15 Years, 110 Pathways, One Inbox: Instructional Coaching Is No Longer Rationed

A letter from Adam Geller, founder and CEO of Edthena, on why instructional coaching for teachers no longer has to be rationed, and how AI coaching puts a coach in every teacher’s inbox.

I’ve been waiting 15 years to write a post like this. I get to say we did it. We have the lightning in a bottle, and we want to give it to every teacher to help them unlock their full potential for impact with students.

I know how a founder sounds when they say that, so let me tell you what we built and you can decide for yourself.

First, the social-media-short version: At Edthena, we’ve completely reimagined the AI Coach experience. Now, personalized, on-demand, content-expert, and content-specific coaching is available to all teachers right in their inbox. All a teacher needs to do is email [email protected] from a school or district address to get started. Yes, that’s it.

Now read this for the long version:

As a first-year science teacher, I wanted nothing more than to be a great science teacher. But there was no one who could come to my class during instruction to talk with me about my teaching and help me determine what to do next. (I always need to say, this is not a story about my principal, with whom I had a great relationship. She just didn’t have science expertise.)

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself on the national strategy team of Teach For America, where I was able to look across contexts and realize that this issue of helping teachers analyze their own teaching was in fact a structural challenge in our education system, not a local one. It was too resource-intensive to have the right person in the right place at the right time for every teacher.

So in February 2011, I started the organization you know as Edthena. Our vision is the same today as it was on day one: use technology to make sure every teacher can talk about their teaching with a trained observer.

The first effort in this journey was building a first-of-its-kind collaborative video coaching platform. It’s hard to remember that in 2011 our cell phones barely had cameras on them, and uploading your own video to an online service was a daunting idea for almost all internet users (not just teachers). Our video uploading was so simple and reliable that we were actually asked by a team at YouTube to show them what we had built.

For the better part of a decade, our video coaching platform solved a real problem for organizations wanting to integrate video into teacher professional learning. But we still faced blockers in our mission to reach every single teacher. Some organizations lacked the coaches. Some teachers weren’t comfortable allowing a coach to see into their rooms. And for those who were comfortable and had access to coaches, the coaching was still fundamentally a rationed resource.

Fast forward again to spring of 2020. Stuck at home with a bit of extra time, we started asking how we might solve those remaining challenges. We had a hypothesis that an emerging space called “conversational AI” could help us build a virtual “guide-on-the-side” for the teacher to act as the coach supporting their thinking and analysis. We made a deliberate decision not to just bolt a new button onto our existing platform. We actually needed to invent new technical methods to make a true thought-partner possible.

In early 2022, before the words ChatGPT had ever been uttered by anyone you know, we announced an experience we called AI Coach. We laugh about this name today, since “AI” is plastered onto everything, and naming yourself “AI Coach” might read as bandwagon-joining rather than as a breaking away from decades-long routines for how instructional coaching looked. But at the time, it was a profound shift. Edie, a completely virtual coach, could walk teachers through structured cycles based on core practices of good teaching.

Of course, late 2022 happened, and suddenly the two most popular letters in the alphabet became A and I.

As an organization, we traveled a pretty wild roller coaster of evolving sentiment in school districts over the last few years. It went from “AI? What does that mean?” to “AI! It must be able to do anything!” to “AI. Nope. That’s scary.” to “AI… Well, I get it, but I’m not allowed to buy it.” to “AI-don’t care. Can it really do the thing you’re saying?”

Along the way, we kept pushing the boundaries, partnering with Digital Promise to add a Science of Reading pathway and even collaborating with researchers from University of Virginia and University at Albany to explore next-generation automated feedback for math lessons, funded by the Gates Foundation. Last fall, TIME named AI Coach one of its Best Inventions of 2025. That was a nice moment, but it turned out to be the starting line for the next phase of development.

The turning point that leads me to write this detailed play-by-play happened in December 2025. General-purpose AI models crossed a line. They got good at “thinking” and “seeing” and working through a problem step-by-step instead of simply answering the last thing you said. Suddenly, AI systems could reason across large sets of information in a more structured way.

