Implementing instructional coaching: A guide for school leaders

Steve Farndon, Ambition Institute, UK Instructional coaching is not only theoretically promising as the only form of CPD that reliably affects student achievement (Kraft et al., 2018), but its impact is also visible in schools. Through our work at Ambition Institute, we’ve seen maths teachers build success with their most challenging groups by focusing on the design of their worked examples, and science teachers generating rich understanding through carefully sequenced retrieval practice. At a whole-school level we’ve seen the growth of new cultures debating and discussing teaching and learning. Instructional coaching has been central to these developments by supporting teachers to understand and apply new theories of learning to the specific contexts of their classrooms. However, implementing instructional coaching is not straightforward – this is because it isn’t always clear what makes it work. There are some questions that are worth grappling with that get to the heart