How TeachForward’s Platforms Empower Instructional Coaches and Scale Their Impact
From personalized feedback to scalable collaboration, TeachForward’s Engage and Align platforms help coaching organizations tackle their biggest operational and instructional challenges.
The Coaching Conundrum: Consistency and Scale in a Rapidly Changing Landscape
Imagine a statewide coaching initiative, eager to support hundreds of new teachers, but struggling to ensure every coach delivers high-quality, consistent feedback. As the program grows, leaders face a familiar set of hurdles: aligning instructional standards, scaling personalized support, and proving impact—all while coaches juggle logistical headaches and limited access to model teaching resources.
Launched in 2020 to support new teachers during the pandemic and improve retention, the Illinois Virtual Instructional Coach and Building Mentor Program has demonstrated both the value and complexity of delivering effective coaching at scale. A core element from the start has been matching beginning teachers with Virtual Instructional Coaches (VICs) across the state. The Engage platform supports this matching process and acts as a central hub for meetings, collaboration, and access to shared resources. VICs complete training modules within the platform, and program leaders rely on built-in tracking tools to monitor completion and maintain accountability. Engage streamlines operations, fosters collaboration, and anchors feedback in evidence-based practice. Today, the program supports more than a thousand beginning teachers annually across over a hundred school districts in Illinois.
How TeachForward’s Platforms Meet the Moment
TeachForward’s Engage and Align platforms are purpose-built to address the most pressing challenges facing coaching organizations today.
1. Inconsistent Feedback and Calibration Across Coaches
Align offers video-based calibration tools, enabling coaches and mentors to ground their feedback on authentic videos of classroom teaching. This approach creates a shared language around effective teaching by using clearly defined rubrics and real classroom examples, ensuring that all feedback is specific, consistent, and grounded in observable, high-quality instructional practice.
2. Difficulty Scaling Personalized Coaching
Engage empowers organizations to scale their coaching impact without sacrificing personalization. Coaches can manage multiple groups, assign differentiated tasks, and provide individualized feedback through video tagging, comments, and resource sharing. Activities can be reused or tailored to meet the unique needs of each teacher, making high-touch coaching possible at scale.
3. Coaches Spending Time on Logistics, Not Coaching
Both platforms streamline administrative burdens with features like customizable user profiles, automated matching (Engage only), learning groups, and analytics dashboards. This automation frees coaches to focus on what matters most: supporting teacher growth.
4. Limited Access to High-Quality Teaching Artifacts
TeachForward’s platforms include a curated library of classroom videos and allow users to upload their own resources. Coaches can access a wide-range of performance examples to demonstrate high quality instruction and/or opportunities for growth without the need for in-person observations or time-intensive material creation, expanding access to best practices across the organization.
5. Poor Engagement or Follow-Through
Engage supports ongoing improvement with activity tracking, messaging, tagging, and revision workflows. Short tutorial videos and customizable dashboards reduce onboarding friction, boosting teacher participation and engagement.
6. Proving Coaching Program Impact
Both Engage and Align provide robust analytics, enabling organizations to track participation, growth, and progress toward instructional goals. These data-driven insights help coaching organizations demonstrate their value to stakeholders and continuously refine their approach.
Real-World Impact: Illinois Virtual Instructional Coach and Mentor Program
The Illinois Virtual Instructional Coach and Building Mentor Program illustrates TeachForward’s transformative potential. In its second year, the program matched over 750 new teachers and clinicians with virtual coaches and mentors, leveraging TeachForward’s platform to facilitate collaboration, resource sharing, and evidence-based feedback. Coaches reported that the platform’s features—such as resource tagging, group chats, and closed-captioned videos—made it easier to support teachers and foster professional growth, even across a geographically dispersed network.
Teachers, in turn, reported that coaching helped them build skills and confidence, while program leaders noted the value of streamlined operations and actionable data for scaling statewide.
Multiply Your Coaching Impact
For coaching organizations seeking to move beyond logistical headaches and inconsistent feedback, TeachForward’s Engage and Align platforms offer a proven path forward. By anchoring coaching in evidence, streamlining operations, and enabling scalable, personalized support, TeachForward empowers coaches to do what they do best—help teachers thrive.
Ready to unlock the next level of coaching? Find out how TeachForward can help your organization scale its impact and transform teacher development.