I recently left a coaching session with one of my first-year principals feeling encouraged.
She was growing in all the ways a coach hopes to see. She asked more reflective questions, gave stronger instructional feedback, and approached challenges with greater confidence. Our conversations had shifted from solving immediate problems to expanding her thinking. I left convinced the coaching was working.
A week later, when I visited her school, I realized something different. During a 5th-grade professional learning committee (PLC) meeting, I noticed the conversation centered on operations instead of learning. Teachers looked to the principal I had been coaching to interpret assessment results, determine what they meant, and identify the instructional next steps, instead of drawing on their own knowledge of their students. While the principal showed some of the reflective habits we had cultivated during our coaching conversations—she was asking more open-ended questions to invite the team’s insight, for example—she ended up offering an answer before allowing the team to wrestle with it.
When I walked away from that meeting, one thought stayed with me: coaching had changed the leader, but it had not yet changed the school’s culture.
That moment forced me to rethink something I had believed for years. We often have measured coaching by stronger instructional feedback, improved classroom practices, better observations, or the growth of the individual being coached. Those outcomes matter. They are visible signs that coaching is making a difference.
However, what if they are not coaching’s greatest contribution? Could we be measuring the wrong thing?
How Schools Learn Together
Coaching is not defined just by conversations, or the individual growth of one person. It is defined by the habits of thinking those conversations leave behind and the way those habits change an entire organization. Every coaching conversation has the potential to shape how people ask questions, challenge assumptions, give feedback, and solve problems together. Over time, those habits become the culture.
Every coaching conversation has the potential to shape how people ask questions, challenge assumptions, give feedback, and solve problems together.
Researchers have consistently found that lasting school improvement depends less on the knowledge of individual leaders than on an organization’s ability to learn collectively. PLCs are most effective when educators engage in shared inquiry, examine evidence together, and assume collective responsibility for improving instruction and student outcomes (Prenger et al., 2021). Coaching builds that capacity not by providing answers, but by improving the quality of professional interactions, the questions educators ask, the assumptions they challenge, and the thinking they develop together.
Schools invest enormous time and resources into professional learning. Teachers leave professional learning sessions energized. Leaders return with new strategies and ambitious plans. However, months later, classrooms often look remarkably similar.
The problem is rarely a lack of information; it is that these strategies and ideas need to be repeated and applied in moments that, over time, shape how the adults in the building think, learn, and improve together. Culture is built in the conversations that follow professional learning. It grows in faculty meetings where questions matter more than quick answers, in collaborative teams willing to examine practice honestly, and in everyday interactions where curiosity becomes more valuable than certainty.
Thinking Like a Coach
The strongest schools do not simply have coaching. They think like coaches. Questions become more common than answers. Feedback becomes part of everyday professional relationships instead of something reserved for evaluations. Reflection moves beyond formal coaching sessions and becomes a shared expectation. Learning belongs to everyone, regardless of title or experience.
The strongest schools do not simply have coaching. They think like coaches.
That kind of culture depends on trust. When educators feel psychologically safe, they admit uncertainty, ask difficult questions, challenge one another’s thinking respectfully, and take instructional risks without fear that mistakes will define them. Trust is not simply the outcome of effective coaching; it is the condition that allows coaching to spread beyond one conversation and influence an entire organization. Eventually, coaching becomes almost invisible.
Perhaps that is the future we should imagine for coaching. Not a role, not a program, not another initiative competing for educators’ time, but the way a school learns.
That realization is what changed my own coaching. In my next conversation with the principal, I asked her to reflect on the PLC and consider how she could intentionally surface and amplify her teachers’ thinking. From that point forward, we measured success by the collective learning taking place in the room, not simply the leader’s growth.
When coaching changes how educators think together, it changes what the organization is capable of becoming.
