructional coaching isn’t about easy. It’s about impact. And impact doesn’t come from surface-level adoption of strategies. It comes from deep, thoughtful reflection and purposeful action—praxis in its truest form.
In the end, praxis is about honoring the professionalism and wisdom of teachers. It’s about creating space for reflection, dialogue, and experimentation. It’s about being humble enough to step back and let teachers lead their own learning—because that’s how real change happens.
And if we’re committed to better outcomes for students, we can’t settle for anything less.
