This #coachbetter episode is another in our series of coaching case studies, with Andrew Ranson, instructional coach at Shanghai American School in China.

These case study episodes are designed to share the story of a coach, and the development of their coaching program and practice in their unique setting.

If you’re a regular listener of the podcast, you might have heard Andrew’s recent QuickTips episode where he shared the ways that he’s using a Data Dashboard to develop a strong Coach-Principal Partnership. Andrew is also featured in another episode with the Shanghai American School coaching team (available 22 April 2026)! Andrew is also a member of the AAICIS A-Team, and has been featured in several episodes about the development of our non-profit. At the time of recording he had just graduated from The Coach Certificate and Mentorship Program.

In this episode Kim and Andrew dig into the importance of the Coach-Principal partnership, and all the elements that coaches need to be aware of when they are seeking to make a deep impact on the school community!

In this conversation they talk about…

What made him curious about coaching
What he found surprising about the move into coaching
How he’s focusing on developing the Coach-Principal partnership
How The Coach supported his professional growth – even as an experienced coach

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Show Notes

Please tell us about your journey as an educator

HS Instructional Coach at PD Campus of SAS.First year at the school, first time coaching has been offered in this division. Prior IC at Abijan in Ivory Coast, home dad for 2 years, AIS Chennai MS AP, EAL Teacher, English Teacher, HS teacher in MD in the US. All stops have in common: all the relationships I was in were highly collaborative. My educator journey into my coaching journey, the throughlline is I liked working with different educators with different areas of expertise

What made you curious about coaching? How did you decide to start exploring the role more deeply?

A couple of relationships I had with colleagues really changed my perception of myself as a teacher, which had a big impact.

In Chennai, they created a position of “inquiry coach”. I was really curious about his job, and when we started getting ot know each other, I learned more about the job.

Cognitive Coaching training – matched the ype of leader I wanted to be. This typ eof leadership is better for students, easier to interact with colleagues.

As AP I was having lots of conversations about discipline, when I started having reflective conversations, they stopped coming in for the same reasons.

Once you started learning about coaching, what surprised you? What did you expect?

The first surprise was how hard it was to get a coaching job. I was an AP with lots of experience coaching but not the title of coaching and it was really hard for me.

By the time I got my first coaching job, I had lots of years experience doing different types of coaching things – including ICF certification. I knew the school was taking a risk because I didn’t have a full time coaching job on my resume.

I was very aware that I was a first year coach with a lot of coaching experience, which seemed unusual. I knew how schools work having been an administrator, and I knew how to coach, so I knew what to do, even though the school was new.

After you go to coaching training and you get all excited about coaching, but then you get back to school, it looks nothing like the training. So how do you adapt the training to your context.

One of the curveballs happened when I met with the Director and asked how coaching came to exist, he said that we were hiring new teachers who we knew had certain skills, but we have teachers who have been here for a long time, who we’re not sure about, so we brought in coaching to fix those teachers.

Another curveball, I was working with three different admin, and I realized they never talked about coaching together because every time I talked to them it was the first time they had heard of the idea. I realized that they all had different definitions of coaching (curriculum focused, literacy coaching, cognitive coaching). Often this was the first time admin were hearing about my vision of coaching. Having a shared vision / definition / reference structure is really complicated to create if it doesn’t exist.

There’s so much in a coaches realm that is dependent on the administrators in the school. I’m most often the one who knows the most about coaching in the room, even with very high capacity administrators. So the admin who are curious and open to conversations, create lots of opportunities for co-constructing work together or just empowering me to do my work or the other side of that line is a reticence to proceed to let coaching loose in the school because of a lack of time to understand it.

There’s too many things for coaching to be in the top 10 for a principal to be interested in. So there’s a skill set coaches have to develop to engage this person who has this much time to think about coaching. Talking about coaching is less effective than actually using coaching skills in a conversation. This creates space for some inquiry to be possible.

Principals make a staggering number of decisions a day, when you’re walking into your weekly meeting, coaches need to remember that this person has already made hundreds of decisions. If I can ensure they’re not having to make decisions, and I’m making room for their thinking during this meeting my goals will be achieved later down the line. I can get to those places faster, easier

Now that you’ve been a coach for a few years, what have you discovered / uncovered about the role?

