Coaching cut #51: Over-modelling

Coaching Cuts: Bite-sized tips for better coaching

Pitfall: Over-modelling

This pitfall lives in the modelling stage of coaching. The coach stands up, models the action step, and the coachee watches. So far so good. But the coach doesn’t stop at the action step. They keep going, modelling what comes next, or what came before, or both. By the time they finish, the coachee has seen a longer sequence of teaching and can’t tell where the action step started and stopped.

It’s an easy pitfall to fall into...

Over-modelling doesn’t happen because coaches are careless. It happens because the bits around the action step feel natural to include. If the action step is about developing a whiteboard routine, it feels logical to also show what you’d do once the boards are up. After all, that’s what happens in a real lesson.

The problem is that coaching isn’t a real lesson. The model exists to give the coachee a clear, focused image of the thing they are working on. The moment you extend beyond the action step, you dilute that focus. Your coachee is now trying to hold two (or three) techniques at once, and the one they’re meant to be practising gets lost in the noise.

This is especially true when the extra bit is more complex or interesting than the routine itself. A whiteboard routine is procedural. Responding to errors on the boards is cognitively demanding and requires careful decision-making. If you model both, the error-correction will take up more time and more of the coachee’s attention, even though it’s not the focus. The routine, which is what they’re actually meant to practise, ends up feeling like the preamble.

The result is a coachee who isn’t sure what they’re rehearsing. If you don’t have that clarity, what should be a manageable step soon feels like too much.

The pitfall in action

Watch how the coach Adam models beyond the action step and confuses coachee, Sarah. They have a very shallow conversation about what she saw, and she’s unsure what to focus her rehearsal on.

So, what do we do instead?

We focus. We model only the action step and nothing else. We tell the coachee where we’re going to start and where we’re going to stop, so they know what they’re watching.

This might feel unnatural. In a real lesson, the whiteboard routine flows straight into scanning and responding. Stopping after “show me” feels like an abrupt cut. But that’s exactly what makes it useful. By isolating the routine, you let the coachee see it clearly, understand why each part matters, and rehearse it without the cognitive load of also thinking about what comes next.

The boundary also communicates something important: that this routine is worth getting right on its own. It’s not just a lead-in to the interesting bit. The routine is the action step, and it deserves the coachee’s full attention.

Let’s see it done better. Notice how much deeper they can go into the purpose of each part of the routine because coach Adam really focused the model on the action step…

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