Skill, Will, or System? What Are We Actually Diagnosing When Change Stalls?
One of the hardest parts of coaching teachers, for me, has always been figuring out where a technical skill gap ends and something else begins.
I have coached someone where I genuinely could not tease it apart.
There was a real technical skill gap. There were things she needed more training, modeling, practice, and support to be able to do consistently. But there was also some kind of block. Was it resistance? Burnout? Something adaptive? Some fear or competing commitment I did not yet have language for?
At the time, I had not yet been exposed to Kegan and Lahey’s concept of an immunity to change. Their work has since given me another way to look back at that experience: people can genuinely want change while also holding competing commitments and assumptions that make the change difficult to enact (Kegan & Lahey, 2009).
But even that still would not have explained everything.
Because the system itself was part of the problem.
There were real cultural issues around who received support, who was given the benefit of the doubt, who was blamed, and who was burdened with responsibilities that may or may not actually have belonged to them. Time, training, support, expectations, and the way different people were treated were not distributed evenly.
So the question I was left with was not simply, Does this teacher have the skill?
It was:
Where did her skill end, where did her will begin, and where did the system become responsible for what we were seeing?
What I Tried
I tried a lot.
I modeled. I explicitly taught skills. I gave theory and philosophy behind the practices we were working on. I scaffolded a gradual release process: side-by-side coaching, then observation with feedback, then slowly reducing my direct involvement after we had taught, modeled, and practiced the skill.
I taught in the classroom so she could see the work with her actual students. We did reading groups around theory and philosophy. We talked about watching other teachers doing similar lessons so she was not only seeing my approach. I brought in another teacher-coach friend who used similar strategies in a different style. I asked her to self-identify areas she wanted to work on. We focused on quick wins, points of highest leverage, positive feedback, and not putting too many things on her plate at once.
There were frequent one-on-one meetings, observation, feedback, planning, and eventually a formal improvement process measuring specific technical skills and deliverables.
And all of that led to very little sustained success.
That is part of why the experience stayed with me.
The Coaching Plan Was Also Being Undermined
One thing I understand more clearly now is that the system was also making the coaching itself difficult to implement consistently.
The same administrator who had asked me to help build the improvement plan, determine how much observation and coaching would happen, and create a structure for modeling, feedback, and support would also regularly change my schedule and redirect me elsewhere.
Time that had supposedly been set aside for one-on-one coaching, planning, modeling, observation, and feedback was constantly shifting or being overridden. I ended up carving those opportunities out wherever I could instead of following the structure we had agreed upon.
If we were evaluating whether the teacher was implementing something with fidelity, but the organization was not implementing the coaching plan with fidelity, then what exactly were we measuring?
Implementation science gives us language for examining determinants, strategies, mechanisms, implementation outcomes, and the conditions that help or hinder implementation rather than looking only at whether an individual did or did not change (Research Institute for Implementation Science in Education [RIISE], n.d.).
That does not mean the technical skill gaps were not real. They were. But I have to be careful about drawing conclusions from an intervention that the larger system was simultaneously asking for and undermining.
What I Would Add Now: Self-Observation
One thing I would do differently now is build much more self-observation into the coaching process.
At the time, most observation and feedback came externally. I would now want the teacher regularly watching her own practice and evaluating herself against criteria we had established together beforehand.
For some people, having another person constantly observing and evaluating can create its own tension. Self-observation gives the person more room to notice, interpret, and assess their own growth.
It also gives the coach better information.
If a teacher can accurately identify where a lesson went off track, where fidelity broke down, what went well, and what she would change next time, that tells me something different from a situation in which her self-assessment and the observed evidence are far apart.
Self-observation can be both a growth tool and a diagnostic tool. It may have helped me see more clearly what was skill, what was will, and what was system.
When Coaching and Evaluation Blur
There is another piece I think is important to name.
I did not come into that role with formal training in coaching, and I had had very little experience being coached myself. Much of what I knew came from my reading, my experience as an educator and teacher leader, and an external coach who had been hired to support me in this role.
That coach was phenomenal.
They gave me theory and reading, modeled what excellent coaching actually looked like, and taught me practical things like documentation, negotiating up, managing up, and thinking systemically about the work. They gave me an example of how I would want to be coached and how I would want to coach other people.
At the same time, I was learning coaching while actively being expected to coach.
I tried to be clear with the teacher about when I was operating in a coaching role and when I was delivering something that had been handed to me administratively. But the system kept blurring that boundary.
I was not the hiring or firing manager. I think that separation matters if a coaching relationship is going to feel genuinely developmental. But I was also pulled into formal improvement planning, helped write the plan, attended most of the meetings, and sometimes became the person delivering difficult decisions based on evaluations I had not conducted.
I was trying to build trust while occupying a role that could reasonably feel connected to consequences.
