How Teaching Like A Coach Leads To Engagement and Achievement

I’ve been coaching HS/MS and Youth athletic teams since 2006. 20 years.

Almost every weekend you’ll find me on a lacrosse field, football field, or basketball court coaching my kids and their teammates.

I love coaching. It’s challenging. It’s rewarding. And it is demanding.

Early on in my coaching career, one of my good friends Steve Mogg (who I taught English with and coached football with) made a comment that still resonates with me today: “Great teaching is like coaching. And great coaches have to teach.”

If you ever been a teacher and a coach, that will make sense immediately. For anyone who hasn’t, let me break it down for you here.

If you walk into any gym or field during practice and you'll notice something that rarely happens in a classroom — every single athlete is working. Not because they're afraid of getting benched, but because the coach has created conditions where effort feels purposeful and feedback/progress is constant. And the research says it translates directly to the classroom.

Coaches don't just deliver content. They develop people.

The conventional model of teaching has always been primarily about delivery. Prepare the lesson, teach the lesson, assess the lesson, move on. Coaching doesn't work that way. Coaches observe, diagnose, adjust, and intervene — in real time, with the individual in front of them.

Matthew Kraft and David Blazar at Brown University studied what happens when this model is applied to teacher development. In a block-randomized trial with 59 teachers in New Orleans charter schools, they found that coached teachers scored 0.59 standard deviations higher on an index of effective teaching practices. This is an effect size that is, by any educational standard, extremely significant.

When Kraft, Blazar, and Hogan then conducted a broader meta-analysis across 60 causal studies, they found that coaching programs produced pooled effect sizes of 0.49 SD on instructional quality and 0.18 SD on student achievement. To put that in perspective, after reviewing experimental evidence across a wide range of educational interventions, researcher Roland Fryer found only one thing that produced larger effects on student outcomes: one-on-one high-dosage tutoring.

Coaching outperforms nearly everything else districts spend money on.

The implications for how teachers structure their own classrooms are worth sitting with. If coaching is this effective for teacher development, what does it mean when teachers themselves coach their students rather than simply lecture them?

Feedback during the play, not after the game.

One of the most recognizable things coaches do is give feedback in the moment — not in a report card four weeks later, not in a quarterly review. They stop the drill, correct one thing, and run it again.

Diane Sweeney's research on Student-Centered Coaching cycles found that when coaching was structured around clear learning targets and ongoing formative assessment, student proficiency on those targets improved from an average of 5% at the start of a coaching cycle to 73% at the end. That's what happens when adults in a building stop treating feedback as a single event and start treating it as an ongoing process.

Teachers who adopt a coaching mindset do the same with their students. They stop asking "did they get it on the test?" and start asking "where is the thinking breaking down right now, and what can I do about it today?" That reorientation alone changes the texture of a classroom.

The knowing-doing gap is real in sports and the classroom. Coaching closes that gap.

Joyce and Showers identified something they called the knowing-doing gap: teachers can leave a training knowing exactly what they're supposed to do and still not do it. Not because they don't care, but because knowledge without application support rarely sticks.

The same gap exists for students. They can know a procedure, a formula, a writing technique, and still fail to use it when it counts.

This happens on a field all the time. Maybe we talked about it in practice, or in film review, and then during the game the cornerback doesn’t drop deep third, or the defender doesn’t rotate, or the player goes to the wrong side of the court.

We know these mistakes happen in real-time for all different reasons. And, it’s not because the players don’t KNOW what to do, it’s about the conditions and reps.

Coaches create conditions for application, watch what happens, and redirect. That's what engaged classrooms look like when teachers borrow from the coaching model: less time talking at students, more time watching what students actually do with their learning.

The University of Virginia's MyTeachingPartner (MTP) Coaching Model documented that coaching focused on teacher-student interaction quality led to improved student engagement and even a reduction in racial disparities in disciplinary referrals. The researchers were tracking what it felt like to be a student in the room.

Coaches know their players. That's not a soft skill. It's the whole job.

Every effective coach knows the difference between a player who responds to a challenge and one who shuts down under pressure. They use that knowledge to decide how to frame a correction, when to push, and when to build confidence first.

This is the dimension of coaching that gets left out of most instructional frameworks, and it's the one that has the most direct impact on engagement. Students don't tune in to teachers who see them as data points. They engage when they believe the adult in the room actually knows them.

Jim Knight, one of the leading researchers in instructional coaching, categorizes student engagement into behavioral, emotional, and cognitive dimensions. His framework is clear that emotional engagement (the sense of belonging and value) is foundational to the other two. You can design the most rigorous lesson in the building. Without the relational foundation, you'll lose half the room before you start.

This isn't about lowering the bar.

Coaching culture is not soft. Championship programs hold extraordinarily high standards. But those standards are held inside an ongoing relationship.

The athlete knows the coach sees them, believes in them, and will stay in the work alongside them. That combination is precisely what the research on teacher effectiveness shows matters most for student outcomes.

When teachers make the shift from content deliverer to development coach (when they're watching how students think, not just what they produce) engagement stops being something you chase and starts being something you build.

The research is there. The framework exists. We just need to borrow it from the gym and bring it into the classroom.

How to Apply This in Your Classroom Starting Today

You don't need a new curriculum, a grant, or a two-day training to start teaching like a coach. You need a few deliberate shifts in how you show up in the room.

Watch before you talk. The next time you give students a task, spend the first three to five minutes just observing. What are students actually doing with the work? Where is the confusion? Where is the confidence? Great coaches don't talk constantly (although I have this problem sometimes). Instead they watch, and then they intervene precisely. Try it once and notice how different the information you get is from what a raised hand would have told you.

Give feedback that lands the same day. Pick one class period this week and make it your goal that every piece of feedback you give happens while the work is still in progress, not after it's turned in. A one-sentence verbal note while a student is writing may be worth more than a paragraph of written comments three days later. The student is still in the problem. They can actually use what you're telling them. The feedback later matters, just like film review, but in the moment is underutilized in classrooms.

Know three things about every student. This doesn't have to be complicated. What motivates this kid? What tends to shut them down? What are they proud of? You don't need a formal survey…though those work fine. You can get there through two minutes of genuine conversation, paying attention during group work, or asking students to write a short "letter to their teacher" at the start of a unit. Coaches build performance on top of relationship. Start building the file, one conversation at a time.

Reframe effort out loud. When a student gets something wrong, the coaching response is not "that's incorrect" and moving on. It's "okay, that's where we are and here's how we get to where we need to be." Not every mistake needs a mini-lesson, but it does need a signal that wrong answers are part of the process, not the end of it. Say that out loud, regularly, until students believe it.

End with the training log. Borrow a page from athletic culture and close your class with 60–90 seconds of reflection. Students answer two questions: What got better today? What am I still working on? No grade. No judgment. Just documentation of growth. Over time, students start seeing themselves as people who are developing. That shift in self-perception is where real engagement lives.

None of this requires a program. It requires a decision to see your students the way a great coach sees their athletes. View them as people with potential who are mid-development, every single day.

Coach like a teacher. Teach like a coach.