By JC Bowman and TC Weber
Professional development should make teachers more skilled, confident, and independent. It should sharpen professional judgment, not replace it.
Tennessee school districts should apply that standard to CT3 Education’s Real Time Teacher Coaching model. CT3 Education is an equity-focused education consulting practice based in San Francisco, California.
TC Weber recently raised important questions about CT3’s growing role in Metro Nashville Public Schools. Those questions deserve attention. In April 2025, the MNPS school board approved a CT3 contract through April 2030, with total compensation not exceeding $1 million. The agreement characterizes the work as a pilot professional-development program that could be expanded. When MNPS is audited, this may be a target area.
CT3 defines Real Time Teacher Coaching as professional development delivered “at the point of instruction.” A teacher wears an earpiece while a coach observes the classroom and offers brief, real-time guidance. The process includes an observation, a pre-conference, a coaching session, and a post-conference.
Immediate feedback is not inherently wrong. Athletes and musicians receive it, and new teachers can benefit from experienced mentors who help them recognize what they may not yet see. However, teaching is not like football practice.
A teacher stands before 25 students, monitoring content, comprehension, behavior, pacing, special needs, classroom climate, and the unexpected moments that arise in any classroom. These teachers have to react, informed by their knowledge of their students and school policies, not someone with no knowledge of that unique situation.
Adding another voice directly into the teacher’s ear changes that dynamic. It also raises a fundamental question: Who owns the teacher’s voice when the headset goes on?
One of the most notable public accounts of CT3 came from Massachusetts teacher Amy Berard in 2015. Berard described coaches directing her via an earpiece—telling her when to warn students about what language to use, and how to deliver instructions. At one point, a student urged her to stop listening to the coaches and be herself.
CT3 responded that it respected Berard’s right to disagree and used that feedback to improve its work. One teacher’s experience does not settle the issue, but it raises the right questions.
CT3 emphasizes relationships, student engagement, classroom management, and teacher confidence. Its website reports working with more than 10,000 teachers and 200 districts and claims that 97 percent of participating schools are renewed. Those claims are notable, but renewal rates and satisfaction surveys are not the same as independently demonstrated gains in student learning.
CT3’s current CEO, Dr. Joy Treadwell, has persuasively argued for the importance of genuine relationships with students. I agree. That makes implementation especially important.
Clear expectations matter. Classroom order matters. Teachers must be able to teach, and students must understand that their behavior affects everyone’s opportunity to learn. But structure should never become scripting.
Teaching is fundamentally human work. Good teachers read faces, recognize hesitation, and know when humor will ease tension, when silence is more powerful than another direction, or when a lesson needs to change because a student has asked a better question.
Those decisions cannot always be reduced to a coaching protocol. MNPS therefore owes teachers and taxpayers clear answers:
- Is participation voluntary?
- Can teachers reject real-time instructions they consider inappropriate?
- Who sets the coaching objectives?
- What qualifications must coaches have in the teacher’s subject and grade level?
- Can coaching information be used for evaluation or discipline?
- How are special education students accommodated?
- What evidence will determine whether the program continues?
The last question should be easy to answer. The MNPS contract says the district will evaluate return on investment using iReading, iMath, and benchmark data. Good. Then publish the results annually and focus on student achievement.
Tell taxpayers which schools participated, what services they received, how much they cost, what outcomes changed, and whether those changes can reasonably be linked to the intervention. And ask teachers—not merely whether they enjoyed the training, but whether it made them better teachers six months later.
The goal of coaching should be independence. A successful coach should eventually become unnecessary as the teacher develops stronger judgment, confidence, and skill.
Tennessee already asks a great deal of its educators. We should be careful about adding an initiative that risks communicating something very different from support. The message is: We trust you to teach the children—but we still need someone whispering instructions in your ear while you do it.
Professional development should give teachers better tools. It should never turn the teacher into one.
TC Weber is an education advocate and writer. His blog is Dad Gone Wild at https://norinrad10.com
JC Bowman is the executive director of Professional Educators of Tennessee.
