Jinkies! This was one of the most energetic sessions I attended at the 2025 Coaching for Change Conference.

Kanisa Williams and her team from DeKalb County Schools used the classic cartoon mystery gang to help coaches uncover something that can sometimes feel far more elusive than ghosts: their own impact.

The session — titled “The Case of the Missing Impact: Let’s Solve the Mystery to Maximizing Coaching Support” — asked coaches to take a hard look at how they work, what gets in the way and how to bring intentionality back to their role.

Here are five tips I got from Williams and her mystery gang on how to maximize the coaching support you can offer your teachers.

 

Tip 1: Know Who You Are and What You Have to Offer

Fred. Daphne. Velma. Shaggy. Scooby. Every coaching team has them — not literally, but in function. This session opened by asking us to reflect: Who are you on your team?

In the world of Scooby, the roles are pretty well defined:

• Velma: the strategist
• Scooby: the heart
• Fred: the leader and organizer
• Daphne: the connector and resource provider
• Shaggy: the empath and advocate

In the session, participants stood up and shouted their Scooby persona, and the room was immediately buzzing.

But the point wasn’t just to have fun. It was to remind us that our impact depends on knowing what we bring to the table — and appreciating the roles others play, too.

The mystery gang wouldn’t have solved as many mysteries if any of these roles were missing. Similarly, your teachers need you and you need your teachers, and all of you need the students. But you also need that school leader there to keep everyone on track. In other words, it takes everyone in the building, regardless of their role, to keep the mystery machine running smoothly episode after episode…I mean, school year after school year.

It’s important to reflect on this sometimes. Make sure you know and appreciate what you are bringing to your school, but also make sure that you know and appreciate what everyone around you is bringing, too.

 

Tip 2: Be Able to Tell Your Own Story

You go into school each day with a full to-do list and by the time you leave, everything is checked off. Does that make you impactful?

That was the mystery the ragtag mystery gang was tasked with solving in this session. What does it mean to be impactful, and how can you determine if you are truly making a difference in your building (and whether they feel the difference you make)?

The first step towards answering those questions is to ask yourself to define impact and how you accomplish it each year.

Williams said that she and the rest of the DeKalb team meet every single year with their academic coaches, and they always ask them the same question: “Did the work that you did during this school year have an impact? Was there a return on investment?”

The trouble often isn’t being able to make a difference. It’s being able to tell the story.

“Oftentimes we’re out here doing all the things for all the people, being everything to everybody, and then we don’t tell our stories the best way that we can,” Williams said. “We’re not able to articulate… all the things that we have done to help build this teacher’s capacity, to help move these scores.”

If you can’t express how you make a difference, will others in the school be able to do it any better?

Because here is the trick: being impactful isn’t about checking off to-do list items. It’s much more than that. Here are just some of the things mentioned in the session that you, as a coach, can impact:

• Measurable outcomes
• Enhanced student learning
• Improved teaching practices
• Teacher professional growth
• Positive organizational change

Take a moment and reflect on how you affect each of these areas and more in your work. If you can do that, you will no longer have to keep investigating the mysterious case of whether you are making a difference. Because you will know without a doubt that you are.

 

Tip 3: Investigate What Is Holding You Back

The first two tips here have been about knowing who you are and how you make a difference. However, reflection isn’t just about the good things. You’ve got to reflect on the whole picture.

That is why the next thing I learned in this session was all about taking a look at the unsolved mysteries in your role.

Before you can solve for impact, you have to identify the mysteries holding you back. In small groups, coaches named their biggest “unsolved cases.”

• It’s hard to show how things like test scores are impacted by the coach’s actions.
• Teachers still feel isolated and unsupported even after working with their coaches.
• Coaches are tasked with doing a million things, not all of which feel like something that should fall to them.

Unmasking the things holding you back is the only way to find out that the scary monster you’ve been afraid of the whole show is just a local businessman trying to drum up business for his new haunted house…or, you know, the instructional coaching equivalent of that metaphor.

