Why August is Too Late to Have a Plan
Anyone who is in education knows that August feeling. The days start coming and they don’t stop coming and then BAM! How did it get to be September already? It’s ‘the calendar has been in control rather than me’ feeling and it’s probably not going to slow down any time soon. The problem? When it comes to instructional coaching, we can’t wait until mid- or end of September to have a coaching system in place. By then, the year has already set its own pace and coaches are busy filling it.
Here’s what we’ve seen in schools time and again: coaches running cycle after cycle, leaders with no clear window into whether any of it is working, and an end-of-year conversation where everyone agrees it was a busy year but nobody can say what actually moved.
Busy isn’t the same as effective. And that’s not a coaching problem, it’s a leadership infrastructure problem.
The good news? It’s a solvable one, and August is the perfect time to solve it. Here are 3 steps every leader in charge of instructional coaches should take before school starts.
Step 1: Determine Your Coaching Focus
Before you assign a single coach, you’ve got to know your greatest instructional need and identify who needs the most support. This step has three moves inside it, and doing all three before August is what separates intentional coaching programs from busy ones.
- Start with your data
- Identify who needs to be coached
- Inventory your coaches
Start With Your Data
Your data already shows what your school needs most. The goal here is to name it specifically enough that it becomes a coaching anchor for the whole year.
- What does your data say is your biggest instructional need this year?
- Is it a specific subject? A grade band? A skill gap that showed up in state test scores?
Identify Who Needs to be Coached
Not all teachers need the same kind of coaching. Knowing the difference before August changes how you structure the work entirely.
- In your highest-need areas, who are the teachers?
- Are there a lot of new teachers in these areas? New to the content?
Inventory Your Coaches
Coaches are often assigned based on availability. Intentional programs assign based on need.
- Who do you have and what are they equipped to coach?
- How will you assign them with intention and not just availability?
Step 2: Build a Tracking System
Every strong instructional coaching program has a system designed to show whether coaching is working. Without one, coaches don’t know if they’re making progress and neither do leaders.
The tracking system doesn’t need to be overly complicated. What it needs to be is consistent and shared. Use these questions to guide how you build it:
- What data will coaches collect inside their cycles?
- How will they document progress toward the instructional goal?
- What does “movement” look like and how fast do you need to see it?
Need a starting point? We built a Sample Tracker that can help you visualize all the possibilities with tracking what’s working, what’s not, and provide you with the data to make strategic adjustments.
Step 3: Pre-Plan Your Checkpoints
Here’s the step that almost never happens, and leaders recognize it immediately when we name it. If collaboration with coaches isn’t on the calendar before August, it more than likely won’t happen. The year fills up too fast.
Pre-planning the feedback loop before the year begins is a power-move for any coaching program. It’s what bridges what coaches are doing and what leadership actually knows what is happening. Before school starts, we suggest your team gets these on the calendar:
- Monthly check-ins with coaches (not optional)
- A standing agenda so that every check-in has a purpose
- A mid-year metric review date
- Clarity on who else needs to be in the feedback loop
- A process for adjusting coaching focus if data isn’t moving
Why These Steps Matter Before August
Coaching is an investment that requires a return on that investment, not just activity. And, from what we have learned from our coaching work in schools, what gets coached gets improved. But improvement doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when leaders set a clear anchor, build a system that makes progress visible, and stay in the loop all year long.
When those three things are in place, coaches have a clearer understanding of the job they must do. At the end of the year, coaches and leaders will be able to tell the story of what moved and why. The calendar is going to do what the calendar does, and it will be September before you know it. The difference is whether your coaching program is ready and moving forward when it gets there.
What gets coached gets improved.
Click to download the 25-26 Edu20/20 Walkthrough Executive Summary Report.
August will come whether your coaches are ready or not. These three steps will make sure your coaches are.
To make it even easier, we created a free Get Your Coaches Ready Before August: Planning Checklist, a one-page tool that walks through all three steps so you don’t have to build this from scratch. Grab it, share it with your team, and go into August with a plan.
And if you want to see this full framework in action with some examples, watch the recording of our free July webinar: Get Your Coaches Ready: 3 Steps Before August That Actually Matter.
Ready to go deeper?
The Edu20/20 Instructional Coaching Institute is this November. Learn more and register, or find out how to bring the institute to YOU.