When I’m working with a principal, do less talking about what coaching is or isn’t and do more of being a coach. When you enter into these relationships with principals, there’s a power differential, and coaching isn’t a thing, it’s a vehicle to improve student learning, make pd more lasting, etc, so I don’t need to advertise what I’m doing because it makes more impact when I go out to do it, so I can share the impact in the meeting rather than talking about what coaching is.

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Show Notes continued…

Tell us about how you’re developing the Coach-Principal Partnership. You have been very intentional about tracking your time and sharing that data with your school leaders, why has that been important for you? what does that look like?

My current principal is very experienced and great at being curious, the admin team was very open about wanting to uncover together what the role is and how it works. They have been open to me coaching them, so I know they’ve seen and experienced my work, it’s not an abstract thing.

Meeting once a week. Over time I’ve realized that I’m thinking about this work far more than they are – in fact our weekly meeting might be the only time that they’re thinking about this. So I created a data dashboard in numbers and words and phrases, and this led to them asking questions that are much deeper than I ever would have expected.

I track the interactions I have with people through a google form that takes 30-40 sec to fill in. I go back to the spreadsheet and count the different interactions I’ve had, the categories they fall into, and the themes that are emerging. Those are things I can share with the principals very easily. This enables us to narrow our conversations to student learning.

One example was that I had been having a consistent number of conversations, and then one of the weeks it dropped down significantly. This prompted my VP to ask: why and this uncovered the ways that the all school priorities are impacting my calendar. We ended up having a conversation about how long it takes to prep a meeting to facilitate. This dialogue was driven by her questions. It gave me an opportunity to say that facilitation is the least valuable coaching support function. Typically when a presentation is over, so is the thinking. It’s never engaging in the ways a coaching conversation is. When you’re being coached, the thinking lasts far longer than the conversation.

Now my principal and VP are starting to ask, what kind of data can we bring to the meeting. I asked them to bring what kind of student learning they’re seeing in their walkthroughs: what kind of protocols are they seeing

Coaching is not the thing, it’s the thing that helps us get to the thing (in this case student learning).

As an experienced coach, you have still engaged so deeply with the work in The Coach. How has the program supported your growth and development as a coach?

Each training I go to layers on levels of nuance that I couldn’t see the last time. What’s in focus now that was out of focus before. The Coach has offered lots of layers of nuance to things that I didn’t have clarity about before. For example a coaching cycle, I’ve never seen it look the way I’ve seen it described in books. I’ve realized that I’m not very skilled at talking about or referring to the visual aid or process of the coaching cycle in my conversations. Now in my work with a teacher, I’m using the graphic and being intentional about describing the process in a way I never have before. Maybe I’ll actually get to the oasis this time around because I’m taking a different approach. I don’t know if I would have figured that out if I had not engaged in the Coach cohort and in collaboration with my colleagues.

Now that all of us have the same reference structure. Just the idea that we could get to the same place (the same page) is fiction. So figuring out what are the points that we have the opportunity to connect around the most, has been really valuable. Some of the content you’ve designed intentionally provokes that. Some of the conversation that emerged was that we should spend more time talking about this because as a group we have no common idea of what this is.

Spending time just talking to each other during the creation of the artifacts was one of the most valuable experiences they’ve had as a coach. They’ve learned so much from the other person’s point of view. There was nothing standardized in how those two people approached those two things.

When I was by myself last year, I desperately needed to talk to other coaches about what coaching should look like, could look like, is looking like all that stuff just to help normalize my experience.

If you’re in a school with other coaches, it’s taken for granted that you have frequent opportunities to talk about your practice together, but really if you don’t create those opportunities, it can be really easy to get into the ether and not into the actual practice. Our custom cohort of The Coach gave us that space.

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For this kind of coaching to thrive we need to focus on both the micro view of your coaching practice and the macro view of your coaching program, so while you’re developing your individual coaching practice you’re also intentionally developing a sustainable coaching culture.

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CASE STUDY: Developing a Strong Coach-Principal Partnership with Andrew Ranson [313]