You can’t solve your problems by ignoring them. You have to face them head-on to figure out that your problems aren’t as scary as you thought and that you can be impactful even with them…or you can find ways to get rid of them. Either way, facing them head-on puts you on the path towards making a big difference in your school!

 

Tip 4: Follow the IMPACT Framework

I’m going to go back to my messy unmasking analogy from Tip 3:

In the world of Scooby Doo, you’d watch some scary ghost or monster create havoc for the beloved mystery gang for a whole, heart-pumping half hour. Finally, near the end, the group – or, really, often Velma – would finally figure out that the ghost was actually not a ghost at all, but a human wearing a ghost costume. This would be revealed in a big unmasking.

Well, in the case of the missing impact, it is time for our unmasking ceremony (even if at just Tip 4 of 5, I am admittedly doing this a little bit early).

In this episode — I mean section — Williams was the one who gave us the big reveal and told us what is really missing in coaching work: IMPACT.

No, not impact. IMPACT. This whole time, the impact you’ve been searching for has been hiding in plain sight right underneath a big acronym that will end up solving all of your coaching problems.

So, what does it mean?

• Intentionality: Williams pointed out that “people will take your time. If you don’t tell them what you have to do, they will say you don’t have anything to do if you’re not sharing what’s in the plan, be intentional.” If you want to make the best use of your time, then you need to be intentional and upfront about what the best use looks like in your role.
• Meaningful relationships: Coaching is about building partnerships. You can’t have a partnership without focusing on building meaningful relationships.
• Purpose-driven goals: To this, Williams said that “coaching is just a conversation. Goals make the work visible.” If you want to show your impact, you need to define what impact is and then be able to show you did that (see Tip 2), and goals help you do that.
• Accountability structure: You can’t do it all alone. You need help. Having structures of accountability in place will make sure everyone is doing their part.
• Clarity/Communication: It is not enough to set goals and be intentional. Others need to be aware of what is happening and why. This is where clarity and communication come into the picture.
• Trust: You must be there every day doing the work and showing everyone that you are there for them.

In the end, we learned that if you want to maximize your success and have the most impact, you need to make sure you have plans in place for each of the six things above:

• Do you plan your day intentionally?
• Are you working to build meaningful relationships with your teachers and everyone else in the school?
• Are you coaching with purpose — or reacting to the loudest need?
• Are you following up and building accountability?
• Are you listening to and communicating well with everyone you work with?
• Do teachers feel safe enough to take risks with you? Can they trust that you’re there to grow them, not judge them?

 

Tip 5: You Can’t Accidentally Stumble Into Being a Good Coach

One of the most powerful quotes shared in this session came from Elena Aguilar.

“Effective coaching is not accidental,” Aguilar said. “It is rooted in intentional planning, strategic questioning and purposeful alignment to teacher and student growth.”

This session wasn’t a surface-level pep talk. It was a push to recalibrate — to think about how we structure our time, our support and our message.

Coaching isn’t about fixing people. It’s about connecting, aligning and growing together.

So, at the end of the day, it isn’t really a mystery at all as to how you can make a difference in your school: all you have to do is try. The tips that Williams and her team provided will help guide you towards success.

 

Final Thoughts

This session didn’t give us a one-size-fits-all fix — and that’s a good thing. What it gave us was something better: a framework for asking the right questions, noticing what’s missing and making coaching work actually work.

Because if we’re serious about solving the case of the missing impact, we can’t wait for someone else to hand us the answers.

We have to investigate our own practice — and get a little brave about what we find.

Finding ways to make a meaningful difference to your teachers can feel difficult. It can sometimes feel like everything and everyone is trying to scare you away from making the impact in your school that you know you are capable of making…

…And they might have succeeded if not for that “meddling” Williams and the incredible team of coaches at Dekalb County Schools.

With their insights, making an IMPACT has now been unmasked.

(And if you want more from Williams, check out the podcast episode she did with us where she discussed even more great coaching strategies! Or keep reading this coaching series because in a few weeks, I’ll cover another session run by the DeKalb County team.)

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