We’ve been thinking a lot about what makes leadership coaching actually matter.
There are plenty of good reasons to coach school leaders. The job is complex and often lonely. Leaders need space to step outside the daily churn, think through hard problems, get honest feedback, and examine how they themselves may need to change as leaders.
But at Springpoint, we want coaching to do something else, too: help leaders change what’s happening in their schools.
That sounds obvious. Of course leadership development should lead somewhere. But this year, as we’ve looked across our coaching engagements, we’ve realized that the connection can be easier to assume than to actually build.
A leader might be working on facilitating stronger teams, distributing leadership, giving better feedback, or managing change. All worthwhile! Meanwhile, their school might be trying to improve the quality of classroom discussion, increase cognitive lift, strengthen teacher practice, or create more meaningful learning experiences for students.
The question we’ve been getting much more precise about is: How do those two kinds of change connect?
Find the connection
Our coaching is grounded in what’s happening in the school. Through observation visits, we spend time in classrooms, talk with students and adults, examine instructional practice, and identify priorities for improvement. Leaders also reflect on their own practice using Springpoint’s Leadership Competencies.
The coaching goal comes from putting those two sources of information in conversation.
What is the school trying to change? What does that change require of the leader? Where might a shift in the leader’s own practice help create the conditions for something different to happen across the school?
This year, we’ve gotten much more precise about that last question. It’s easy to identify an instructional priority and a leadership goal that are both important. It’s harder—and much more useful—to articulate how they relate.
That connection gives the coaching somewhere concrete to go. Coach and leader can pay attention not only to how the leader’s practice is changing, but to what that change is beginning to make possible around them.
What this can look like in practice
We’ve seen this play out at Salem High School, where Principal Glenn Burns has been working with Springpoint coach Dr. Carlos Beato.
Salem was focused on strengthening its systems for teacher and staff development and advancing shared instructional priorities. Glenn, meanwhile, was working on “Build a Culture of Team,” one of Springpoint’s Leadership Competencies, with a particular focus on distributed leadership.
The connection between those goals became central to the coaching. If Salem needed more people taking ownership of instructional improvement, what did Glenn need to do differently as a leader to make that possible?
Some of the shifts were structural. Glenn reorganized the instructional leadership team around priority areas, creating more opportunities for staff to contribute based on their interests and expertise. He brought the full administrative team into the structure and created more intentional opportunities to use data and feedback to examine progress.
Others required a change in his own practice. During instructional rounds, Glenn did something that can be particularly hard for strong leaders: he stepped back. Other people led the debrief. They facilitated the discussion. They took responsibility for moving the conversation forward without waiting for Glenn to do it for them.
The point wasn’t for Glenn to become a leader who delegates more. Salem needed more people capable of owning instructional improvement, and Glenn was changing his leadership practice to help make that possible.
That’s the kind of connection we’re trying to make more explicit in coaching. Glenn’s work on distributed leadership wasn’t happening alongside Salem’s efforts to strengthen instruction. The leadership goal and the school goal reinforced each other: as Glenn created more space for others to lead, the team could take greater collective ownership of instructional improvement.
How far is the coaching conversation from a classroom?
School change is messy. A principal changes a leadership practice on Tuesday and students don’t suddenly have better learning experiences on Wednesday.
We don’t pretend the causal chain is that clean. But we also don’t want to shrug our shoulders at the distance between leadership development and student experience.
Leaders make decisions about what schools pay attention to. They shape how teachers learn together, how responsibility gets distributed, what gets followed up on, and whether an instructional priority becomes something people actually do or something that lives in a strategic plan. They also set the climate in a school building, signaling through their own vulnerability and public learning if this school is this a safe space to make mistakes, to try new practices, to learn in public.
So we’ve started asking ourselves a version of this question more often: How far is this coaching conversation from a classroom?
Sometimes there are several steps between the two. That’s okay. What matters is whether we can still see the path. What are we trying to change about teaching and learning? What needs to change across the school for that to happen? What does that require of the leader? And then we coach there.
Getting more precise about that path has opened up a next set of challenges for us: identifying the evidence that can tell us whether change is taking hold, noticing when a shift in one leader’s practice begins to influence how others work and lead, and setting goals that connect these different levels of change without assuming the relationship between them is linear.
We’re still getting better at this. But the more closely we examine that path, the clearer we get about what strong coaching asks of leaders: to work on themselves while staying deeply connected to what they’re trying to change around them.