Laurie Santos, Yale professor and host of The Happiness Lab, has spent years studying what makes people happy. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Santos explained that happiness is not a destination but an ongoing process. She compared it to physical fitness. The activities and habits that contribute to happiness need to be practiced repeatedly or the benefits fade. Among the factors she identifies as contributing to happiness are social connection, meaning, gratitude, helping others, and a sense of agency. (The Dartmouth, June 10,2026)
Reflecting on Santos’ observations, I considered that students benefit from happy teachers, but perhaps not for the reasons we might assume. The environments where teachers thrive are often the same environments where students thrive. When teachers experience purpose, connection, growth, contribution, and agency, they are more likely to create learning environments where students experience those same conditions.
This raises an important question for instructional coaches, peer coaches, and school leaders. How can coaching strengthen the conditions that increase both teacher happiness and student learning? Coaching can be a pathway to better teaching and to happier teachers.
Coaching Can Connect Teacher Purpose and Satisfaction
Teachers don’t cause student achievement; students do. Consequently, some of the most rewarding moments in teaching occur when educators observe students demonstrating curiosity, perseverance, confidence, collaboration, or ownership of learning. Coaching can help teachers focus on those outcomes. Coaches encourage teachers to notice the student learning behaviors they hoped to generate and the student growth that may otherwise go unrecognized amid the daily demands of teaching.
Many teachers also carry personal goals that extend beyond required standards. They want students to become more curious, resilient, empathetic, or engaged learners. Coaches who take time to understand these deeper purposes can help teachers reconnect with the reasons they entered the profession. Satisfaction grows when teachers see evidence that their work is advancing the outcomes they value most for students.
Coaching Can Build Connections
One of the strongest findings from happiness research is the importance of meaningful relationships. Teaching can be deeply rewarding, but it can also be surprisingly isolating. Teachers often spend their days surrounded by students while having few opportunities for reflective conversations with colleagues about their challenges, questions, and successes.
A coach listens, asks questions, and communicates that a teacher’s thinking matters. Often, the greatest value of a coaching conversation is the experience of being heard. Coaching provides teachers with a thinking partner who helps them process experiences, explore possibilities, and reflect on their practice. Over time, coaching can also help create cultures where those reflective conversations become a normal part of professional life.
Instructional coaches can promote peer coaching, collaborative teams, and professional learning communities where teachers learn with and from one another. Relationships built on trust, curiosity, and shared learning strengthen not only teaching practices but also teachers’ sense of belonging. Community builds coachability, and coachability builds community. Both contribute to teacher happiness and to student learning.
Coaching Can Increase Agency
People are more likely to thrive when they feel they have influence over what happens next. A sense of agency—the belief that one’s actions can make a difference—is strongly connected to motivation, engagement, and well-being. The opposite occurs when people feel that decisions are being made for them rather than with them.
Effective coaching strengthens teacher agency. Coaches help teachers identify possibilities, test ideas, and learn from the results. Teachers are positioned as professionals capable of generating solutions rather than simply implementing someone else’s answers. When teachers identify goals that matter to them, explore strategies they believe are worth trying, and examine evidence of student learning, they develop greater ownership of both the process and the outcomes.
Agency produces energy.
Teachers who believe they can influence student success are more likely to experience the confidence, growth, and satisfaction that contribute to happiness.
Coaching Can Cultivate Gratitude and Hope
Teachers frequently focus on what still needs attention. There is always another lesson to plan, another student to support, another challenge to solve. While this commitment to improvement is important, it can also cause teachers to overlook evidence of growth and accomplishment.
Effective coaching creates opportunities for reflection on progress. Coaches help teachers notice what students can do today that they could not do previously. They help teachers recognize risks that students took, challenges that were overcome, and small victories that might otherwise pass unnoticed. These conversations encourage teachers to notice growth and progress rather than focusing exclusively on what remains unfinished.
Coaching builds hope. When teachers examine evidence of progress and identify next steps, they are reminded that change is possible. Hope grows when teachers see that their efforts matter and that students are capable of continued growth. By helping teachers notice progress and possibility, coaching contributes to the optimism and resilience that support both happiness and professional fulfillment.
If happiness is like fitness, then schools need more than occasional morale boosters. Like fitness, happiness grows through repeated practices and habits. Effective coaching creates connection, reinforces purpose, increases agency, and cultivates gratitude and hope. Those same conditions support both teacher happiness and student learning. Perhaps that is one more reason coaching matters. It doesn’t just help teachers become more effective. It helps them remain energized, fulfilled, and hopeful in work that matters.
