Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Article submitted by: Stephanie Feldner, System Change Coach, CESA 8
Every year, Wisconsin schools embark on new initiatives, from adopting new instructional materials to restructuring collaborative teacher team meetings, but getting a new practice to stick is often challenging. As coaches, our role is to support educators on the ground. A crucial part is establishing clear, two-way communication that gathers feedback from teachers and uses it to drive both coaching support and leadership action.
The "Celebrations, Barriers, and Supports" reflection is a straightforward, customizable template that facilitates this vital feedback loop.
A Simple Tool for Deep Insights
The reflection is structured around three essential prompts for any implementing team:
- Celebrations: What has gone well? Recognizing and honoring the effort and progress of educators is crucial. This prompt helps us pull out concrete wins—successful practices that should be affirmed and shared.
- Barriers: Have you experienced any barriers or challenges? This allows the practitioner to identify exactly what is getting in the way of using the practice effectively.
- Supports: What supports (if any) do you need to be even more successful? This provides coaches and leaders immediate, actionable data to tailor guidance and determine specific resources or training needed.
The template can be easily adapted for virtually any school or district effort, such as using a new program, implementing co-teaching, or forming a new collaborative team.
From Team Feedback to System-Level Action
The true power of this tool really emerges when coaches and leadership teams aggregate the responses. The combined data moves beyond a private team discussion to become a clear window into the school or system as a whole.
By looking for common patterns and trends across multiple teams, coaches and leadership teams can ask:
- Are the same barriers cited repeatedly across the school or district?
- Are teams requesting the same supports?
This analysis enables meaningful system-level action. For example, if multiple teacher teams identify a lack of access to specific materials as a barrier to using a new math program, the system is informed that this is not a coaching or training issue but rather a resource and logistics problem that requires leadership action to remove or mitigate.
Crucially, aggregated data also may highlight individual teams whose unique or intensive barriers or support requests may signal a need for targeted coaching support. For instance, one team might reveal a need for direct, intensive support on structuring their new meeting protocol even if the district’s overall implementation plan is solid. This data-driven approach ensures coaching efforts are focused where they are needed most.
The included Leadership Reflection slide formalizes this whole process, prompting leaders to review the findings, determine necessary system-level action, and plan next steps for growing the practice across the district. This intentional step closes the loop, turning feedback into organizational improvement.
Connecting to the Coaching Competency Practice Profile (CCPP)
The use of this tool aligns with CCPP competencies, notably the expectation for coaches to be able to analyze data and systems. The tool helps coaches gather the necessary evidence to:
- Analyze data, evolving and fluid situations, and systems for the conditions of change (see 6a).By collecting and analyzing aggregated data, coaches move beyond individual classroom support to diagnose and address both system-wide challenges and team-specific needs.
- Examine and challenge inequitable policies and practices within systems (see 1c). When system barriers are revealed, the coach uses this data to challenge those structures and push for systemic change that supports each and every student.
This simple, three-part reflection template is a first step in supporting consistent and effective practice by empowering educator voices and guiding system-level leaders to make data-informed decisions.
Toolbox / Access the editable reflection tool and the leadership reflection slide here: Reflection Template for Teacher Teams