School Leadership Model
At Jounce, we help School Leaders accelerate the development of their teacher-coaching skills
and their ability to train their leadership teams to coach more effectively. As our partner
school principals have started to implement the Jounce coaching model, we’ve seen
encouraging results. At our ﬁrst partner school, students have made 24.8 percentage points of
growth in math and 41.9 percentage points of growth in reading over the last two years. Our
newer partner schools are on track to make similar gains. Principals are learning to effectively
implement this teacher-coaching model to dramatically increase student achievement, and
ultimately change the opportunities and outcomes for kids who need it the most.
Helping a school leader to be an excellent coach looks about the same as coaching a teacher.
We focus on very speciﬁc coaching skills that have clear, named steps. We spend very little
time discussing and a lot of time practicing. We practice until these speciﬁc coaching skills are
so automatic for school leaders that they can do them with little thought – they then start to
get creative, add to the skills, make them better, and make them their own.
School leaders and their leadership teams have many roles and necessary tasks, but by far the
most important driver of student success is teacher development. We constantly push for
more of leaders’ time to be spent helping their teachers get better. Even over-committing in
this area has much more acceptable consequences than under-committing. Imagine that a
pep rally or other school event is not well-planned, that several parents do not receive
return-calls from administrators, or that some teachers’ mid-year evaluations are done hastily
or completed late. None of these situations are ideal, and all of them certainly have negative
effects. But if every teacher is getting frequent, high-quality coaching, then classrooms will be
orderly and safe (even after the pep rally got too boisterous), kids will be learning and
achieving daily (making even critical parents generally satisﬁed with their school), and teachers
will see and feel their own rapid professional growth (making them less worried about the
details of their evaluation). Schools are far from this extreme – with thoughtful delegation and
meeting norms they could allot far more time to teacher development without sacriﬁcing
student events, parent relationships, and teacher evaluation – but the extreme example
illustrates how heavy an emphasis should be placed on teacher coaching, if we are truly
focused on student outcomes.
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It is our hope that JounceJounce leaders – both at existing partner schools and at new
Fellow-led schools – will put world-class teacher development at the center of all school and
system design choices. They will use the question, “Will this make my teachers better,
faster?” as the ﬁrst criterion for decision making, they will build staff culture around the pillar
of high-frequency skill practice, and they will challenge themselves to devote 80% of
leadership time to increasing instructional skill levels in the building.
Jounce school leaders can use three approaches to protect the primacy of accelerated
teacher development while executing on the other essentials of effective school management:
Operational Leadership Role: Leaders lean on a trusted operations specialist or co-school
director as an operational leader who sets the vision for, and leads execution of, school
operations.
High-Repetition Practice for Non-Instructional Tasks: Leaders use principles from the
Jounce coaching model to become more efﬁcient at non-coaching tasks, learning to plan
staff meetings, appropriately address staff or parent concerns, or redesign student culture
systems, for example, in minutes rather than hours.
Purposeful Tradeoffs: Leaders look for overlap between improving instructional skills and
closing other gaps in the school – for example, negative staff culture dynamics are often
related to the stresses caused by different levels of classroom management ability across
staff members. Jounce leaders understand that trying to do all things well means doing
nothing well, and view the willingness to make difﬁcult tradeoffs as an essential leadership
competency.
Rallying Goal for School Leaders: 3x12x30 + 3 + 5
• Every teacher does 3 coaching sessions, 12 minutes or less for each session, with at least 30 excellent reps.
• Every teacher gets real-time coaching (either a HandOff or other form of real-time) 3 times, every single week.
• Every teacher gets 5 nuance meetings (3 minutes or less) focused on a small aspect of the skill, each week.
Coaching Footprint: 9 active coaching touch points for every teacher, every week.
Leadership Time: 60-80 minutes with each teacher, each week.
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Sample Key Coaching Skills
Fundamental Beliefs
A. Perfect execution matters. A small set of strategies, executed perfectly every time, is
better than a large set of strategies executed poorly or inconsistently.
