A Smarter Approach to Teacher Coaching and Growth
Wherever stage educators are in their careers, coaching provides valuable feedback and support to improve practice, increase job satisfaction, and drive student success. But coaching is too often managed using spreadsheets and disconnected systems, making it challenging for everyone from administrators and instructional leaders to coaches and teachers to keep track of the process and make measurable progress.
By mid-year, disconnects appear: coaching notes live in personal drive folders, observation rubrics vary by school, and leaders lack clear visibility into teacher support and progress.
An online teacher coaching platform centralizes classroom observations, feedback, action steps, and growth tracking in one shared system, moving beyond simple observation capture to ensure consistent follow-through across your entire district.
Standardize coaching practices so every teacher receives consistent, high-quality support.
Make coaching visible with quick logging and clear records of feedback and growth.
Give leaders insight into coaching activity without adding extra meetings.
What a Coaching Cycle Looks Like in Grow
Coaching platforms tend to describe features. In practice, a coach’s week follows a cycle like this:
- Observe. A coach does a walkthrough or a full observation and captures notes in a district-built form. Timestamped running records keep notes tied to specific moments in the lesson.
- Give feedback right away. Quick Feedback lets the coach send brief notes or a private message right after the visit, while the lesson is still fresh for the teacher.
- Assign an action step. The coach picks an action step tied to the district’s evaluation criteria, so the next move is specific, like “use cold call to check for understanding during guided practice.” Generic advice like “improve engagement” is what this step replaces.
- Follow up. The Touchpoint Dashboard shows when each teacher last received support and flags anyone who has gone past the district’s threshold. That way, follow-up doesn’t depend on a coach’s memory.
- Review growth. Rubric scores, action steps, and goals build up into one record that the teacher, coach, and principal can all see.
Touchpoint Dashboard: See Who Needs Coaching Now
Easily see which teachers need support using the Touchpoint Dashboard. Switch between campuses, scan a linked roster, and view the last interaction type plus “days since” to spot who needs support now. Schedule touchpoints to keep frequency high and accountability simple.
Turn Walkthroughs into Next Steps with Digital Sticky Notes
Share a brief note with the teacher, add a private reflection for yourself, assign an action step from a dropdown, and notify the right stakeholders without leaving the page. These actions keep the momentum going between observations so coaching feels timely, supportive, and doable.
Coach Consistently in Your Own Language
Whether your model is Get Better Faster, Relay, or something entirely your own, Grow makes it easy to create fully customizable observation forms. Mix and match components like timestamped running records and scored rubrics to create forms that reflect your coaching culture.
See What Coaching Is Working
Use 21+ reports and dashboards to see where coaching is happening, what kind of support is being delivered, and how performance is trending by domain and indicator. Turn that clarity into targeted professional development, shout-outs for coaches, and shared accountability.
A Customizable Teacher Coaching Platform That Creates a Coaching Culture Unique to Your District
Grow brings role-based visibility and shared language to every level so leaders can align, coaches can act, and teachers can grow without extra busy work—all in an easy-to-use online teacher coaching tool.
Align coaching practices across schools with consistent language, shared methods, and actionable reporting.
Gain visibility into coaching frequency and quality without extra check-ins with dynamic dashboards that indicate where follow-up is needed.
Log observations, assign action steps, and track progress over time, all in one place.
Receive feedback that’s specific, actionable, and easy to track so coaching feels supportive and consistent.
What to look for in classroom observation software for K-12
Most “best observation software” lists compare features. District buyers also need to know what a platform costs to run, how long it takes to adopt, and whether it fits the systems they already use. These questions can help you compare vendors, including Level Data.
