Who Deserves Coaching? Everyone.

There’s a quiet assumption behind how some educational leaders think about coaching teachers or principals: it’s for teachers or principals who are new or are struggling. Give the new principals a mentor for a year or two. Send a coach in when things in a class aren’t going well. The assumption is that only some need coaching because once you’re “good,” you’re done. You’ve arrived. You can handle the rest yourself.

That assumption is wrong. In this article we draw on ideas from medicine and in particular, Dr. Atul Gawande’s New Yorker essay “Personal Best“, to shed light on why.

The myth of the finished expert

Gawande discusses the idea that after enough training, a student graduates and no longer needs instruction. He calls this “the traditional model of pedagogy.” He explains that this is how we train elite musicians, and it’s how we think about professional expertise generally. Doctors, he points out, are taught to see mastery the same way: something you build once and then maintain through sheer discipline. As Gawande puts it, medical training instills “an ethic of perfectionism”, which is the belief that expertise is a condition professionals must sustain entirely on their own.

Elite sports operate on the opposite premise. Coaching in professional athletics assumes that self-perfection is a myth. That almost nobody, no matter how well-trained, can identify their own blind spots and keep improving without outside eyes and external feedback. Gawande lays out the contradiction bluntly: these two views of expertise can’t both be right.

That contradiction is exactly what’s playing out in our schools. We treat teaching and school leadership like the elite musician model: you complete your preparation, demonstrate competence, and then you’re expected to continue improving largely on your own. Teachers are expected to refine instruction year after year. Principals are expected to become increasingly effective instructional leaders while navigating ever-growing organizational complexity. Yet both are asked to do this with remarkably little ongoing support or coaching. 

Gawande found that world-class musicians rely on someone else’s outside ear to hear the ways they can improve their performance. He also found that a surgeon with two thousand operations under his belt still benefits from someone else’s outside perspective. If they need it, why wouldn’t a tenth-year teacher?

The same is true for principals. A veteran principal may have led dozens of instructional initiatives, facilitated hundreds of classroom observations, and supported countless teachers. Yet they, too, develop blind spots. They benefit from another experienced leader who can observe how they facilitate a leadership team meeting, analyze instructional data with them, debrief classroom visits, or examine how they support teacher learning—not to evaluate them, but to help them see aspects of their leadership they cannot easily see themselves.

Gawande’s definition of coaching 

Gawande’s definition of coaching is useful here: coaches observe, judge, and guide. That’s a simple description, and it’s one that applies just as well to a veteran second-grade math teacher as it does to a first-year teacher. Every teacher, every practitioner of complicated practice, benefits from someone watching closely enough to notice what they can’t see about their own work. Gawande’s own coach, a retired surgeon, caught things in the operating room that eight years of unsupervised expertise had never surfaced: a patient positioned wrong for the assistant, an elbow drifting too high, a light quietly sliding out of the wound for half an hour without anyone noticing. Gawande had performed that exact operation roughly a thousand times. He still had blind spots.

Dr. Jim Knight, who has spent decades building instructional coaching programs, found something similar with teachers. When districts funnel coaching only toward newer or struggling teachers, they’re treating coaching as a remedial patch instead of part of a larger infrastructure for a whole profession. That approach has two problems. First, it doesn’t fix the underlying issue Knight’s research points to: that most teachers simply lack regular access to a colleague watching them work and talking it through afterward. Second, it’s unfair to the teachers who are good and want to get better. Those are exactly the teachers we typically tell to go build and sustain their own growth, alone, indefinitely.  

A similar pattern exists for principals. Leadership coaching is often reserved for first-year administrators or those experiencing significant challenges. Veteran principals, meanwhile, are expected to continue developing increasingly sophisticated instructional leadership without the benefit of regular coaching. Yet leading adult learning, developing leadership teams, and improving instruction across an entire school are complex practices that also benefit from skilled observation, thoughtful questioning, and ongoing reflection.

Gawande discovered as a surgeon that this expectation, improve over the course of your career by yourself, is not actually a reasonable one to place on any professional, no matter how skilled.

Coaching as infrastructure, not intervention

If coaching only shows up when something’s broken, it will always carry a stigma  — a signal that you’re the problem, not that you’re serious about your craft. Gawande’s essay suggests a different framing: coaching isn’t remedial. Coaching is how many high-performing professionals (surgeons, violinists, opera singers, basketball players) sustain excellence over a career. The plateau he describes hitting after eight years as a surgeon isn’t a personal failing. It’s what happens if individuals don’t get outside eyes on their work.

So who deserves coaching? Not just the struggling teacher, not just the first year principal. The accomplished teacher working to deepen students’ mathematical thinking deserves coaching. So does the experienced principal striving to become a stronger instructional leader, better support teachers, and build more coherent learning experiences across an entire school.

If we expect principals to create cultures where teachers embrace feedback, reflection, and continuous improvement, principals must experience those same conditions themselves. A culture of learning is difficult to build for others if it is not also true for the people leading the work. Coaching shouldn’t be a rescue plan. It should be the ordinary, expected condition of doing serious work well, for as long as you do it.

Organizing coaching infrastructure

If everyone deserves a coach, not just the struggling or the brand-new, then an important question is how we make that sustainable at scale. As we’ve discussed in a past post, one-on-one coaching cycles, however well-intentioned, can only reach a handful of teachers a year and reinforce the idea that coaching is remedial rather than routine. The better answer is to organize coaching around systems: shift the “unit of change” from the individual teacher to the grade-level team, so the coach’s job becomes facilitating collective inquiry rather than waiting for individual invitations. That’s how you deliver on the promise that coaching is for everyone: by building a coherent, school-wide structure where every teacher, on every team, gets access to outside eyes as a normal part of the job.

The same systems thinking applies to principals. Rather than limiting leadership coaching to first-year administrators, districts can create structures where principals regularly learn alongside peers, analyze evidence of teaching and learning together, receive coaching from experienced district leaders or principal supervisors, and reflect on their own leadership practice. Just as collaborative teacher teams become the unit of change for classroom instruction, principal networks can become the unit of change for school leadership. When coaching is organized as part of a coherent learning system, everyone has access to the outside perspective Gawande argues is essential for continued growth.

Coaching should not be something reserved for people who are struggling. It should be part of the professional infrastructure of a learning organization. In schools where everyone is expected to grow, everyone deserves someone who observes, asks thoughtful questions, and helps them see what they cannot see alone. 

The ideas in this post are influenced by the following scholars: Atul Gawande, Pam Grossman, Jim Knight