How Instructional Coaches Can Balance Confidentiality and Accountability

Instructional coaches regularly walk a tightrope between maintaining trust and demonstrating the impact of coaching to administrators. The teachers you support often only agree to coaching support because it is confidential and private. However, your principal requests evidence that coaching is effective. As stewards of limited resources, they need to demonstrate a return on investment in educational coaching and a clear indication of your coaching effectiveness.

We both work with instructional coaches and schools on a regular basis and have a foundational belief in the importance of confidentiality to the coaching process. We know that, as the coach, you may feel caught in the middle. How do you maintain teacher trust while demonstrating results to leaders? The good news: You don’t have to choose between trust and transparency.

Why Confidentiality is NonNegotiable

When a teacher agrees to record a lesson, experiment with a new strategy, or unpack a classroom challenge with a coach, she’s not performing: She’s learning. That willingness to take an educational risk hinges on one promise: What happens in coaching stays in coaching.

Research backs this up. Confidentiality is an essential, nonnegotiable element of trust and not merely a courtesy. Without it, coaching collapses into surveillance; with it, it becomes a safe space for growth. As Kim has written about before, data and reflection are tools for growth, not evaluation. When used in this manner, data and reflection support growth rather than compliance. This distinction separates educational coaching from compliance monitoring and keeps teachers willing to take the risks that lead to real learning.

Why Documenting Coaching Impact Builds Credibility

Instructional coaches who intentionally make their work visible strengthen the credibility of the profession, their work, and the sustainability of their programs. Just as teachers need psychological safety, leaders need evidence that coaching contributes to teacher growth and student success.

When coaches share concrete evidence of progress in teaching and learning, they show that coaching is not only supportive but central to a school’s improvement efforts. While relationships form the foundation of coaching, its effectiveness depends on making results visible and communicating them clearly to stakeholders.

As schools face greater scrutiny over coaching investments, effective coaches make their work visible from the start. They intentionally document and demonstrate impact to show how coaching supports both teacher growth and student learning. However, this transparency doesn’t require breaking confidentiality. Instead, it’s about communicating results responsibly while preserving teachers’ trust.

How to Share Without Breaking Trust

Even with strong systems and tools in place, the real challenge comes when coaches sit down with leaders. They need to show that coaching makes a difference without making teachers feel exposed. The key is to share patterns and progress, not names and narratives, using summaries or visuals that highlight growth while preserving confidentiality.

• Share trends, not names. Instead of saying, “I coached Ms. Lee on scaffolding,” summarize the pattern: “Across our coaching cycles, 85 percent of teachers implemented new scaffolding strategies, and walk-throughs showed increased student independence.”
• Use visuals, not raw data. Replace spreadsheets with visuals—like a bar graph showing growth in teacher confidence ratings over time or a pie chart of coaching cycle types—to make progress easy to see without identifying individuals.
• Ask for consent. Before sharing teacher quotes or artifacts, always ask, “Would you be comfortable with my sharing this example in our coaching summary?” A teacher-approved quote such as “Using think-alouds helped my students explain their reasoning” humanizes the data while keeping consent front and center.

Tools to Balance Trust and Transparency

Coaching thrives on trust, but it also depends on visibility. The tools shared below help coaches do both: maintain the privacy that teachers deserve while communicating the results that sustain coaching programs. The Trust + Transparency Coaching System Workflow Guide to effectively and efficiently combine the checklist and template. Together, these tools help coaches balance confidentiality with transparency by protecting teacher trust while showing leaders credible evidence of impact.

Tool #1: The safe-to-share checklist. Before putting anything in a coaching report or sharing in a meeting, it helps to pause and run your notes through a simple filter. This safe-to-share checklist breaks data into three clear categories: safe, safe IF (with consent), and confidential—so you can show program impact without risking teacher trust.

When working with individuals, the key is to focus on the “safe-to-share” data from the checklist above, while maintaining your own coach-facing report. For example, coaches might track quantitative data—such as the number of teachers who implemented a targeted strategy or the frequency of student engagement in academic talk—and pair it with qualitative data, including teacher reflections, focus group notes, or brief quotes about what changed in their classrooms. Together, these data types create a balanced view of progress while keeping the process manageable.

Tool #2: The dual-report template. The dual-report system helps coaches balance confidentiality with transparency by organizing your coaching documentation into two reports. The coach-facing report is private for the coach only. This report includes your detailed notes, names, reflections, and next steps. The leader-facing summary is public and designed for leaders. It includes aggregated data, anonymized trends, and highlights safe to share. Coaches can use them together by taking take raw notes privately, then translating safe evidence into the leader summary.

Tool #3: Companion guide: Using the tools together. Coaches don’t have to choose between trust and transparency. With quick tools like the checklist, the dual-report template, and group coaching formats, you can start showing impact tomorrow while protecting the relationships that make coaching work.

When coaches view the data they collect about their practice as information to help make the next decision, not as evaluation, they are creating a safe space in which to develop their own practice based on the outcome of their work so far. Coaches can do this by examining the data they collect and asking themselves: What evidence do I have that demonstrates improved student (or teacher) learning? What other evidence am I missing, or might be helpful to collect? These two questions can guide data-collection practices to track within a coach-facing report, which can be aggregated and shared with leaders in a leader-facing summary.