Coaching Cut #39 Personal preference in your praise
Coaching Cuts: Bite-sized tips for better coaching
Our new series of coaching cuts focuses on typical coaching pitfalls and how to avoid them. These pitfalls come from our experience as coaches (yes, we’ve both done them all before) and from many coaching sessions we’ve watched. This is what makes us think they are typical and worth unpicking and correcting.
We hope they are a helpful way for you to avoid the mistakes we made, so you can keep getting better at coaching!
Let’s see this week’s pitfall…
Pitfall: Personal preference in your praise
This pitfall shows up when coaches praise a teacher in a way that centres the coach’s own preferences.
It sounds like this:
“I really loved your use of [teaching technique]. I use it all the time in my own teaching — I’ve always found it works really well.”
This kind of praise is completely understandable because coaches draw on their own experience and are trying to build rapport.
But there’s a hidden problem.
What the teacher may hear is not:
“This decision supported learning in this moment.”
But instead:
“My coach likes [technique].”
“[Technique] is a safe choice when I’m being observed.”
“If I use this technique, I’ll get positive feedback.”
Over time, this can lead to overgeneralisation:
“I’ll just use [technique] whenever my coach comes to watch me teach.”
The coaching conversation shifts away from decision-making and learning and towards performing the coach’s preferences.
Why this matters
This isn’t an issue about the thing the coach selects to praise. The technique might be a great choice.
The issue is that the teacher leaves the conversation without clarity about:
why the choice was effective,
what learning it supported,
and when it would (or wouldn’t) be the right move again.
When praise is anchored in personal preference, it doesn’t help teachers build a transferable mental model. Instead of thinking “When is this useful?”, they’re left thinking “What does my coach like?”
That’s not a route to adaptive expertise.
The pitfall in action…
In the clip below, watch how coach Sarah praises the use of show-me boards by linking it to her own teaching experience. The praise is warm and well-intentioned but it stops short of analysing the decision or its impact on learning.
As a result, the teacher, Adam, isn’t invited to think about why the strategy worked, or how he might decide whether to use it again in a different context.
How to do it better
So what do we do instead?
We remove personal preference from the equation entirely.
Rather than saying “I loved it” or “I always use this”, we anchor our feedback in learning.
A simple shift helps:
“I think it was effective when… because…”
But, you can still say “I loved it when…” IF you link to learning.
Here’s what to do:
Zoom in on a specific moment in the lesson
Name the instructional decision the teacher made
Link that decision to its effect on student learning
Explore when the strategy would (and wouldn’t) be the most effective in other situations.
Crucially, we can ask the teacher to do some of this thinking themselves:
“What were you hoping to find out at that point?”
“What would have been the risk of using a different approach?”
“When might this strategy be less helpful?”
This keeps the focus where it belongs: on purposeful choice, not favourite techniques.
Let’s see it done better…
In the second clip, watch how coach Sarah revisits the same moment but this time spotlights teacher Adam’s decision-making and explicitly links it to learning. Notice how the conversation moves beyond what was done to why it worked. Also notice how teacher Adam is supported to think about future use of the technique!
And if you found this useful…
Check out our podcast Coaching Unpacked for live coaching and analysis
Look out for our upcoming book with Dr Haili Hughes, Coaching for Adaptive Expertise, out JULY 2026!
 | A guest post by
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Thanks for this great example of coaching light versus coaching heavy!