B. Automaticity comes after mastery. Executing correctly is just the start; executing
correctly every time, with very little thought or effort, is the goal. Creativity will come from
the mental space freed up by automaticity.
C. Clear, nameable steps provide a roadmap for repeatable practice and criteria for
standardized feedback. Repeatable practice and standardized feedback (feedback against a
known standard) provide the fastest route to automaticity.
D. Kids come ﬁrst. Adult discomfort can be overcome and pushed through if our kids will
beneﬁt through better learning.
E. Buy-in comes from experiencing success, not from verbal persuasion (and not even from
seeing someone else succeed). Push through discomfort, knowing you need to manufacture
success in each session.
F. Energy is contagious. Be excited, jump up to practice; energy and enthusiasm, not
explanations or apologies, will build the bridge over discomfort.
Key Coaching Skills (Coaching Meeting)
Technique
Steps
Four Part Goal
Connect the purpose of each skill explicitly to the
four-part goal at the beginning of every session: “All
students(1) observably(2) doing high-quality thinking(3)
at every moment(4).” Some skills address three of the
four: All students(1) observably thinking(2) at all
times(3).”
Call Your Shot
1. Name each step as you model it.
2. Physically “Step Out” of the model or turn your head
toward the teacher to differentiate naming the step from
modeling.
3. Exaggerate the Model
Name step, Exaggerate the model,
Nothing else (avoid additional
explanation).
Exaggerate for
Imitation
1. Exaggerate each step (changes in facial expression,
changes in tone, changes in volume, changes in body
language)
2. Require exact imitation at first (same words, direction,
question; same tone and body language changes)
Particularly important to get exact
imitation so that a) teachers are not
doing lower quality reps due to lack
of fluency with the language, and b)
the rhythm of pauses, suspense, cues
is present and consistent
Pop Up/Let’s Try It
1. Get to modeling quickly, with minimal conversation
first.
2. Jump up from chair to practice with energy and
enthusiasm, in order to normalize the process of getting
up to practice.
3. If teacher starts to ask questions or discuss his/her
philosophy regarding teaching, acknowledge with a smile
and nod, but push with “Let’s try it.”
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Nuances
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Technique
Steps
Nuances
Recount and Isolate
1. After modeling, and before teacher gets up to practice,
ask, “Walk me through the steps.”
2. Push for exact words during the recounting of the
steps
3. Isolate particularly difficult steps, asking teachers to
demonstrate those parts alone
Ex: “Good – so what does the
“observable directions” part sound
like?”
Set the Bar
1. Name the goal for reps to complete
2. State goal of automaticity, not mastery
3. Visibly count the reps
Chunk reps – i.e. 10 reps of the first
step, 10 reps of the second step, 10
more putting the whole skill together
“Again/Same One”
1. Build momentum through first few reps by simply
nodding without words or saying “good, again”
2. Repeat the exact same rep (same direction, same
word, same question) 10 times or more to build
momentum and automaticity before making any changes:
“Good, same one.”
Whisper/Time
Out/Remodel
1. Whisper coach: Without stopping the teacher’s
practice, quietly tell her exactly what she is doing well or
remind her about what to do (i.e. “Nice! Good curiosity…”
or “Then narrate thinking…”).
2. Pause the practice immediately when not perfect.
Use as few words as possible (i.e. just repeat the name of
the step missed) or do a quick mini-model (i.e. “that part
should look like this…”), and then have the teacher
re-practice
Balancing two goals: maximizing the
number of reps in the smallest
amount of time and making sure
every rep is high quality. Get to high
quality execution of each rep in the
fewest words possible.
Reps Past Mastery/
Reps to Automaticity
1. When teacher has demonstrated the skill with perfect
execution of all steps, pause to name the facets that
made it perfect, then reset the bar for reps to
automaticity.
2. Have the teacher execute 15-20 additional reps at this
level of perfection, in quick succession.
3. The first 5 reps past mastery should be exactly the
same – do not allow changes to the wording or context.
4. Remind the teacher that the bar of automaticity (20 in
a row, perfectly) resets with an imperfect rep
A good rule of thumb is that the reps
between mastery and automaticity
should be greater than the reps
before mastery.
