S5E28: AJ Pettway on “Student-Centered Learning,” Instructional Coaching, and School Leadership

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell, and today we are talking about teaching, coaching, and the strange language of modern education.

One phrase that comes up constantly in education is “student-centered learning.” It gets used so often, and so vaguely, that it’s started to mean almost everything and almost nothing at the same time. Usually, it signals a rejection of explicit instruction in favor of discovery, personalization, or loosely defined engagement. But underneath the rhetoric is a more important question: what does it actually mean to center students in the work of learning without abandoning the responsibility to teach well?

So I wanted to sit down with someone who has spent years thinking about that question from inside classrooms, schools, and coaching systems.

AJ Pettway didn’t take a traditional path into education, and part of what makes this conversation interesting is how grounded his perspective is in actual classroom experience across very different contexts. Over the course of his career, AJ has taught and coached in a wide range of school environments, experiences that shaped the way he thinks about learner variability, instructional quality, and what teachers actually need in order to improve.

In this episode, we talk about AJ’s path into teaching and how his thinking about instruction evolved over time. We discuss the reality of learner differences and how schools often misunderstand what effective differentiation actually requires. AJ explains why he has become increasingly critical of the phrase “student-centered learning,” what people usually mean when they say it, and where the idea often breaks down in practice.

We also get into instructional coaching — specifically the fears and challenges that come with moving from the classroom into a leadership role. AJ reflects on his early years as a coach, including the insecurities that came with trying to support teachers while still refining his own understanding of instruction.

Finally, we tackle a question that sits underneath almost every school improvement effort: do school leaders actually need to be instructional experts? AJ makes the case that without a deep understanding of instruction itself, leadership too easily drifts into managing culture, compliance, or systems while the core work of teaching remains untouched.

Along the way, we talk about pedagogy, coaching, professional growth, and the tension between educational slogans and the reality of what it takes to help students learn.

🚨 Tickets Selling Fast! 🚨

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

🗽 NYC | July 27–31, 2026

👉 Learn more + register here: 🎟️ Explicit Teaching Institute registration

I also hope you have time to check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.