This is also where my restorative lens matters. I want coaching to happen as much as possible in a WITH posture, with high expectations and real support, rather than becoming something done to another person (Wachtel, 2016). But power and role ambiguity can make that harder.
Can a coaching relationship remain genuinely supportive when the coach is also being used as the conduit for evaluation, discipline, or decisions they did not make?
And:
If an organization expects someone to coach change, what structures does it owe both the coach and the person being coached so that relationship can actually function as coaching?
A Different Teacher, a Different Outcome
There was another teacher in the same environment who had many of the same frustrations and some of the same technical gaps.
She had been in the same classroom. She had experienced many of the same feelings of abandonment, lack of support, blame, and being promised structures and supports that did not materialize.
The larger system did not suddenly become healthier for her.
But we changed part of her immediate environment.
She moved to a different grade level and was intentionally paired with a teacher whose strengths were very different from hers. Their skills complemented each other. We initially divided responsibilities based on what each person was already stronger at, then used gradual release so they could learn from one another and slowly take on responsibilities that had previously been difficult.
The difference was dramatic.
She improved in concrete technical areas she had previously identified as weaknesses and that had also been observed externally: lesson execution, transitions, behavior interventions, and implementation of student supports, including IEPs and 504 plans.
Her fluency increased. Her capability increased. Her energy changed.
She could see that the skills she already had were making a difference, while also seeing herself learn and improve in areas that had been difficult. The larger structural problems did not disappear. Frustration, burnout, stress, blame, and broken promises still existed.
But the immediate relational and instructional environment changed enough that her experience of herself changed too.
As her coach, I could see the difference not only in technical performance but also in how she moved through stressful moments and difficult days. The improvement from one year to the next was palpable.
The System Was Not Background
I was also being evaluated inside the same system.
I was held accountable for outcomes that included things that predated me, things decided without my input, and things I was expected to deliver even when I would not have made or supported those decisions myself.
I was told directly that if I were doing my job correctly, we should be seeing improvement in student scores, and that the lack of dramatic improvement reflected the inefficiency of my coaching.
At the same time, the schedule that was supposed to allow me to coach was repeatedly overridden.
When I raised that contradiction, the problem was often reframed as my lack of capacity, my time management, my being “overwhelmed,” or my not doing the work well enough.
I experienced that as a pattern in which responsibility for systemic problems was being located in individual people.
At times, I was also evaluated on responsibilities that had not been part of my original role, had not been discussed in prior meetings, and had not been included in the feedback I had been receiving. That shifting of expectations was deeply disheartening.
And it made the original coaching question recursive.
I was asking:
Is this teacher struggling because of skill, will, or system?
Meanwhile, the organization was effectively asking the same question about me.
What I Think Differently Now
I do not think the answer is that everything was systemic.
The technical skill gaps were real.
I also do not think the answer is that the first teacher simply lacked will.
And I do not think the second teacher’s success proves that changing a classroom placement fixes organizational dysfunction.
What I think now is that skill, will, and system are not three clean boxes. They interact.
Sometimes changing one part of the system reveals capacities in a person that the previous environment was obscuring.
Sometimes a person genuinely needs more technical skill.
Sometimes something adaptive is happening underneath the behavior. Kegan and Lahey’s work helps me think about competing commitments and assumptions that may exist alongside a sincere desire to change (Kegan & Lahey, 2009).
Sometimes the environment itself is creating friction.
And sometimes the coach is trying to diagnose all three while also being shaped by the same system.
That leaves me with questions I think are more useful than simply asking whether someone is “resistant to change”:
If we expect fidelity from the person being coached, what responsibility does the organization have to implement the coaching supports with fidelity too?
How do we evaluate an individual’s skill or will when the schedule, priorities, criteria, and expectations around them are constantly shifting?
What happens when the coach and the person being coached are both experiencing some of the same systemic pressures?
Are we looking at an implementation failure in the individual, or a failure in the conditions designed to support implementation?
And maybe the hardest one:
How do I hold someone accountable for what is theirs without making them responsible for what belongs to the system?
That is where I am landing right now.
A coach has to be careful not to individualize a systemic failure.
But we also cannot use “the system” to explain away an individual skill gap.
The work is in learning how to tell the difference, while remembering that sometimes the most honest answer is that the pieces are tangled together.
References
Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Harvard Business Press.
Research Institute for Implementation Science in Education. (n.d.). Module 1: Implementation science overview [Online learning module]. School Mental Health Assessment, Research, & Training Center, University of Washington.
Wachtel, T. (2016). Defining restorative. International Institute for Restorative Practices.
OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (GPT-5.6 Sol) [Large language model].
AI assistance disclosure: I used ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2026) to organize, condense, and lightly reframe experiences, examples, questions, and reflections I had already developed and dictated. ChatGPT also assisted with grammar, transitions, APA citation formatting, and organization while preserving my original ideas and perspective.
