What Traditional Walkthroughs Miss — And TeachFX Catches
Lincoln County Schools, NC
Melanie Huss walked into a high school English classroom and saw everything she hoped to see. Students at stations, taking notes. A teacher conferencing one-on-one about writing. Active learning in action.
"If you walked around and saw what the kids were doing, it was all meaningful work," recalls Huss, Assistant Superintendent of Academics for Lincoln County Schools in North Carolina. "But when I actually stopped and listened to the student conversations, they were talking about TikTok influencers, fake eyelashes, and Bad Bunny."
A traditional walkthrough would have missed it entirely. "If I would have walked in there with my little checklist, I would have said students were talking, student discourse was happening," Huss says. "But, TeachFX takes that so much deeper to things we can't see."
The 28-Year Problem
Lincoln County has never had instructional coaches. "We do not have the local funding to be able to provide instructional coaches," Huss explains. "That's not something we have ever had."
For principals managing dozens of teachers, this created an impossible challenge: How do you provide consistent instructional feedback at scale?
Traditional observations weren't the answer.
Non-Evaluative Changes Everything
What TeachFX provided was something Lincoln County had never had: immediate, private, non-evaluative feedback that teachers could use on their own terms.
"It's completely non-evaluative," Huss explains. "Even if we had full-time coaches, it's really hard for teachers not to see a coach as evaluative, because that coach and principal are connected. But TeachFX is different—it will never become part of the administrative or evaluative system. It brings you self-awareness about what's happening in your classroom, and then you work on that."
For Katrina Robinson, principal at East Lincoln Middle School, this was the key to adoption. When she piloted TeachFX with five teachers last year, skeptical veteran teachers agreed to try it once they understood the recordings were private.
The Breakthrough
One veteran teacher, initially resistant to "technology, one more new thing," recorded her lesson and gave a student extra wait time after an incorrect answer—simply because she knew she was recording. The gifted student, given time to think, self-corrected twice and reached her own aha moment.
"The teacher told me, 'I would have normally jumped in and corrected her, but I gave her three opportunities to answer,'" Robinson recalls. "'I got to see the aha moment on my student's face.'"
This year, Robinson expanded to all 45 teachers. The results:
Teachers increased Opportunities to Respond by 317% (from 37.3 to 155.8 per hour)
Open-ended questions grew 360% (from 8.9 to 40.8 per hour)
Academic press increased 493% for engaged teachers
Student talk time increased 28%
Robinson, who describes herself as "more operations-minded," credits TeachFX with developing her instructional leadership skills. "My ability to talk about instructional practice, my ability to set goals with teachers—I've seen that growth in myself as they've increased the use of TeachFX," she says.
Solving the Impossible Problem
For Huss, TeachFX finally answers the question that has plagued her entire 28-year career: "How can we provide feedback to teachers when we don't have instructional coaches? TeachFX meets that need. It provides direct, constructive feedback in a way that's immediate and allows teachers to measure the impact of their work themselves."
Two-thirds of Robinson's teachers would now be upset if TeachFX disappeared. The district is expanding beyond pilot schools.