AI as Your Personal Instructional Coach
Table of Contents
TL;DR
(Instructional Guidance, Transcript, and Prompts below)
Why Reflection Matters
Excellent teaching depends on the ability to stop, reflect, and analyze what worked, what did not, and what can be improved. Strong relationships and deep content knowledge matter, but regular structured reflection is the key to continuous growth.
How AI Supports Teacher Reflection
AI can function as a personal instructional coach by asking targeted questions, helping teachers analyze their own decisions, and suggesting areas for improvement. Rather than giving directives, it prompts thinking and supports reflective practice.
Process for AI to Provide Coaching
Step 1: Generate Reflection Questions
Teachers can ask AI to produce structured reflection questions that cover design, delivery, engagement, assessment, and improvement. These questions guide thoughtful evaluation of a completed lesson.
Step 2: Create a Self-Evaluation Form
AI can convert reflection questions into a simple Likert-scale self-assessment. This allows teachers to quickly rate key aspects of their lesson without writing a full reflective essay.
Step 3: Analyze Your Ratings
After completing the self-evaluation, teachers can ask AI to interpret their responses. The system identifies strengths, pinpoints challenges such as pacing or clarity, and offers targeted recommendations for refining future lessons.
Step 4: Generate Strategies for Improvement
If an area needs improvement, such as engagement or instructional flow, teachers can ask AI for specific strategies to try next time. This produces practical, actionable options aligned with the teacher’s goals and context.
Key Takeaway
AI can effectively serve as an always-available instructional coach. By helping teachers reflect, evaluate, and plan next steps, AI supports ongoing professional growth and improves classroom practice.
Teacher Take-aways
Pedagogical and Instructional Implications
Reflective practice is a cornerstone of effective teaching and professional development. By systematically examining one’s instructional decisions, actions, and their impact, teachers can continuously refine their practice rather than relying solely on intuition or ad-hoc adjustments.
A core role of instructional coaching is not to provide ready-made answers but to prompt reflective thinking. A coach, whether a mentor, peer, or self-study guide, helps guide teachers to examine fundamental aspects of their practice: clarity of learning objectives, lesson flow, pacing, the quality of explanations, engagement and equity, responsiveness to student understanding, and assessment of learning. Through targeted questioning rather than directives, coaches encourage teachers to identify what worked well, what was challenging, and what to try differently next time.
To make reflection sustainable and meaningful, it is helpful to use a structured but lightweight self-evaluation framework. Rather than writing long narrative reflections, teachers can rate aspects of their lesson (such as clarity, engagement, pacing, inclusivity) on a simple scale after each class. Over time, the pattern of self-ratings reveals trends: strengths to build on and recurring challenges that warrant targeted improvement.
Once patterns emerge, teachers and coaches can select one or two focus areas (for example, improving student engagement, refining transitions between activities, or strengthening formative assessment) and collaboratively develop specific strategies. This targeted approach helps avoid overwhelming attempts to “fix everything at once,” and enables incremental, sustainable professional growth.
Incorporating regular reflection into teaching practice, whether individually or with a coach, also supports teacher well-being, professional identity, and self-efficacy. Reflective practice encourages teachers to align their beliefs and values with their instructional choices, to adapt thoughtfully to student needs, and to build confidence in their ability to grow.
Over time, the cumulative effect of disciplined reflective practice translates into more coherent, responsive, and effective instruction, which supports deeper student learning.
Ghorbani, M. R., Parhizkar, F., Sadeghi, A., & Baniasad, A. (2023). Reflective teaching practice: The impact of reflective journals on teacher professional growth. Journal of Education and Learning, 12(4), 55–70.
Tsui, A. B. M., & Law, D. Y. K. (2023). Teacher reflective practice and professional learning: A longitudinal study on changes in teachers’ perceptions and classroom actions. Teaching and Teacher Education, 127, 104089.
AI Support and Use
Teachers can use AI as a practical reflective-practice and coaching tool by leveraging it to structure thinking, interpret patterns, and identify targeted strategies for improvement. AI supports teacher growth without replacing professional judgment, making the reflective cycle easier to sustain.
Teachers can use AI to strengthen instructional practice by:
- Structuring reflection by generating focused questions about lesson design, delivery, engagement, and assessment, helping teachers concentrate on what matters most.
- Creating quick self-evaluation tools, such as brief rating scales that make post-lesson reflection fast and consistent across days or units.
- Identifying patterns by summarizing repeated self-ratings and highlighting strengths and recurring challenges, similar to how a coach interprets observational data.
- Supporting targeted improvement by suggesting strategies aligned to specific needs, such as improving pacing, refining transitions, or increasing equitable participation.
- Sustaining professional learning through a repeatable cycle of reflection, rating, interpretation, and strategy generation that teachers can use individually or with teams.
Using AI in this way helps teachers maintain a continuous, efficient process for examining their instruction, making informed adjustments, and strengthening the quality of student learning.
Full Transcript and Prompts
What is the number one key to becoming an excellent teacher?
To be the very best teacher you can be, which means providing the very best learning experience for students, you have to know the content (obviously), you have to build strong positive relationships with students (obviously), but the key is, without a doubt, the ability to stop, reflect, and think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how things have gone, and what you can do differently.
