Instructional Coaching Toolkit

Explore our library of Instructional Coaching materials. Each section contains essential questions to guide you, and is supported by BetterLesson strategies and resources.

In order to optimize coaching efforts, clearly defined coaching roles must be established to help nurture healthy communication. Once the role of the coach has been established, many roles that fall within the scope of the coach’s work. It is imperative that coaches understand various styles of coaching and when to enact them to support educators. 

question-icon Essential Questions

  • What is the role of the coach?
  • What is “not” the role of the coach?
  • What are ways the role may shift at times?
  • What are some of the key styles and critical attributes of instructional coaching?

strategy-icon Strategies and Resources


Defining Your Role as a Coach: This strategy will support you to define your role for yourself, your school, and the teachers you support.

Planning for a Successful Launch of Coaching: This strategy provides a step by step approach and aligned resources to prepare for a successful launch of a coaching year. 

A Guide to Implementing Instructional Coaching: This guide will support education leaders to:
  • Define the purpose, roles, and responsibilities that make instructional coaches highly effective impact multipliers.
  • Address the three (3) challenges to integrating coaching into a school or district: time, talent, and training.
  • Offer an 8-step blueprint for implementing an instructional coaching model, either as a pilot or in a system-wide capacity.

The BetterLesson TML cycle is a highly effective student-centered approach to coaching. The TML Cycle is a recursive process that makes significant shifts in practice actionable using a change-over-time method.

question-icon Essential Questions

  • How can I build an effective coaching relationship?

  • What role does systems play in efficacy and relationship building? 

  • How can I maximize my time to focus on the coaching, not the paperwork?

strategy-icon Strategies and Resources

Student-Centered Coaching Continuum: This continuum shows the essential elements of the student-centered focused coaching approach.

Try-Measure-Learn (TML): The Heart of Continuous Improvement: TML creates change in teachers' classroom practice one step at a time, by identifying a high-impact strategy specifically related to a teacher's classroom needs, supporting the teacher in implementing that strategy, and immediately measuring its impact to determine next steps. 

Try-Measure-Learn: The Coaching Process in Action – BetterLesson: This blog post shares and shows the TML process in action with practitioners.

Norms ensure optimal productivity in group settings. Collaboratively developed norms help to ensure group buy-in and adherence. Instructional coaches are often charged to facilitate educator support in group settings.

question-icon Essential Questions

  • Why are norms necessary?

  • Why is it more beneficial for norms to be collaboratively developed?

  • How do norms support professional development and learning for educators?

strategy-icon Strategies and Resources

Developing Norms to Support Productive Group Work

Try-Measure-Learn sets a goal, and then establishes a "doable" cycle of continuous improvement. Coaches must plan collaboratively which creates trust and supports reporting. Such reporting will all the aggregation individuals' progress provides insight into school, grade - content area, district trends.

question-icon Essential Questions

  • How can I make changes to teaching practice accessible?

  • How do I meet teachers where they are at while also staying on track?

  • How can I spot trends across the grade level (school, etc.)?

strategy-icon Strategies and Resources

Try-Measure-Learn: The Heart of Continuous Improvement: The Try - Measure - Learn (TML) cycle is the foundation of the BetterLesson coaching model. TML creates change in teachers' classroom practice one step at a time, by identifying a high-impact strategy specifically related to a teacher's classroom needs, supporting the teacher in implementing that strategy, and immediately measuring its impact to determine next steps.

GROW: 4 Steps to an Effective Coaching Conversation: This cycle can be used to find or create teaching strategies aligned to specific goals and outcomes that teachers have in mind. 

Coaching Observation: This instructional leadership strategy provides an instructional coach with a variety of ways to focus a coaching observation on objective data. 

Illuminating Deeper Feedback: Illuminating deeper feedback is a process uncovered in this strategy that enables  coaches and leaders to support teachers to uncover feedback through questioning and coaching rather than simply giving feedback.

Collaborate to Analyze Progress and Increase Impact of Coaching: This strategy provides Instructional Leaders with a ready-made agenda, as well as supporting resources, for five different activities that allow them to reflect on progress made by a cohort of teachers being coached, set new goals for their coaching, and collaborate on the design of creative solutions to support the achievement of these goals.

Tools provide a means for coaches to focus on your priorities. BL has created tools and templates to help coaches, especially new coaches, create a scalable and manageable system of support.

question-icon Essential Questions

  • What critical elements support you to implement an effective coaching model?

  • What tools do you need to scale and manage your work?

  • How might tools and resources help prioritize work and increase productivity?

  • How do you build them?

strategy-icon Strategies and Resources

Managing a Coaching Calendar
Using Calendly to Drive Authentic Observation: This strategy guides instructional leaders to ensure follow up with the teacher in a time that aligns to when teachers want to do observations in their schedule, while also empowering the teacher to feel like they can own their implementation and next steps. 

Collaborate to Analyze Progress: This strategy provides Instructional Leaders with a ready-made agenda, as well as supporting resources, for five different activities that allow them to reflect on progress made by a cohort of teachers being coached, set new goals for their coaching, and collaborate on the design of creative solutions to support the achievement of these goals.

Creating a Calendar for Feedback and Observation Cycles: This strategy supports instructional leaders to develop a cadence of observation and feedback that supports teacher learning.

Facilitating challenging exchanges with educators requires the coach to consider the purpose, pre-work, intentions and desired outcomes. Coaches have emotions which are worth processing during the planning phase to cultivate emotional resilience.

question-icon Essential Questions

  • What skills do you need to lead hard conversations with educators?

  • How might planning for those exchanges increase your confidence?

strategy-icon Strategies and Resources

Difficult Conversations: This strategy also provides tips for teachers and instructional leaders to have productive difficult conversations with colleagues and to cut off unproductive difficult conversations when they encounter them.

Reflective Conversation Starters: This strategy supports a structured activity for staff to engage in reflective conversations in an indirect yet intentional manner. 

Reflecting on Progress: The resources below will give you access to question stems for coaches and teachers at each step of the PRO Co-Reflective process.

4 Steps to Grow: This cycle can be used to find or create teaching strategies aligned to specific goals and outcomes that teachers have in mind.

Anticipating Outcomes: This strategy will help you to anticipate different scenarios that could take place during an upcoming coaching session.

Debriefing and Setting Next Steps: This strategy will help to collaboratively establish actionable next steps for the teacher.

Additional Coaching Resources

For Leaders

Explore more about Instructional Coaching support at BetterLesson. Also, take a moment to browse the BetterLesson Learning Catalog to learn more about our products and services.

School leader holding a meeting

Learning Experiences for Instructional Coaches