How targeted coaching for school leaders trickles down to student success

The best leaders never stop learning.

In my education career, I have served as a teacher, a director of academics, and as a leadership coach working with hundreds of school and system leaders. Every school that I have seen undergo a dramatic improvement has one thing in common: a dedicated leader who is willing to be coached.

The challenge is leaders rarely have access to the level of support and resources that are necessary for their development. What principals actually need is a thought partner in the form of a leadership coach who can establish a dynamic of growth and collaboration, rather than coming in and telling them what to do.

In my current role with Relay Graduate School of Education, my job is to build up strong leaders like Katie Harshman so she can build stronger teachers at her school and improve student outcomes. Katie is the principal at Minnequa Elementary in Pueblo, Colorado, and in 2017 her school had been struggling with ensuring that students were academically on track. After a five-year partnership between Relay and Pueblo School District 60 to focus coaching at the district level, teachers reported better working conditions for instruction and learning while student outcomes were also on the rise.

I started working with Katie in 2019, when Minnequa Elementary was under a state order to improve or close. By the time my coaching with Katie ended in 2022, Minnequa Elementary had proudly exited turnaround status. Here are some of the strategies I used to support Katie, who implemented them purposefully and strategically with her teachers and instructional leaders to achieve schoolwide success.

Start with the school leader’s strength and build from there

Deciding what challenge to address first can be overwhelming, especially for a school that is in turnaround. My work involves connecting with school leaders to find their passions and help identify tools they already have at their disposal.

At Minnequa, Katie felt most comfortable with the math curriculum, so that is where we dug in first. In 2019, the median student growth percentile for math at Minnequa was 54. That figure had jumped to 74 by the time our work together ended in 2022.

Gathering data through observation

Although teacher observation is a common practice, school leaders can sometimes go through the motions without seeing growth if they don’t have the proper coaching.

During my first visit to Minnequa, Katie told me she knew she needed to spend more time in classrooms, but wasn’t sure how to build the systems to make that happen effectively. In my teaching days, my principal would walk in, watch me for about five minutes, leave a Post-it note with some vague encouragement, and…that was it for the classroom walkthrough.

At Minnequa, we knew we had to do things differently: the classroom observation sessions had to serve as a platform that could support the deep and ongoing development of the school’s teachers. Katie and I would observe and gather data together during site visits – what is going well and how can we build on those things? Which elements of the curriculum are not working for you? I would say about 30 to 40% of our time spent together was in classrooms observing teachers, naming our action steps and deciding how to prioritize them.

No time like the present to share real-time feedback

During classroom visits, I encourage school leaders to intervene in real-time to adjust and fix instruction instead of waiting days to share feedback. But what exactly does that look like, and how can principals give real-time feedback to their teachers without disrupting the flow of their classroom?

The real-time feedback coaching model that Katie adopted features a series of tiered interactions, beginning with silent hand signals and “whisper prompts'' before progressing through the explicit modeling of instructional techniques. A non-verbal cue might involve discretely pointing toward students who are off task so the teacher can re-engage them. We also make sure to leave space for reflection and feedback within any lesson.

“She has shown me how to really get into every kid's business, for lack of a better word,” said Margaret Nelson, a 3rd grade teacher at Minnequa, of her classroom visits with Katie. “You’re always walking around, you’re naming what you're looking for. So that you can take real-time data of what kids are getting right, what they're getting wrong.”

This model is based on a four-step process:

1. Framing what the coach will demonstrate,
2. Modeling an instructional practice or technique,
3. Debriefing quickly, in-the-moment, and
4. Observing how the teacher immediately practices the technique that the coach just modeled

Minnequa is just one example of how school leaders can create safe spaces for teachers to grow by modeling humility and an eagerness to learn, resulting in better outcomes for students.