Coaching Meets High-Leverage Practice
James Tucker urged embedding coaching around shared high-leverage practices — managing cognitive load, retrieval, and formative feedback — to balance teacher autonomy with evidence-based excellence argued. He recommended tools like the Great Teaching Toolkit to standardize practice without eroding professional judgment.
The Great Teaching Toolkit’s Evidence Review was published in June 2020 [teachertoolkit.co.uk], and its "Model for Great Teaching" supplies a common professional language and step‑by‑step practice elements for coaches to anchor schoolwide instruction [evidencebased.education]. One academy network that piloted Toolkit-aligned work scheduled sixteen afternoon professional sessions across a year to build facilitative coaching skills and ensure every teacher from nursery to Year 13 engaged in at least one course [cobis.org.uk]. Instructional‑coaching research recommends three structural moves — match coaches to clear instructional priorities, bankroll coaching infrastructure, and require coach expertise in local curricula — as core design features for scaling agreed practices without micromanaging teachers [aasa.org]. Practical classroom tools map to those priorities: high‑leverage routines toolkits provide dozens of explicit model‑try‑feedback transition routines for tightening morning starts and lesson handoffs [cesa6.org], while umbrella reviews and recent primary‑school trials quantify the payoff of formative feedback and retrieval practice for measurable learning gains (meta‑reviews and a 2025 primary trial respectively). mdpi.com
