We Ask Students to Reflect. Why Don't We? A Self-Assessment for Academic Coaches
I'm a little nervous right now!
Why? Because after two years of focusing full-time on growing my coach training program inside the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, I'm thinking about returning to one-on-one coaching with students again. Eep!
You probably wouldn't expect me to feel nervous about that, right? I know I come across as confident, and I literally have an entire training program full of videos where I confidently teach tools and frameworks for supporting students.
But when I imagine myself back in a Zoom room with a student 1:1, I can feel my stomach tighten a little alongside the thought: what if I can't actually help this student? What if I'm not good enough anymore?
Certainly, a few meaningful things have changed while I've been away from direct student work:
I've been adding new tools to the Anti-Boring Toolkit — emotional regulation frameworks, a new cognitive overload mini-lecture, and more — things I built and taught others to use but have never actually used myself in a live student session.
Which immediately raises an interesting question: how would I even know whether my student coaching is up to par any more? Not emotionally. Not based on whatever gut feelings to be loudest that day. But actually know.
Because if I sit with my insecurities for more than a minute, I can recognize that they're connected to some very old "not enough" stories I built in childhood. They tend to show up whenever I'm stepping into something vulnerable or uncertain.
But do they really pertain to my coaching skills?! It would be nice to have a more neutral "metric” to use to assess my coaching ability, and not my old “not enoughness” stories.
So — egads!! As I was writing this introduction to this blog post - a thought occurred to me.
What if the brand new rubric I just created for other coaches to assess themselves as coaches could help me be more clear about where my own skills current stand.
After all, I’ve built an entire framework to help coaches assess their growth with more clarity and objectivity, and meanwhile I've apparently been assessing myself based on a vague cocktail of anxiety, imposter syndrome, and vibes.
And that matters, because "do I feel good enough?" is actually a terrible reflection question. It tells me how emotionally activated I am in a moment, but it doesn't tell me where my coaching skills actually are right now, or where I want to keep growing next.
The more useful question isn't "am I a good coach or not?" That framing goes nowhere. The better question is: where am I now, and what would intentional growth look like from here, as I step back into student coaching again?
Because educators are always evolving. The only real choice is whether we're paying attention to that growth intentionally — or just reacting emotionally to whatever happened in our last session.
So I started wondering: what would it actually look like to assess coaching growth — not through imposter syndrome, but through real, structured reflection inside community? This post introduces a new tool I'm hoping will do just that — and if you want to experience it live, I'm introducing it to the world via a free workshop at the end of May. More on that at the end of this post. But first — let's talk about what honest professional reflection actually looks like for coaches.
What the Research Actually Says About How Experts Grow
So what does growth for professionals actually require? Well whaddaya know — there's research on this.
Anders Ericsson spent decades studying what separates people who plateau from people who keep improving — across fields as different as music, surgery, and chess.
His conclusion: experience alone doesn't create expertise. Deliberate practice does.
That means paying attention to specific moments, analyzing decisions, experimenting, adjusting — with intention. The Deans for Impact paper Practice with Purpose (2016) translates his research into an education context, and it's worth reading if you haven't already.
This kind of growth is especially important in coaching work, because coaching can feel incredibly growth-oriented for the student without actually creating much professional growth for the coach.
A little lopsided, yes?
We have sessions. Some feel amazing. Some feel terrible. Some leave us energized; others leave us replaying awkward moments in the shower three days later.
But unless we slow down enough to examine what actually happened in those moments, it's very easy to just keep repeating our existing patterns — whether they're effective or not.
A coach who can specifically identify what happened when a student shut down emotionally, or why a particular intervention suddenly unlocked motivation, is learning something useful.
A coach who only walks away thinking "that session felt hard" probably isn't.
The Isolation Problem for Academic and EF Coaches
And then there's the question of community. So many coaches and tutors are going it alone, in their offices or zoom rooms with students, but without a lot of contact with other growth-oriented professionals.
Same is often true for classroom teachers. John Hattie's Visible Learning research points to something called “collective teacher efficacy” — the shared belief among educators that they can improve outcomes together, not just individually — as one of the strongest correlates of student achievement his team has found.
