The Elephant Planner for Instructional Coaches

You carry a caseload you did not pick, in classrooms you do not run, toward outcomes you cannot mandate. Your whole toolkit is influence. When a cycle works, the teacher gets the credit, exactly as it should be, and your evidence lives in other people's rooms. This planner was built for that job, the real one, not a tidy version of it.

The Elephant Planner for Instructional Coaches is a 210-page, print-ready system organized around the six domains of a coach's work: instruction, coaching practice, teacher development, data and progress, team and collaboration, and personal leadership. Every page earns its place by helping you answer one of four questions. What needs my attention today? Who needs my support? What patterns am I seeing? What is my next action?

It is built for a coach, not an evaluator. The observation pages start with low-inference notes, because what you saw and what you concluded are two different things, and only one of them is safe to hand a teacher. There is a full coaching cycle set, from caseload tracker to cycle planner to cycle log, and an Influence Without Authority page for the ask you cannot simply make, because persuasion is the coach's whole strategic problem.

Burnout in this work is a systems problem, not a personal failing. This planner will not make the job smaller. What it will do is take the whole thing out of your head and put it on the page, so you can leave the building on time without carrying every open cycle home with you.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. This planner cuts the year into bites you can actually digest.

What's inside

• 30 planning tools across six domains, each built to reprint as often as you need
• A full year of monthly and weekly calendar spreads, August to July
• A weekly coach schedule to protect your time before the day claims it
• A complete coaching cycle set: caseload tracker, cycle planner, cycle log, modeling and co-teaching planner, and video reflection
• Low-inference notes and learning walk planning that keep observation non-evaluative
• Set-up pages for self-evaluation, goals, and progress monitoring across all six domains
• Reflection questions written for a coach, with a ruled continuation on every reverse

The details

• 210 pages, print-ready PDF
• US Letter, 8.5 by 11 inches, portrait, black and white throughout
• School year 2026 to 2027
• Single-user license, print any page as many times as you need
• Three downloads included

This is not a compliance binder. It is an operating system for the way instructional coaches actually work, one honest conversation at a time.