Jim Knight is one of the wise men of coaching. His well is deep; he draws from it the best tools from practitioners, the wisdom of experience, and research-based insights. And he never loses sight of the bigger picture: the point of all this is to have more impact in this life we're lucky enough to live.
--MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER, Author of The Coaching Habit

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. Jim Knight's work has helped me understand the details of how effective coaching can and should be done.
--DR. ATUL GAWANDE, surgeon, public health researcher, and author of The Checklist Manifesto


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 a 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.

Quintessential Jim, The Impact Cycle comes loaded with every possible tool to help you reach your coaching goals, starting with a comprehensive video program, robust checklists, and a model Instructional Playbook. Quickly, you'll learn how to

• Interact and dialogue with teachers as partners
• Guide teachers to identify emotionally compelling, measurable, and student-focused goals
• Set coaching goals, plan strategies, and monitor progress for optimal impact
• Use documentary-style video and text-based case studies as models to promote maximum teacher clarity and proactive problem solving
• Streamline teacher enrollment, data collection, and deep listening

Jim writes, When we grow, improve, and learn, when we strive to become a better version of ourselves, we tap into something deep in ourselves that craves that kind of growth. Read The Impact Cycle and soon you'll discover how you can continually refine your practice to help teachers and students realize their fullest potential.

View Jim Knight's Impact Cycle video trailer:

Data Rules provides much-needed clarity on how instructional leaders can effectively leverage data.

It's no secret that using data can be a key driver of teacher growth and student achievement. The only real question is how. Coaching expert Jim Knight and professor Michael Faggella-Luby distill decades of research into an accessible, proven approach that explains

- Why data is important for transforming teaching.
- A framework of 10 easy-to-apply rules for effective data use.
- Best practices to communicate and discuss data.
- How to analyze data for student engagement and achievement.
- How to analyze data for instructional practice.

To help schools achieve sustained improvement, this book also connects its data rules to the Impact Cycle, Knight's field-tested model for coaching teachers based on research from the Instructional Coaching Group (ICG). Equipped with the right tools, any instructional leader or coach will be able to realize the full potential of data, move the needle on classroom instruction, and improve student outcomes.

This book is a copublication of ASCD and One Fine Bird Press.

Even under ideal conditions, teaching is tough work. Facing unrelenting pressure from administrators and parents and caught in a race against time to improve student outcomes, educators can easily become discouraged (or worse, burn out completely) without a robust coaching system in place to support them.

For more than 20 years, perfecting such a system has been the paramount objective of best-selling author and coaching guru Jim Knight and his team of researchers at the Instructional Coaching Group (ICG). In The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching, Knight offers a blueprint for establishing, administering, and assessing an instructional coaching program laser-focused on every educator's ultimate goal: the academic success of students.

Organized around ICG's seven Success Factors for great instructional coaching, this book offers

* An in-depth guide to the Impact Cycle, ICG's research-based and field-tested model for coaching teachers through issues that matter most to them;

* Detailed guidance on how to create a playbook of instructional strategies to share with collaborating teachers--and how to model those strategies under different conditions;

* Practical advice on preparing for and engaging in substantive, reflective, and teacher-centered coaching conversations;

* Best practices for gathering, analyzing, and responding to data for improved teaching and learning; and

* Real-life anecdotes and testimonies from educators and coaches who have reaped the benefits of the Impact Cycle in a diverse array of schools.

In addition, each chapter of the book contains a learning map to help orient you and a list of valuable additional resources to complement the text. Whether you're new to coaching or well versed in the practice, The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching will no doubt prove a cornerstone of your coaching library for years to come.

In schools, every day is game day. Every day, teachers need the best resources and forms of support because students deserve the best we as educators can offer. An instructional playbook aims to serve as that kind of support: a tool that coaches can use to help teachers match specific learning goals with the right research-based instructional strategies.

Coaches have enormous potential to help teachers learn and implement new teaching practices, but coaches will be effective only if they deeply understand the strategies they describe and their explanations are clear. The Instructional Playbook: The Missing Link for Translating Research into Practice addresses both issues head on and offers a simple and clear explanation of how to create a playbook uniquely designed to meet teachers' instructional needs.

The idea of an instructional playbook has caught fire since Jim Knight described it in The Impact Cycle (2017). This book helps instructional coaches create playbooks that produce a common language about high-impact teaching strategies, deepen everyone's understanding of what instructional coaches do, and, most important, support teachers and students in classrooms.

Check out The Better Conversations trailer: https: //youtu.be/y3FrWTXC8Uw


I thought I knew how to have a conversation; I've had millions of them. Some were good, others not so much