In our work with schools, we interact with instructional coaches every week. But what, exactly, is a coach? In the context of mathematics education and instructional improvement, we think of a coach as someone skilled at facilitating teacher learning who brings specialized knowledge to bear on professional conversations. Coaching is essentially job-embedded professional development, meaning teachers learn in and from their own practice while a coach supports them in planning for, enacting, and reflecting on their teaching.
While research has clearly defined what strong coaching interactions look and sound like—a topic we will dive into in a future post—it is first critical to examine the “why” and “how” of the coaching role itself. We know from research on coaching that how you frame the role of the coach from the start significantly influences its effectiveness. Traditionally, coaching has been viewed through two lens: as a lever for individual reform or as a lever for systemic reform. You may recall that we are interested in supporting schools and districts as learning organizations. We think to do this, coaching needs to be reconceptualized as coaching for systems change.
The Pitfalls of the Individual Reform Frame
The prevailing frame for coaching in many U.S. schools remains largely reactive and individually focused. In this model, coaches often wait for invitations from individual teachers to help them improve or focus exclusively on a teacher’s specific interests. While well-intentioned, this approach has several significant drawbacks:
- Fails to Harness the Collective: When coaching is siloed into one-on-one interactions, you lose the power of the collective. Teachers are not working toward a shared instructional goal, and the school misses the opportunity to build school-wide coherence.
- The “Deficit” Stigma: If coaching is only framed as support for individuals, it often becomes associated with teachers “in need”. This makes coaching feel like a “bad thing”—if you are working with a coach, the perception is that you are an underperforming teacher.
- The Support Cliff: Many programs focus exclusively on new teachers. While early-career support is vital, a purely individual frame often means that veteran teachers stop receiving support after their first few years, even as standards and curricula change.
- Issues of Scale: One-on-one coaching cycles are difficult to “scale up” to achieve school-wide reform. As some scholars have noted, the traditional approach may simply be inadequate for moving an entire system forward.
Reframing for Systemic Reform: The Collective Approach
In contrast, coaching for systems emphasizes coaching as a means to build collective capacity. In this model, the school-wide professional community becomes the primary focus, replacing the model of teachers working in isolation with a vision of improving practice together.
As researcher Melinda Mangin has highlighted, the framing of the coach’s role matters deeply. If a district frames a coach’s role as building individual capacity but expects systemic change, the resulting enactment is often disjointed and fails to meet school-wide goals. To avoid this, successful systems-oriented coaching shifts the “unit of change” from the individual teacher to the grade-level team.
Who gets to work with the coach in each approach?
Here are two images. One depicts a few teachers getting to work deeply with the coach across a school year, this shows the individual reform frame where an individual teacher is the “unit of change”. The other depicts what happens when coaching is framed for systemic reform and the unit of change is the grade level team. Further, as can be seen in the image, facilitating teacher collaboration becomes the main work of the coach.
Prime Example: Building Collective Capacity
We care about supporting flourishing classrooms for all teachers and students. One of the best examples of this shift comes from Hilltop Elementary, a school that transformed from the bottom 5% of its state to a “school of distinction” by reorganizing the school to support teacher learning, which meant reorganizing its coaching system. Rather than waiting for invitations, the coach at Hilltop facilitated regular, collaborative routines that brought teachers together to study content, student thinking, and pedagogy simultaneously.
Key features of this systemic approach include:
- Shared Agreements: Coaches help teachers develop a common language and shared meaning regarding what high-quality instruction looks like across the school.
- Deprivatizing Practice: By moving coaching into group settings, the “privacy” of the classroom is replaced by public, collaborative inquiry.
- Coherent Learning Systems: The coach’s work is integrated across school, grade, and individual levels to ensure everyone is moving toward the same ambitious goals.
How does this look in practice? The coach had settings to support systemic change. For example, they utilized a structure called Math Learning Labs. These are full-day experiences where teachers co-plan a lesson, enact it together in a real classroom, and then reflect on what they learned about student thinking. The coach and teachers also engaged in “Teacher Time Outs” that took place while instruction unfolded, during which any educator in the room can call a time out to pause and think aloud with their colleagues. In all of these settings, the coach facilitated teacher collaboration and positioned herself as a co-learner alongside teachers.
Does Systemic Coaching Abandon the Individual?
Absolutely not. Shifting to a systems frame does not mean coaches stop working with individual teachers. Instead, it repurposes individual support to serve the collective goal.
When a coach works “at-elbow” with a teacher in their classroom, they are providing just-in-time support to try out a practice the team has collectively studied. This individualized support is not a reactive “fire-fighting” mission but a strategic step in a larger, coherent plan for implementing school-wide goals.
Conclusion
Efforts to facilitate school-wide change have moved toward collaborative capacity building. This requires a shift in our professional development literature and practice—moving away from individual choices toward collective sense-making and joint inquiry.
When we frame coaching as a tool for the collective, we move away from a deficit model of “fixing” teachers and toward a humanizing, inquiry-based culture where everyone, including the coach and the principal, is a learner. As you set up your coaching program, remember: the frame you choose determines whether you are supporting individuals in their silos or building a powerful, coherent system capable of lasting reform.
The ideas in this post are influenced by the following scholars: Cynthia Coburn, Jessica Granger, Teresa Lind, Melinda Mangin, Jennifer Russell, and Sarah Woulfin.
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