Effective professional development requires continuous support that can best be delivered by a school-based coach. By now many of us are familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s supposition from the book Outliers about how much time it takes to become good at something. He writes, “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for expertise: ten thousand hours” (2008, p. 39). 

The complex task of teaching takes time to learn. Some may argue that excellence can only come with years of experience. Yet there is too much at stake for our young learners to have to wait on their teachers to gain enough experience to become effective. So we create opportunities for teachers to engage in professional learning, which serves as the “practice” that occurs in mastering other types of tasks. However, despite major financial resources invested in such learning opportunities, we know that often very little of it leads to a change in instructional practice, let alone increased learning for students. 

If the outcome of coaching is improved student learning, then coaching has to be in-depth and sustained over time. This requires a coach and teacher (or team of teachers) to determine where the students are in their learning, design and implement instruction that is differentiated, and modify the instruction to ensure that the students meet the standards. One way to provide the necessary support is by organizing coaching into cycles to create a structure that allows for sustained collaboration over a period of time. These coaching cycles provide a framework for designing ongoing and in-depth work with teachers. They occur in the following stages.