Andy Lyons still remembers the routine: the literacy coach hunched over her laptop after dismissal, copying the district’s ELA look-fors—line by line—into a brand-new Google Form. By the time she finished sharing edit rights with six colleagues and checking the formulas, the evening custodians were vacuuming the hall. Three weeks later, a new focus strand meant starting the whole thing over.

For the staff at Paragon Mills Elementary in Nashville, this was the cost of doing instructional business. Yes, the forms captured evidence, but they also trapped it. Because the documents lived in the coach’s Drive, Andy—the principal—had to request access or wait for a printout every time he met with his supervisor. The system worked… until it didn’t:

• a first-year teacher needed rapid-fire coaching but only one observer could see her trajectory;
  
• data conversations stalled while coaches hunted for the right spreadsheet;
  
• countless leader-hours evaporated into template building.

A colleague’s tip—and a pivot

Everything shifted at a principals’ meeting when a neighboring leader pulled out her phone and showed Andy Education Walkthrough.

“She said, ‘I can build or tweak a template in minutes, and my whole team sees the data the second I hit save.’ That was all I needed to hear,” Andy recalls.

He piloted the platform in May, liked what he saw, and budgeted for a full rollout the next school year. Setup was almost anticlimactic: most MNPS rubrics already lived in the community library; the team copied them, adjusted a few labels, and logged in.

The year the forms disappeared

By August, all seven instructional leaders—Andy, an assistant principal, two deans, and three coaches—were walking classrooms with iPads instead of clipboards. When a coach finished a 15-minute pop-in, she tapped Send and a PDF landed in the teacher’s inbox before she reached the door. The staff quickly discovered that the platform wasn’t just faster; it rewired their coaching culture.

1. Unified focus. Because every observer used the same template, teachers knew exactly what would be under the microscope. Planning sessions began with, “Remember, the next cycle looks for text evidence.”
2. Distributed visibility. Any leader could open the dashboard and watch a story unfold: a novice teacher climbing from “emerging” to “proficient,” or—just as important—not climbing at all.
3. Instant evidence. When Andy’s director asked, “How do you know your walkthroughs are targeting rigor?” he pulled the graph on screen. No emails, no printouts, no delay.

A new coaching rhythm

The school settled into a pattern that felt less like paperwork and more like joint problem-solving:

Weeks 1–3

• Pick one narrow look-for (say, accountable talk).
  
• Schedule pop-ins; newer or struggling teachers receive extra touchpoints.
  

Week 4

• Leaders project the dashboard at the Instructional Leadership Team meeting.
  
• Teachers join, interpret the bars and heat maps, and vote: Stay on this strand or move on?
• Coaches design PD and model lessons keyed to that decision.
  

Every three weeks the cycle restarted—no one had to rebuild a thing.

Early signs it’s working and the numbers to prove it

• Walk-through volume without overload. In a typical month, the seven-member team now logs 30–40 visits—roughly 300 touch-points in a school year—without adding a single planning period to anyone’s schedule.
  
• Hundreds of minutes reclaimed. What once took the literacy coach an evening—building or cloning a Google Form—now takes under 15 minutes. Across the ten or so cycles Paragon Mills runs each year, that’s 15-plus hours of clerical work swapped for coaching prep.
  
• Feedback in under 60 seconds. Teachers who used to wait up to 24 hours for an email or sticky note now receive a PDF before the observer leaves the doorway—a turnaround that’s 1,400 times faster than the old norm.
  
• Growth you can graph. New-to-profession teachers who started the year scoring “emerging” on the ELA rubric climbed to “developing” after the first three-week cycle and hit “proficient” by winter break—progress charted in living color on the dashboard, not hidden in a coach’s notebook.
  
• District-level ripple. After Andy shared those dashboards at a principals’ meeting, five neighboring MNPS schools adopted the platform—turning one campus’s efficiency fix into a budding network norm.
  

Each metric points to the same conclusion: centralizing templates and data hasn’t just tidied the paperwork; it has multiplied the reach and speed of every coaching move Paragon Mills makes.

What comes next

Paragon Mills is now chunking the district’s hefty ELA rubric into bite-sized templates that rotate through the year, and Andy’s team is experimenting with overlaying interim assessment scores to spot which instructional moves drive the biggest student gains. Peer walkthroughs are on deck for fall; with templates at the ready, veteran teachers can step into the observer role without training hurdles.

Key takeaway—centralized data, distributed leadership

Real-time feedback is great, but for Paragon Mills the breakthrough was simpler: put everything in one shared home. When templates live in a common library and every datapoint flows to a single dashboard, seven observers act like one cohesive coach—and every reclaimed minute goes back to kids, not Google Forms.