From Scripted to Supported: Coaching Change When the Curriculum and the Safety Net Disappears

The meeting hadn’t even started yet, and I could already tell how it was going to go.

One teacher sat down with her arms crossed. Another stared at her laptop, disengaged. And one teacher, an experienced reading strategist who had recently come out of retirement, walked in visibly frustrated, already mid-complaint about student behavior and reading levels.

I glanced at my agenda and knew it wouldn’t survive the hour.

At the time, I thought the problem was curriculum. What I eventually learned was that it was grief and that the most effective coaching move I made that year didn’t involve lesson plans, data, or differentiation strategies at all.

It involved five minutes of listening.

When the Script Was the Safety Net

For years, this Title I school had used a highly scripted reading curriculum built around a walk-to-read model. Students were grouped strictly by reading level, even if that meant fifth graders learning alongside first graders or second graders rotating with fourth graders. Lessons were scripted down to the minute. And that wasn’t a figure of speech.

Administrators and sometimes curriculum vendor representatives conducted walkthroughs with stopwatches. Teachers were expected to be on the exact page, at the exact time, saying the exact language.

The curriculum was expensive, but it worked for this school. More importantly, it provided certainty. Teachers didn’t have to decide what came next. The script told them.

Then district budget cuts made the program unaffordable.

The school was forced to choose a new curriculum. One that met instructional needs but came at little to no cost. They landed on EngageNY ELA, a free curriculum where only the books needed to be purchased.

On paper, it seemed like a reasonable solution.

In practice, it changed everything.

From Execution Back to Planning

EngageNY still offered structure, but it removed two things teachers had relied on for years: leveled reading groups and word by word scripted instruction timed to the minute. Walk-to-read disappeared. Classrooms now held students with a wide range of reading abilities, and teachers were expected to differentiate within whole-group instruction.

They had to plan again. Really plan.

That’s where I came in as an instructional coach tasked with helping grade-level teams relearn how to dive deeply into the curriculum and Common Core State Standards in order to plan lessons, scaffold instruction, and collaborate effectively under a model that demanded professional judgment instead of compliance.

Most teams struggled at first. One team, in particular, barely functioned.

What Looked Like Resistance Was Really Loss

Third grade was divided, tense, and emotionally spent.

One teacher, Mrs. C., stood out immediately. She was a veteran reading strategist who had retired and returned due to staffing shortages. She knew literacy. But she was drowning.

Her students had significant behavioral challenges, and the majority were reading at a first-grade level or below. Every meeting, she arrived already frustrated. If she participated, it was often to vent or to argue with a colleague. No sooner would I redirect the conversation than it would derail again.

I did what coaches are trained to do.

We created team norms.
I tightened the agenda.
I used parking lots, protocols, redirection strategies, and positive framing.
I tried to keep us “solution-focused.”

Nothing worked for long.

Meetings either turned contentious or stayed surface-level. I left more than one meeting wondering what else I could possibly try.

What I didn’t realize yet was that I was treating this as a technical problem when it was clearly an adaptive one.

The Lesson I Learned From a Five-Year-Old

By October, I was exhausted.

That weekend, I visited my sister and her family. My five-year-old niece was upset about something small but intense in the way only five-year-olds can manage. My instinct was to calm her down, distract her, or talk her through it.

My sister did none of those things.

She just listened.

My niece word-vomited every frustration she had, then ran off happy and regulated like nothing had happened.

When I asked my sister about it, she said, “If I try to stop her from talking or talk her out of her feelings, it only makes it worse. She just needs to get it out.”

That was my lightbulb moment.

I had been trying to redirect, reframe, and manage teachers’ emotions instead of acknowledging them. I wasn’t creating space for the loss they were experiencing, the loss of structure, predictability, and confidence.

The Five-Minute Shift That Changed Everything

The following week, I changed the agenda.

I told the team we were starting with five minutes of venting. No interruptions. No fixing. No forced false positivity. Just listening. I set a timer and opened the floor.

The skepticism was immediate.

Then Mrs. C. began to speak.

She vented about behaviors. About reading gaps. About feeling like she was failing students despite decades of experience. Her tone started sharp, defensive, but as the words poured out, it softened. No one interrupted. No one argued. No one tried to solve it.

When the timer went off, she stopped. Smiled. Opened her notebook.

“Okay,” she said. “What are we working on today?”

For the rest of the meeting, she participated fully. She didn’t derail once. She didn’t argue with colleagues. And the rest of the team, who had clearly been bracing themselves, relaxed.

That meeting didn’t just go better. It worked.

Leadership Skepticism and Validation

The assistant principal questioned the strategy. She worried it was a waste of instructional time.

A few weeks later, she had to facilitate the meeting in my absence. She skipped the venting portion and tried to redirect Mrs. C. with what I’d call well-intentioned, but false, positivity.

The meeting imploded.

She never regained control.

After that, the five-minute venting session was no longer questioned.

Because it became clear that the time wasn’t indulgent, it was preventative.

Change Management Is Emotional Work

What this experience taught me is something change management literature has said for years: people don’t resist change because they’re difficult. They resist change because change represents loss.

This curriculum shift was a technical decision driven by budget cuts. But for teachers, it required adaptive change—rethinking their identity, instructional instincts, and collaborative habits.

According to Heifetz and Linsky, adaptive leadership requires creating space for people to process loss before expecting them to move forward. That’s what the venting timer did. It lowered the emotional temperature so real thinking could happen.

No protocol could do that.

What I Carry With Me Now as a Coach

This experience reshaped my coaching practice.

Here’s what I know now:

• If people are emotional, no amount of structure will fix it.

• Listening is not a soft skill, it’s a leadership move.

• Venting doesn’t derail productivity; ignoring emotion does.

• Adaptive change requires emotional safety before instructional rigor.

Most importantly, I learned that sometimes the most impactful coaching strategy doesn’t come from a framework or a training.

Sometimes, it comes from setting a timer and getting out of the way.

It Was Never Just About the Curriculum

The breakthrough with that team didn’t happen because we found the perfect lesson plan or differentiation strategy.

It happened because someone finally felt heard.

And when teachers feel heard, they’re far more willing, and far more able, to do the hard work that change requires.