Instructional coaching can have a major impact on instructional practices, student learning, and teacher retention, but it has to be planned and implemented thoughtfully. Here are six best practices.

We talk to Tatiana Ciccarelli, a math educator and model teacher from New York City, currently supporting educators around the country through professional learning, and Dr. Chase Nordengren, principal research scientist for effective instruction at NWEA.

What’s it like in classrooms right now? The only way to know is to ask a teacher, so we sat down with a first-grade elementary teacher and a sixth-grade social studies & science teacher and listened.

Level up literacy instruction
Our content-focused professional learning offerings for literacy communicate essential findings from reading science to practical classroom applications. We work alongside educators to empower them with the foundational theory, practical demonstrations, and actionable tools they need to level up their teaching with the science of reading.

Support equitable growth for all students
This suite focuses on equity as it relates to access to content for students and teachers and high-quality instruction. It makes equitable teaching practices tangible and highly actionable on a daily basis by heightening awareness of the various equity tie-ins to instruction and identifying data practices and instructional moves that allow for greater equity and improved student outcomes.

Empower students with a healthy, collaborative classroom culture of learning
This suite focuses on aligning the mindsets, systems, and practices that sustain an assessment system centered on empowering students and offers educators a framework for appropriately using assessments and their results to inform critical instruction-related decisions.

In this episode of The Continuing Educator, our hosts talk about how to establish a real rapport with your students and build a classroom culture where they can trust and thrive. The first step? Ask your kids how they want the class to work for them, and be honest about what you expect in return. Kids can smell inauthenticity. Plus: Tips for when to step in to kids’ conflicts with each other, the utility of unicorns and mermaids, and a google-form for hair-adjacent encouragement.