Let’s face it, coaching teachers can be expensive—sometimes very much so.
With tight budgets and potential funding cuts looming, district leaders like you may be facing tough decisions about how to adjust programs like coaching. But even well-intentioned cuts, made with an eye toward cost savings, can quietly erode the very impact that drives coaching’s return on investment (ROI).
As one recent report titled Sustaining High-Quality Instructional Coaching in a Challenging Budget Environment, from Education Resource Strategies puts it, reducing coaching without restructuring support doesn’t actually improve ROI; it weakens it:
“Reducing instructional coach roles and placing those coaching responsibilities on principals and assistant principals, for example, decreases the investment side of the ROI equation. However, without reducing other responsibilities and protecting the time needed for effective coaching, offloading coaching to overworked school leaders may erode their impact on teaching and learning. And less impact with marginally lower investment does nothing to improve ROI.”
Fortunately, you don’t have to rely on piecemeal anecdotes, limited participation, and the occasional snapshot of student scores to measure how coaching impacts your organization.
This article outlines key strategies to discover and maximize your returns on this major investment through your coaching program’s implementation, impact, and influence. Let’s dive in.
Implementation: How teams manage coaching cycles
Why It Matters
You may have the right coaching framework for your district’s culture, the best coaches hired or lead teachers trained, or even stable funding sources. But your coaching program may still fall flat on its face thanks to implementation issues.
So many coaching programs sputter out because stakeholders struggle to operate consistently within their coaching model. Challenges range from disjointed documentation tools to haphazard meeting schedules to insufficient time for teachers to participate in coaching.
Getting ahead of implementation pitfalls means building a strong coaching infrastructure upon which to deepen and expand coaching. These efforts may feel costly upfront, but they ultimately save your district time, money, and effort.
How To Discover
Start by centralizing everything related to coaching under one digital roof, including rubrics, teacher feedback, instructional resources, coaching meetings, and more.
A single source of coaching truth helps you (and everyone else participating) cultivate a common language to talk about coaching cycles, outcomes, and goals. It also saves everyone time and headaches by streamlining core coaching processes, like setting goals or tracking how often coaches meet with teachers.
Last, leaders like you gain greater visibility into the health of the program itself. With centralized insights and data tracking, you will quickly see whether coaches have the capacity to meet with their coachees or if a particular teacher is engaging regularly with their peer coaching group. That way, you can help steer team members or adjust processes to keep coaching on track.
How To Maximize
Continue to monitor and support each coaching team as they navigate each cycle through to completion, from logging observations to completing rubrics. Use your insights to guide coaches, restructure feedback groups, adjust staffing, etc.
Fidelity to a coaching program, through both language and practice, maximizes the time and effort that each coach, teacher, and principal spends driving it.
Eliminate the hidden costs of inconsistent implementations with Grow. Configurable, framework-agnostic, and format-flexible, Grow centralizes and simplifies data collection and core coaching processes. Learn more.
Impact: How coaching improves teacher growth
Why It Matters
The point of coaching is to shift instructional practices and, by extension, impact student learning. But to measure how coaching yields that impact, you need concrete data.
Data creates transparency between a coach and their teachers about how they progress towards their goals and where they can continue to grow. Data may also serve as evidence for a teacher’s self-reflection, or even help them advocate for themselves during separate performance cycles.
Most importantly, the right coaching data supports leaders like you in making key decisions about the entire program, as well as keeping everyone accountable and informed about progress and potential gaps.
How To Discover
Monitor how coaching feedback and activities impact each teacher, whether they lead to specific changes in classroom instructional practices or require follow-up meetings when improvements are not realized. You may also consider reviewing other data, such as student achievement scores, depending on program-wide and individual coaching goals.
Consider also collecting qualitative feedback from participants about the program itself. Sending a survey twice a year or gathering insight through informal conversations can offer more opportunities to improve your coaching initiative.
How To Maximize
While data can illuminate what needs to change in a program, it can also point to bright spots that deserve celebration. Use impact data to point out campuses or peer coaching groups that have seen tremendous gains. Data can also help educate other key stakeholders, such as parents and school board members, on the efficacy of the coaching program.
Gain quantitative evidence of your coaching impact with Grow. Access comprehensive dashboards that highlight teacher, coach, grade-level, school, and district-wide patterns, allowing you to make decisions with data, not gut checks.
Influence: How coaching drives other key outcomes
Why It Matters
At its best, instructional coaching creates a ripple effect in other strategic areas for your district, especially those related to teacher engagement, satisfaction, career mobility, and retention rates.
In a time when many districts are strapped for funding, instructional investments like coaching become all the more valuable when they allow you to do more for your teachers with fewer resources.
How To Discover
Triangulate coaching trends against other district strategic goals year over year. Ask yourself questions like:
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- Are there patterns among teachers in coaching roles, such as staying longer in their positions or getting promoted into leadership?
- How many teachers have opportunities to step up into a peer-coaching role, and does this affect school-wide teacher retention or engagement?
- Are there patterns in teachers’ performance and their engagement with coaching programs?
How To Maximize
By investigating how coaching impacts other priorities beyond instruction, you build a strong case to advocate for additional resources or bigger changes to the program. For instance, you may work with the board of education to allocate funding for a new coaching stipend, collaborate with principals to adjust school schedules for peer coaching opportunities, explore hybrid coaching models to reach more teachers geographically, etc.
Grow’s year-over-year trends and easy integrations make it easy to see the impact of coaching on other district priorities, from teacher retention and pay improvements to student achievement.
Ready to elevate your instructional coaching with data-driven insights and efficient processes? Request a demo of Grow, the award-winning platform designed for teacher growth.