The research base is still developing, and Hattie himself has flagged some caution about how strongly to interpret the findings. But the directional point feels hard to argue with: we grow faster when we're learning alongside others who are asking the same questions.
Because honestly? Most coaches work in isolation.
Classroom teachers at least have some built-in structures for reflection: departments, observations, professional learning communities (PLCs), hallway conversations after difficult classes.
Coaches in private practice often have… their own thoughts. Maybe a Facebook group. Maybe a new training you’re taking, but most trainings for study tools and executive function skill development don’t allow you to reflect alongside other coaches.
A lot of us are trying to grow professionally inside a vacuum.
And on top of that, coaching sessions themselves are emotionally demanding. By the time we've supported an overwhelmed student, navigated parent communication, solved a scheduling crisis, and helped somebody figure out how to start the essay due tomorrow morning, structured reflection can feel like one more impossible task.
So instead, most of us (myself included!) default to emotional evaluation:
That session felt good. That session felt awful. I think I helped? Maybe I'm terrible at this?
Which is understandable. But it's not especially useful.
The coaches I've seen grow the most over time are not necessarily the ones with the most natural charisma or the fanciest certifications. They're the ones who consistently stay curious about their own practice.
They notice patterns. They ask better questions. They reflect in specific ways. And ideally, they do at least some of that reflection in community.
Coaching can be lonely. The Anti-Boring Learning Lab was built to fix that.
Take a free video tour and see exactly what's waiting —
resources, training, and connection with coaches who get it.
Introducing the Rubric: Our Core Coaching Moves
So back to my own feelings of vulnerability related to my ability to be a good coach — and to so many other student-facing coaches who worry whether they're any good at this job, or who have an overinflated sense of their own work (though I think there are more folks in the former camp than the latter).
What would it actually look like to reflect with more precision — and less imposter syndrome?
That's the question that led me to build a self-assessment rubric I'm calling Our Core Coaching Moves. It maps out five expert moves that I think sit at the heart of skilled 1:1 coaching with students — with two bonus ones that I've seen make a real difference.
Each move is rated on a four-level developmental continuum:
Noticing Gaps — you're seeing the gap for the first time and getting curious
Putting in Effort — you're working on it deliberately; it takes effort and can feel clunky
Finding Flow — practice is paying off and it's starting to feel natural
Always Evolving — mastery opens new questions. Think spiral, not ladder.
Because that's how skill development actually works — it's not a ladder you climb once and then you're done. You get fluent with something, and that fluency reveals the next layer of complexity you couldn't even see before.
Which means there's no "good coach" finish line to cross. There's just where you are right now, and where you want to head next.
When I finally sat down and used this rubric on myself — which, as I confessed in the intro, I had somehow avoided doing until very recently — a few things surprised me. I'm stronger in some areas than my anxiety had been telling me. And there are specific places I want to grow that I can now actually name, rather than just feeling vaguely inadequate about.
That's the difference between a map and a mood. A mood tells you how lost you feel. A map shows you where you actually are.
The rubric is in beta — which means I'm still refining it, and your experience with it will genuinely help shape where it goes next. I'm planning to make this an annual end-of-year ritual for our community: a moment to step back together, assess honestly, and set intentions for where we want to grow.
And the first time we're doing it together is at an upcoming free workshop. More on that below.
Join Me for the Workshop (It’s Free)
If anything in this post resonated — the vulnerability, the isolation, the feeling of assessing yourself by vibes rather than a clear metric — I'd love for you to join me at my upcoming free workshop.
From Meh to Motivated (May 16, 2026) is where I'm introducing the Our Core Coaching Moves rubric to the world for the first time. Here's what you can expect:
Walk through the rubric together and assess yourself in real time
Get a first look at a tool that's still being shaped — your feedback matters
Be part of what I hope becomes an annual end-of-year ritual for coaches and tutors everywhere
It's free. It's live. And it's the first time I'm doing this publicly.
Not ready for a live event? Or reading this blog post after all the fun?!
Our free resource library is a good place to start exploring what structured coaching frameworks actually look like in practice.
Your Turn
What does your current reflection practice actually look like — honest answer? And if you've ever found a way to assess your own coaching skills that didn't involve either imposter syndrome or wishful thinking, I'd genuinely love to hear about it in the comments.