The Impact Cycle: What Instructional Coaches Should Do to Foster Powerful Improvements in Teaching
Jim Knight
Identify. Learn. Improve.
When it comes to improving practice, few professional texts can rival the impact felt by Jim Knight’s Instructional Coaching. For hundreds of thousands of educators, Jim bridged the long-standing divide between staff room and classroom offering up a much more collaborative, respectful, and efficient PD model for achieving instructional excellence.
Now, one decade of research and hundreds of in-services later, Jim takes that work a significant step further with The Impact Cycle: an all-new instructional coaching cycle to help teachers and, in turn, their students improve in clear, measurable ways.
Purchase the Book:
“The Impact Cycle described in this book is a process coaches can use to partner with teachers to help them have a positive impact on students’ learning and well-being. The three stages of the cycle –identify, learn, improve –are central to coaching and, I believe, are also central to something fundamental: our universal desire to get better. I wrote this book to recognize that coaching is both simple and complex, and I want to honor that simultaneous simplicity and complexity by summarizing what we have learned to make it easier for instructional coaches to implement the Impact Cycle.”
– Jim Knight
Instructional Coaches Partnering With Teachers
01
What does it mean to improve?
What is instructional coaching?
Three approaches to coaching
Deep learning, deep coaching
02
Identify: getting a clear picture of reality
Getting a clear picture of current reality
Using video to get a clear picture of reality
Learning from students
Putting it all together
03
Questions to identify a PEERS Goal
PEERS Goals
Questions to identify a PEERS Goal
The Identify questions
04
Learn
Describing teaching strategies
Instructional playbooks
Modeling teaching strategies
05
Improve
The Improve stage of the Impact Cycle
Step 1: Confirm Direction
Step 2: Review Progress
Step 3: Invent Improvements
Step 4: Plan Next Actions
06
Instructional Coaches’ Toolkit
Strategies for enrolling teachers
Data-gathering tools
Instructional playbook
Strategies for assessing student attitude
Set Powerful Student-Focused Goals to Increase Success
Expand Your Learning
Explore our other resources to learn more about Instructional Coaching. We offer a variety of workshops, PDFs, informational videos and more.
This 2-day workshop describes the coaching cycle proposed for instructional coaches. The Impact Cycle, the product of 20 years of ICG research, provides a framework for any coaching scenario.
In this course, Jim Knight introduces the foundational principles, skills, and framework necessary for the first 90 days of instructional coaching, including The Partnership Principles, The Impact Cycle, and resources for coaching in action.
When it comes to improving practice, few professional texts can rival the impact felt by Jim Knight's Instructional Coaching. For hundreds of thousands of educators, Jim bridged the long-standing divide between staff room and classroom offering up a much more collaborative, respectful, and efficient PD model for achieving instructional excellence.
To view specific resources from the Impact Cycle book and reflection guide, visit our publisher's companion website for quick and easy access to all the resources.
These appendices contain standards, rubrics, feedback forms, self-evaluation forms, administrator forms, Impact Cycle checklist, and a candidate evaluation form intended to support the learning in the book and workshop.
A one hour webinar based on the book The Impact Cycle
Deep Instructional Coaching Uses the Impact Cycle
Jim Knight has spent more than two decades studying professional learning, effective teaching, and instructional coaching. He has coached thousands of teachers through the Impact Cycle. ICG believes that every school should implement a coaching cycle and our research has shown The Impact Cycle to make a positive impact on student learning. This aligns with our vision for excellent instruction, every day, in every class, for every student, everywhere.
Read About Other Success Factors
Our research has helped us identify seven success factors that are essential for developing and sustaining a great coaching program. Success Factor #4 is the Impact Cycle. View Jim Knight’s collection of books to learn about his research and other success factors.
