This paper attempts to articulate the process and content of the coaching model developed by the staff who work in schools affiliated with the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC). BASRC is a 7-year-old nonprofit grant-funding organization with the mission to transform schools in the San Francisco Bay area, California into vital places to learn and teach. Central to the BASRC support of its member schools are school coaches, who usually work with three to five individual schools in the same school district. Each coach works for 4 to 5 hours a week with formal and informal leaders in each school to enact a set of activities designed to foster and sustain a schoolwide continuous improvement process with the goal of improving the technical core of schooling. The BASRC model is a hybrid of curricular, cognitive, and principles-based coaching that also draws on traditional organizational consulting. Coaches work with school leaders in these stages: (1) introductory; (2) study; (3) plan and contracting; (4) action; and (5) reflection. Each stage is explained in detail. The paper also discusses some of the tension found in coaches work. Coaches find that the key to addressing these tensions is to use them as teachable moments , to make sense of them for the improvement process. (Contains 27 references.) (SLD)