| What to evaluate | Questions to ask vendors | How Grow approaches it |
| Rubric flexibility | Can we use our own framework without paying for custom development? | Unlimited configurable forms, including Danielson, Marzano, and district-built rubrics |
| Observation capture | Can coaches log both quick walkthroughs and full observations? | Quick Feedback for walkthroughs; timestamped running records for full lessons |
| Follow-up visibility | How will we know who hasn’t been supported recently? | Touchpoint Dashboard with color-coded thresholds |
| Reporting | Can we see trends by school, domain, and time period and export the data? | 21+ reports and dashboards; CSV export |
| Link to student outcomes | Can we connect coaching and PD activity to student results? | Educator Supports Module and Return on Instruction analytics |
| Rostering and integrations | Will staff and roster data sync automatically from our SIS and HR systems? | Level Data’s core work is K-12 data integration, including SIS and HR data |
| Data privacy | How are teacher and student data protected? | Level Data is a signatory to the Student Privacy Pledge |
Track, Support, and Grow Your State’s Educator Workforce
Level Data’s teacher coaching tool helps state education agencies build a cohesive foundation to manage their educator workforce at scale with unified workflows for licensure, program approval, credentialing, and evaluations.
For states with evaluation mandates, the same records that support coaching can also show that observations and evaluations happened on schedule. Districts don’t have to rebuild that documentation separately at reporting time.
See What Schools Are Saying About Our Customizable Online Teacher Coaching Platform
Grow has made leaders’ lives easier. We can track when teachers make changes to the lesson plan, and the data is right there. Did a teacher see the deadline? Did I review it? Did they make revisions and resubmit the lesson plan? Grow makes it simple to track that.
Earning a highly effective teacher designation doesn’t automatically translate into being a highly effective coach. Those are skills we have to grow and develop. And Grow helps us do that. With Grow, we can examine the type of feedback coaches are giving, and, at the district level, see how they can improve their coaching.
The trick isn’t that the tools changed how we use data—it’s that they enabled us to actually use data. With fewer forms and clearer structures, we can focus on what matters.
Without Grow, we’d still be in Google Docs, and principals would be stuck in the weeds. With Grow, we have true distributed leadership, accountability, and the ability to support teachers at every level.
In the DeKalb County School District, Level Data is used as a compass. Grow data ensures that feedback is timely, targeted, and aligned with district priorities, promoting a culture of accountability, reflection, and collective growth.
Observation only pays off when you can see what it changed
Most classroom observation software stops once the form is submitted. Level Data’s view is that observation is worth a teacher’s and coach’s time only when it leads to a next step and that step can be connected to results. That’s why Grow includes the Educator Supports Module. It gives district leaders one source of data showing student outcomes alongside PD and coaching activity, so they can see which supports are making a difference and change course where they aren’t.
If you’re comparing platforms, start with the questions in the table above, then ask each vendor to show you how a single observation becomes an action step, a follow-up, and finally a data point you could take to your board. To go further, see how Level Data helps districts measure PD ROI and connect coaching to student growth through Return on Instruction analytics.
Grow Online Teacher Coaching Platform FAQ
Administrators can track teacher growth over time by keeping every observation, rubric score, action step, and goal for a teacher in one shared record, instead of spreading it across forms and folders. In Grow, rubric reports show change by indicator or domain across any time period, and the Touchpoint Dashboard shows how often each teacher has received support. Viewed together, they show whether a teacher is improving and whether coaching has been steady enough to explain it.
To show that coaching improves student outcomes, connect coaching and PD records to student assessment data and compare outcomes across teachers and schools with different levels of support. That requires coaching data that is consistent and complete, which is hard to get from spreadsheets. Grow’s Educator Supports Module and Level Data’s Return on Instruction analytics are designed for this analysis, so leaders can see where coaching investments line up with student growth.
Yes. Grow is a fully customizable teacher coaching tool. Whether you use a national framework (like Danielson or Marzano) or a proprietary rubric developed by your district (or something in between), the platform can be tailored to match your specific language, indicators, and scoring methods.
While many tools focus solely on compliance and year-end ratings, Grow is designed for continuous professional improvement. It prioritizes “bite-sized” feedback, allowing coaches to assign immediate action steps and track a teacher’s progress over time, rather than just once or twice a year.
Grow provides high-level dashboards that allow district administrators to see coaching trends across multiple schools. You can quickly identify which teaching strategies are being mastered and where additional professional development resources may be needed.
Additionally, Grow’s Educator Supports Module provides a single source for data insights that show student outcomes relative to professional development and coaching activities so district leaders can measure the impact of these investments and make adjustments to optimize student growth.