Warm Up
1. Immediately start with See The Room, both teacher and
coach moving and practicing.
2. Add additional skills on command, such as Observable
Directions.
3. Provide teacher with content or words to say to allow
focus on executing the nuances of the skill.
4. Use whisper coaching to ensure high quality skill
execution.
Also useful as an assessment of
automaticity. Put a new skill into the
context of several other skills and ask
teacher to execute it on command to
see if it has truly become automatic.
Wall Practice
1. After giving feedback and monitoring to the point of
automaticity, have teacher(s) turn toward a wall in the
room to practice the skill 10-20 more times.
2. Emphasize the importance of every rep being executed
perfectly and with exaggeration of nuances.
When there are multiple teachers per
coach (whether a large PD with 50+
teachers, or a coaching session with
2 teachers and 1 coach), wall practice
dramatically increases number or
reps
Even in one-on-one coaching, doing
some Wall Practice normalizes
teacher to do practice regular on his
own
Coach should do Wall Practice at the
same time, normalizing this process
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Think of this as “make 20 shots in a
row, nothing but net, or start over” –
if you hit the rim at all, you start back
at 0
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Key Coaching Skills (Nuance Meetings)
Technique
Steps
Nuances
Nuance Meetings
1. Demonstrate excitement about the potential of the skill.
“I’ve got a great nuance for you!”
2. Set the time-frame – 4 minutes or less – and set timer.
3. Name the Nuance parts: think about what the teacher
will do with eyes, body, volume, pace, hands.
4. Model Skill, Exaggerating Nuance
5. Teacher Practice. (25 Reps)
Use hallway or other public space to
build culture of normalized practice.
Coaching Booth: Set up in one
location and ask any teacher that
wants to come by for specific
practice on any skill they want
Don’t sacrifice perfect execution for
urgency. Not for new skills
Unapologetic about extra practice.
Super small/ focused nuance
Leave at timer’s sound to build trust
about quickness of meetings
Instead of the “how are things going
meeting”
Key Coaching Skills (Real-Time Coaching)
Technique
Steps
Nuances
HandOff Modeling
with Call Your Shot
1. Call Your Shot – name the step or nuance you are
going to model and what a teacher should look for on a
post-it or with a whisper
2. Raise hand/jump in with question, connection, or praise
3. Self-interrupt
4. Observable Direction (exaggerate)
4. Model KTS (exaggerate)
5. Hand Back: Observable Direction to track teacher
(including exaggerated scan) OR non-verbal cue to
teacher to practice modeled skill (‘your turn’)
1. Modeling “How”: zoom in on one
step or nuance of the skill you are
modeling – note this to the teacher
first, then exaggerate the model of
this step/nuance
2. Modeling “When”: model a
sequence, showing that the skill you
are modeling can be used in several
different contexts and with high
frequency
3. To model during independent work
(i.e. See, SC, N), use steps 1 and 4.
4. If not executed, repeat the
HandOff and re-model
5. Follow up with a Call Your Shot
email (“What did you notice when I
asked my question today?”) that
requires response
Note/Whisper
Coaching
1. Name the skill and the step of that skill to execute (on
your note or by whispering)
2. Name, in as few words as possible, the change to that
skill or step you’d like to see
3. Stay until you’ve seen the skill executed correctly.
1. Consider “when” vs. “how” – if
coaching the “when,” just give a very
short cue that always indicates the
same teacher action; if coaching the
“how,” state the words the teacher
should say or describe the tone/body
language the teacher should use
2. If you don’t see the skill, or it is
executed incorrectly, provide a
second note/whisper, and/or model
with a HandOff
Bug-In-Ear and
Signaling
1. Choose the cue(s) you will give to the teacher
2. Practice in an empty room first, with the teacher
responding to your cues
Consider “when” vs. “how” – if
coaching the “when,” just give a very
short cue that always indicates the
same teacher action; if coaching the
“how,” state the words the teacher
should say or describe the tone/body
language the teacher should use
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