We started testing and asking big design questions…

Could we build an AI-powered coach that is an expert in a content area instead of a generalist?

Could we make the virtual coach as conversational as a mainstream chatbot?

Could we put the coach in the teacher’s inbox so feedback was as easy as sending an email?

Spoiler alert: the answer is yes to all of these things.

In short, starting in January 2026, we rebuilt the whole AI Coach experience again, from the ground up.

How Did We Do It?

We pointed an AI system at a large body of academic literature and had it synthesize how each field defines good instruction. We then articulated exactly what you would see and hear in a classroom when it is happening. And after we built the detectors, we built a testing system to validate and verify our methods against publicly available datasets with codes from human raters. Then we organized the content in each subject area into small topics with multiple explorations to engage with a skill area in a bite-size way. This would enable the virtual coach to focus on pedagogical skills one at a time in a particular, reasoned order.

What does this mean for a teacher? A second-grade teacher working on reading can pick the pathway on “teaching the sound-to-symbol foundation systematically” and be confident it’s fully anchored in the Science of Reading. The virtual coach knows what “systematic phonics instruction” looks like and sounds like, can point out the moments in the teacher’s video where it showed up and where it didn’t, and reference the research on what to try next.

That same specificity runs across 110 distinct learning pathways that span math, literacy, science, social studies, technology integration, world languages, multilingual learner support, core teaching practices, and teacher induction.

The end result is that Edie, the coach, is smarter than ever and ready whenever a teacher wants her for a quick conversation or a deep dive into a lesson.

Teachers securely record or upload a lesson directly in their web browser. Within minutes, Edie sends an email calling out specific moments for review, citing timestamps and exact dialogue. From there, the conversation goes wherever the teacher is. Reply from a phone between classes, or open the platform to look at the evidence together. Nobody has to find an hour on a coach’s calendar, and there is nothing to schedule.

We also fiercely protected what teachers already loved about AI Coach. Conversations with the virtual coach are private. No one in their district can see their videos or conversations without their permission, and the entire experience is fully FERPA and COPPA compliant. The system also automatically builds a done-for-you reflection log to serve as an artifact for in-person collaborations with colleagues, plus a separate contact-hours log to turn in for PD credits.

To be clear, we don’t want this to be interpreted as a call to get rid of your coaches. Quite the opposite. If we could treat teachers like professional athletes and put a personal coach in every teacher’s classroom every single day, we’d be the first to say to do it. But it’s not possible. It’s never been possible. So, yes, keep all the coaches you already have and that you can afford to hire. AI Coach will help amplify their impact by supporting teachers in between their visits.

And for teams of teachers working in professional learning communities, AI Coach acts as the scaffold to bridge the gap between classroom practice and collaborative learning. The team can select their area of focus for learning, then teachers work with Edie to examine their practice, and then teachers come back together to discuss while anchored to their actual teaching and learning data.

So Why This Letter?

Things have been a full-court press since January 2026, and we haven’t even updated our public-facing materials yet. But who cares?! We delivered on time to our existing partners earlier this month for the start of the school year, and now we’re telling you: Edie, the AI-powered coach, is available to every single teacher in their inbox.

Coaching has always been rationed because it took a specific expert, in a specific room, at a specific time. That constraint is officially gone.

It’s a big claim. When I say it out loud to people, I almost can’t believe it. But I’m willing to publicly and confidently say we can do it.

All teachers will have to do is email [email protected] from a school or district address, and Edie will take it from there. Yes, that’s it.

Somewhere right now there is a first-year science teacher who wants nothing more than to be a great science teacher. This time, there is someone to watch the lesson with.

– Adam

P.S. Coming soon: we’ll detail more about the process we used to validate our methods and the research basis for our theory of action.

P.P.S. This is a letter from me, but “I” didn’t do this alone. There are many people who have contributed to our ability to get here today.

Adam Geller is the founder and CEO of Edthena. Ready to give every teacher a coach? Email [email protected] from a school or district address, or learn more about AI Coach.