AI as Your Coach
Basically what we’re describing is coaching. And we can actually turn to AI to provide coaching for us. Because, if we think about it, what a good coach does is ask questions. The good coach doesn’t say, “Okay, next time do this, do this, do this,” but help you to think and to reflect and to consider and to make decisions. And the AI can do that very well.
Step 1: Generate Questions for Reflection
So, let’s start with prompt number one.
Prompt
I have a lesson plan that I think is pretty good. After I implement the plan, I want to reflect on it to determine its quality and delivery. What are questions I should consider?
I have a lesson plan. I think it’s pretty good. So, you’ve presented a lesson. After I implement the plan, I want to reflect on it to determine its quality and the delivery. What are some things I should be thinking about?
So basically, you can think about a lot of things, but what types of questions will help you to consider strengths, weaknesses, and potential improvements for the next time. So let’s start there and drop it into my ChatGPT.
Some things to think about: here are reflection questions you can use. They are grouped in design, delivery, engagement, assessment, and improvement, which is a pretty nice, well-rounded set of categories of topics to consider. And we’ve got a lot of questions here.
Now, what you could do is you could prepare a little response to each of these, write out an answer for everything and feed it back into the AI.
We’re going to do something a bit more simple here because, frankly, this is something you want to do regularly, and nobody’s got the time to now go write a full reflection paper on something. I mean, maybe you do, but most people don’t.
All right, so, what we’re going to do: we’ve looked at these we say, “You know what? These really are good questions. There’s a lot of good things to think about here.” Were all the students actively engaged? How did I respond to questions or misconceptions? And so forth and so forth.
We’re going to simplify this with prompt number two.
Step 2: Create a Self-Evaluation Form
Prompt number two basically says, “Okay, good stuff. Make it into a survey with liker type scores, you know, on a scale of one to five.” And for example, here is a potential question, but only give me two per category.
Prompt
Turn this into a survey format with likert-type scores that I can answer. Such as “Were transitions smooth and efficient?” on a scale of 1 to 5. Only include 2 most important questions per category.
Now, obviously, the more questions you’re responding to, the more thorough the feedback is going to be, but this is going to give us a good example of how this process is useful.
So, give me my Likert-type scale of one to five, but only two per category. (And, oh, what just happened there? All right, let me try that again and copy and go.) So, it’s going to do just that. It’s going to say, “Okay, here’s all the different categories. Here’s two questions per on a scale of one to five. What do you think of this?”
The lesson objectives were clear and achievable. All right, on a scale of one to five, do you agree with that or not? And we’ll do that for all of the questions.
(And I don’t know where it just went. Let’s try that again. There we go. I think we broke ChatGPT! Okay, it happens. Here we go. That was a little unexpected.)
All right, so we’ve got two items per category, and we’ve got top four.
Step 3: Ask AI to Analyze Your Responses
What I’m going to do is I’m going to simply prepare a response to each of those and then I’m going to ask the AI to generate some feedback based on the response that I give it.
Now, I notice that there are 14. So, let me add one. 13 – We’re going to give that one a four. And 14 -we’re going to give that one a five. I think I’ve got the right count now. Yes, 14 questions.
Prompt
On the basis of these scores, what are some strategies for improving my lesson and delivery next time, plus overall recommendations?
So, I’ve got my responses. It’s question answer, question, answer, question, answer. But at the end of it, here’s what I want to know on the basis of these scores: what are some potential strategies for improving the lesson and the delivery, and provide some overall recommendations as well because that’s really what we’re trying to get to here, right?
So, let’s see what we get and we’ll cross our fingers that this time there are no glitches. (That is real life in action right there.)
Based on your responses, etc., etc. Okay.
Some good stuff: clarity of objectives, etc., but there’s room to refine delivery, pacing, and so forth.
Now, what it’s going to do is it’s going to give me a little interpretation, things I did well, some things I might think about doing differently next time, some areas per category to think about, and some recommendations based on the information that I fed to it, and finally, some overall recommendations. Take all this stuff we just said.
Here’s the point. Here’s the overall thought. Refine delivery and pacing and clarity, enhance accessibility through pre-teaching supports, etc., etc.
Step 4: Generate Ideas to Try
Now we’ve got a little bit more to do here and for that we are going to turn to prompt number four and that is that’s that’s what it is. Here’s what it is.
Prompt
What are some strategies I can use for [improving instructional flow]?
If we’ve got some things that come out of the overall recommendations to consider, what we can do is we can say, “Okay, I agree. I need to increase engagement equity. All right, not really sure how I’m going to do that, though. What are some options for doing that? What are some strategies that I can consider?”
And that’s what the final question does for us. What are some strategies I can use for this, and then it’s going to be one of the areas in the overall recommendation.
So I’m going to pop that in there, and I’m going to swap out for increasing engagement equity.
All right, you see I need to do it. I agree it needs to be better. But what are some ways that I can do it? What are some ideas and strategies I can apply if I feel they are appropriate according to my judgment and my understanding of the instructional context?
All right, here we go: lots of, up here are ways that we can actually do it.
Concluding Thoughts
So what we have done is we’ve basically had the AI serve in the role of an instructional coach to help us think through what we have done, evaluate it, and generate some ideas for moving forward because that, ultimately, is what makes an amazing teacher.
I hope you found these techniques useful. Take care.