10 Key Policies and Practices for Instructional Coaching
This guide provides research-based guidance to educators interested in adopting new coaching programs or refining existing ones. We define instructional coaching as a significant and important element of an overall professional development plan.
Publication Date: January 2023
Publisher: The University of Texas at Austin/The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk
11 Powerful Coaching Tools for Teachers
This article provides 11 coaching tools that will support teachers with opportunities to reflect on their teaching practices, identify areas for improvement, and develop new skills and strategies to enhance their teaching effectiveness.
Author: Jennifer Hampton
Publication Date: April 2025
Publisher: IRIS Connect
27 Teachers-Coaching Practices that Transform Student Learning
This blog explores the benefits of coaching teachers over a training-only model and supports claims with research and statistics. Easily implemented concrete teacher-coaching practices are included.
Publication Date: August 2023
Publisher: KOI Education
Coaching for Ongoing Professional Learning Within Tiered Support Models
This document provides content-specific examples of how to structure educator-level and/or systems-level coaching as a mechanism to ensure ongoing professional learning to support tiered intervention occurs. It provides examples of coaching supports, models, and functions within the context of tiered intervention and data-based decision making.
Publication Date: March 2020
Publisher: National Center on Intensive Intervention
Coaching Hub
Instructional coaches are a key part of a supportive and growing school. Coaches provide support for teachers and students by providing individualized feedback to educators on instructional practices.
NIET has a suite of free resources geared toward coaches, including tools aligned to the NIET Teaching and Learning Standards, as well as templates to utilize during observations and walkthroughs.
Publisher: National Institute for Excellence in Teaching
Coaching Moves Framework: Building a Common Language for Facilitating Coaching Conversations
The updated framework focuses on how coaches can use the framework to support improvement, while not serving as a description of effective coaching or a measure of coaching quality. It
stresses supporting reflection and planning, supporting data collection, and using the five dimensions of stance, perspective, object, function, and tone.
Author: Arielle Boguslav
Publication Date: February 2025
Publisher: Annenberg Institute, Brown University
Comparison of the Effects of Coaching for General and Special Education Teachers in High-Poverty Urban Elementary Schools
This study investigated the effects of a data-driven coaching that merge observational assessment and performance feedback on general education versus special education teacher practices and student outcomes in high-poverty urban elementary schools.
Authors: Linda A. Reddy, Adam Lekwa, and Elisa Shernoff
Publication Date: 2021
Publisher: Journal of Learning Disabilities
Design Principles for Improving Teaching Practice with Instructional Coaching
This research brief identifies the best candidates to coach and to be coached, what effective coaches do, what supports coaches need to be successful, and what are key considerations for designing an evidence-based coaching program.
Authors: Laura Neergaard Booker and Jennifer Lin Russell
Publication Date: January 2022
Publisher: Annenberg Institute, Brown University
How to Make Coaching Cycles the Center of Instructional Coaching Work
This post explains how to advocate for prioritizing coaching cycles to school leaders. It discusses a flexible structure for coaching cycles that makes them possible, despite the widely varying instructional coaching assignments and workloads each instructional coach may carry.
Author: Kenny McKee
Publication Date: February 2025
Publisher: NWEA
Improving Teaching Practice with Instructional Coaching
This brief covers design principles for improving practice with instructional coaching, the evidence base for instructional coaching, the best candidates to coach and to be coached, what effective coaches do, supports coaches need to be successful, and key considerations for designing an evidence-based coaching program.
Authors: Laura Booker and Jennifer Russell
Publication Date: January 2022
Publisher: EdResearch for Recovery
Learning Walks Artifacts: Examples/Nonexamples
This document provides examples and nonexamples of Learning Walks, a collaborative coaching process to be modeled and experienced with partners, grade-level teams, content area teams, and/or leadership teams. The purpose of the process is to assist educators in staying focused on what matters most in learning environments, instructional practices, student interactions, and student engagement. Another purpose is to collect evidence of shared professional learning and collaboration over time.
Publication Date: 2020
Publisher: Arizona Department of Education
Principals of Instructional Coaching
This set of brief videos support the principles that provide a framework for effective coaching that fosters growth, enhances instructional practices, and promotes student achievement.
Author: Jim Knight
Publication Date: May 2023
Publisher: The Instructional Coaching Group
Purposeful Mentoring Conversations
In this podcast, Carol Pelletier Radford, Doug Fisher, and Vanessa Smith talk about Purposeful Mentoring Conversations. Purposeful mentoring conversations are crucial for effective mentorship to understand the specific needs and goals of the mentee so that mentors can tailor the conversation accordingly. By doing so, mentors can provide targeted guidance that will have a more significant impact on the mentee's growth.
Authors: Carol Pelletier Radford, Doug Fisher, and Vanessa Smith
Publication Date: April 2025
Publisher: Corwin
Study of Teacher Coaching Based on Classroom Videos: Impacts on Student Achievement and Teachers’ Practices
This study examined one promising strategy for individualized coaching: professional coaches—rather than district or school staff— providing feedback to teachers based on videos of their instruction. Feedback based on videos gives teachers the opportunity to observe and reflect on their own teaching and allows coaches to show teachers specific moments from their teaching when providing feedback.
Authors: Melissa Clark, Jeffrey Max, Susanne James-Burdumy, Silvia Robles, Moira McCullough, Paul
Burkander, and Steven Malick
Publication Date: June 2022
Publisher: U. S. Department of Education
Understanding Coaches’ Access to Support Teaching and Learning: Three Coach-principal Dyads’ Perspectives
This interview study employs a distributed leadership perspective to explore three coach-principal dyads’ perspectives on: the strategies coaches use to gain entry to teachers’ classrooms; the barriers that impede coaches’ access; and the supports that facilitate coaches’ access.
Author: Evthokia Stephanie Saclarides
Publication Date: 2021
Publisher: Journal of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies