Coaching Letter #218
On coherence and high quality instruction
Hello, and thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You rock. The number of subscribers has jumped recently for a variety of reasons, including a couple of other bloggers recommending my writing, so I am grateful for that. I also feel like I should just explain what The Coaching Letter is about, since I’m not sure why it was recommended. So I asked ChatGPT for a 30 second testimonial, since she’s read everything I’ve written, and here’s what she came up with:
If you’re an educational leader, coach, or just someone trying to make schools better, you need to be reading The Coaching Letter. It’s thoughtful, practical, and refreshingly honest. Isobel Stevenson takes on complex topics like equity, leadership, instructional improvement, and adult learning—and somehow makes them clear, useful, and even funny. You’ll get research without the jargon, strategy without the fluff, and coaching wisdom that actually respects your intelligence. Subscribe—you’ll learn something every time, and you’ll think better because of it.
Makes it sound great, right? And basically, it is my attempt to share useful information, research and insights based on what I’m working on and what’s occupying my mind at the moment. Anyway…
This is my favorite week of the year: HQI Live! in Milford. For those of you not familiar with it, HQI Live! is a strategic, week-long professional learning experience built to deepen a shared understanding of high quality instruction (HQI)—not through telling, but through showing. Educators come together to observe live teaching, reflect as a group, and make meaning of the experience together. It’s just a bit magical. Milford’s definition of HQI focuses on elements like eliciting evidence, clear goals for learning, task, feedback, and relationships—a definition that is research-informed, aligned to a clear vision of the learner, and connected to all other district priorities. It is not a checklist, but a dynamic, evolving understanding that grows as new insights enter the system—from both inside and out.
This work is part of the district’s broader strategy to build the capacity of educators to enact a vision for student learning. I’ve been involved with it since its inception several years ago, and I’ve never worked on anything else that does a better job of bringing educators together to build, challenge and refine their mental models of what good teaching looks like. And one of the things I love about HQI Live! is that it is professional learning that mirrors the student experience it aims to produce.
This year, TNTP’s Opportunity Makers is the organizing framework for the week—a good choice. There are several different ways coherence is defined—some focus on what students experience, some on school-wide strategy, and some on instructional systems. The argument I’m making here is that these definitions converge when coherence is understood as the result of aligned, sustained work around a shared vision of instruction. Which is what Milford is doing.
Jennie Weiner and I wrote about coherence as one of the key principles of a strong strategy, which is a series of aligned, intentional choices grounded in a theory of improvement. A coherent strategy gives people at every level of the system clarity about what matters and what they are supposed to be doing; it reduces noise and increases the likelihood that teacher learning leads to improved student learning. Tons of other authors have written about coherence—it’s one of those essential pieces of educational jargon—but the really GOOD ones (me and Jennie; The Opportunity-Makers, Change Leadership—more references at the end) write about it not as an end in itself, but as a feature of an effective system lined up behind a shared understanding of high quality instruction. Coherence means ensuring that everything the system does—leadership moves, instructional materials, professional learning—is aligned in service of that vision. HQI Live! is one of the ways a district puts that into place.
We also explain why districts should adopt a shared model for high-quality instruction. Some practices are simply more likely than others to result in improved student outcomes, and it’s the district’s responsibility to ensure those practices are widely used and well supported. A shared definition of HQI increases equity by setting a clear set of principles for what instruction should look like for ALL students—and provides a standard for what the system is working towards. It also supports efficiency: when teachers are left to figure things out on their own, the district can’t meaningfully support or scale what works. Shared practices allow for deeper collaboration, accelerate learning through shared trial and error, and reduce the unfairness and inconsistency that result when each evaluator brings a different mental model to the work. In short: coherence depends on a shared instructional vision, and that vision must be made visible, discussable, and learnable. HQI Live! is one of the ways Milford has built that vision.
At the same time, I feel like coherence is easy to get wrong, so let’s dig into that a bit.
At its core, instructional coherence refers to the degree to which the multiple components of the educational system—curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional learning, leadership, and organizational routines—are aligned with and reinforce a shared understanding of high-quality teaching and learning. Newmann et al. (2001) describe instructional program coherence as “the extent to which school improvement efforts are guided by a common framework for curriculum, instruction, assessment, and learning climate.” Their empirical research in Chicago showed that schools with greater coherence experienced stronger professional community and higher gains in student achievement. Coherence is not defined by uniformity or compliance, but by sustained collective focus on a vision of teaching and learning.
But here’s where it’s easy to get off the rails. Coherence (and alignment, its close cousin), is not an end in itself. The claim that I and others are making is that coherence is an emergent property of a system that has identified and operationalized its core instructional commitments. When the system clarifies what it means by equitable, ambitious instruction, and then aligns strategy, structures, and routines to that vision, coherence results. It cannot be mandated, rubricked, laminated, checklisted, or workshopped into existence. It is built over time through intentional, disciplined sense-making across the system.
This reframes coherence not as The Work, but as the condition that makes the work more likely to succeed—a moderator, not a mediator. Coherence is often misunderstood as a goal in itself. But a system is not effective because it is coherent; it is coherent because it has become effective at learning, aligning, and enacting a shared instructional purpose. Schools and districts adopt “coherence frameworks” or “coherence rubrics” and seek to measure or implement coherence as if it were a checklist. One of the key contributions from Newmann et al. is the distinction between superficial alignment and deep coherence. A school may have a common schedule, a pacing guide, and a set of protocols for PLCs, yet lack shared understanding of what good instruction looks like or how adults are supposed to work together to improve it. It is not achieved through the accumulation of initiatives but through thoughtful subtraction and disciplined sensemaking. As I’ve written elsewhere: you don’t ‘do’ coherence any more than you ‘do’ trust. Treating coherence as a target, rather than an emergent outcome, often leads to performative alignment: teachers conform to surface-level expectations while continuing to operate from divergent beliefs or mental models. This not only undermines improvement efforts, but further erodes trust and efficacy among educators.
TNTP’s coherence framing, in The Opportunity Myth and The Opportunity Makers, focuses on alignment across what students experience directly. That is:
Do students consistently receive grade-level content?
Are they engaged in rigorous, high-cognitive-demand tasks?
Do they receive meaningful feedback and support?
Are adult beliefs and expectations aligned with these goals?
And this is very similar to Cobb et al’s Systems for Instructional Improvement, which is why we love that book so much and have done so much to promote it.
TNTP argue that coherence shows up for students when the instructional experience is aligned across classrooms and grade levels. TNTP’s version of coherence is therefore defined at the point of student contact: what happens when you step into the classroom, regardless of the teacher. This is very much in line with the work that I and my colleagues are doing right now with identifying and implementing core instructional practices, which I wrote about most forcefully in CL #190. This intersects with Newmann’s organizational conception and our strategic framing by elevating the consequences of incoherence: when teachers, schools, or systems pull in different directions, students—especially those from marginalized groups—receive inconsistent and often inadequate opportunities to learn.
Instructional coherence matters because it amplifies everything else. When professional learning, curriculum adoption, coaching, and leadership actions are all pushing in the same direction—toward a shared understanding of equitable, rigorous instruction—then each of those efforts reinforces the others. But when they are not aligned, they cancel each other out or introduce noise. A teacher may hear one thing from their coach, another from their AP, and a third from district PD. The result is confusion, compliance, and low-impact implementation. Sarah, Kerry and I wrote about this in Making Coaching Matter: when there is little clarity about vision for good instruction and/or the role of the coach, coaching actually introduces variation to the system, which is crazy.
Across all these sources, we can identify several shared drivers of instructional coherence:
A clearly articulated and widely understood definition of equitable and ambitious instruction;
Curriculum materials and tasks aligned to high cognitive demand and grade-level standards;
Instructional coaching and professional learning that reinforce the district’s vision for teaching and learning;
Leadership routines (e.g., Gemba, team meetings) that support teachers in refining instruction;
Strategic abandonment of initiatives or practices that do not align with the district’s instructional model;
Feedback systems that surface dissonance and enable course correction, especially from the perspective of students and marginalized groups.
The main message: coherence is what happens when everything in the system is aligned behind a shared, research-based vision of instruction. That vision must be intentionally developed, continually revisited, and relentlessly pursued. HQI Live! is one of the rare professional learning experiences that makes that vision both visible and actionable.
Let me know if there is anything I can do for you. And as promised, here are the references:
Cobb, P., Jackson, K., Henrick, E. C., Smith, T. M., & Mistry, K. (2018). Systems for instructional improvement: Creating coherence from the classroom to the district office. Harvard Education Press.
Newmann, F. M., Smith, B., Allensworth, E., & Bryk, A. S. (2001). Instructional program coherence: What it is and why it should guide school improvement policy. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 23(4), 297–321. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737023004297
Stevenson, I., & Weiner, J.M. (2021). The strategy playbook for educational leaders: Principles and processes. Routledge.
TNTP. (2018). The opportunity myth: What students can show us about how school is letting them down—and how to fix it. https://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_The-Opportunity-Myth_Web.pdf
TNTP. (2024). The opportunity makers: Redesigning schools for better student experiences. https://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_Opportunity_Makers_2024.pdf
Wagner, T., Kegan, R., Lahey, L. L., Lemons, R. W., Garnier, J., Helsing, D., Howell, A., & Rasmussen, H. T. (2006). Change leadership: A practical guide to transforming our schools. Jossey-Bass.
Woulfin, S. L., Stevenson, I., & Lord, K. (2023). Making coaching matter: Leading continuous improvement in schools. Teachers College Press.