Curriculum Coaching Resources

What is an instructional playbook?

As my colleagues Ann Hoffman, Michelle Harris, Sharon Thomas, and I explain in The Instructional Playbook (2020), anyone who aspires to be an effective instructional coach needs an instructional playbook.

Part of what prompted us to write that book was our discovery that many coaches cannot name the teaching strategies they share with teachers or are unclear about how the strategies they share are to be effectively implemented. Since the job of an instructional coach is to support teachers as they try to get better, coaches need to understand—and understand well—the strategies they share.

Why do coaches need an instructional playbook?

Playbooks are essential because they make learning real. Far too often, we pretend professional development will have a positive impact on what takes place in classrooms when we know that, in reality, usually nothing will happen after the event.

A presenter might offer an entertaining and interesting workshop, but unless the participants do the hard work of deeply understanding strategies and how to use them, they won’t implement them. The shelves in teachers’ classrooms around the world are filled with books that were never opened once the workshop was over.

Instructional playbooks change that by empowering coaches and teachers to take research off the shelf and put it into action in the classroom.

Instructional Playbooks are Essential Curriculum Coaching Resources

In short, instructional playbooks are organizational tools that professional developers use to (1) identify high-impact teaching strategies and (2) explain those strategies to teachers so they and their students can meet powerful goals.

Instructional playbooks are essential because, too often, teachers don’t have the specific, practical information they need to implement teaching strategies effectively, even after reading books or attending professional development sessions. Like all professionals, teachers need ideas to be translated into explicit, actionable knowledge if they are going to implement them.

As instructional coach April Strong explains, “The instructional playbook brings clarity by breaking things down, step-by-step, to impact how our teachers are instructing our students.”