He gave teachers the one thing the system forgot to budget for: a coach in their corner.
FOUNDER & CEO // EDCONNECTIVE // VIRTUAL INSTRUCTIONAL COACHING
Walk into a school and you will find a math teacher with a coach, a basketball team with a coach, even a debate club with a coach. Walk into the same school and find the people running the classrooms - and most of them are coaching themselves. Will Morris noticed the gap, then spent his career closing it.
EdConnective, the company he founded and runs as CEO from Richmond, Virginia, delivers one-to-one virtual instructional coaching to teachers, instructional coaches, and K-12 leaders. A teacher records a lesson. A trained coach watches it, then sends back specific, actionable feedback - usually within 48 hours. The teacher practices the move ten to fifteen times until it stops feeling like homework and starts feeling like a habit. Around 95% of that feedback actually makes it into the classroom, which in a field famous for one-and-done workshops is the whole ballgame.
The matching is deliberate. Morris likes to describe it as the "eharmony" of teacher coaching - educators are paired with coaches through a data-driven engine rather than whoever happens to be free that week. The coaching is non-evaluative on purpose. No grade, no gotcha, no note in the file. The point is growth, not judgment, and teachers tend to lower their guard when nobody is keeping score.
It travels. EdConnective now operates across more than a dozen states and has delivered thousands of coaching sessions, with districts signing on because the model turns professional development from a line item into something that shows up on a classroom walkthrough. The company that started with 45 schools and 70 coaches has grown into a national operation.
Most professional development in American schools follows a familiar shape. A district books a speaker, fills a gymnasium with teachers on a day off, runs a few hours of slides, and hands out certificates. By the following Friday, the binder is on a shelf and the classroom looks exactly as it did before. Morris researched this exact failure point at Penn, and EdConnective is the rebuttal. Coaching is not an event. It is a relationship that runs across a semester, one video and one small adjustment at a time.
The mechanics are almost stubbornly simple. A teacher does not get a lecture about classroom management; the teacher gets a coach who watched their third-period class and noticed exactly where the energy dropped. Feedback is specific, it is fast, and it is tied to the district's own priorities rather than a generic playbook. Because the same coach returns week after week, the advice compounds. A move that felt awkward in October is muscle memory by December. That continuity is why the company can claim implementation rates near 95% - the feedback is not just delivered, it is practiced until it sticks.
There is a quieter design choice underneath all of it: the coaching is non-evaluative. In a profession where observation usually arrives attached to a rating, a raise, or a renewal, that distinction matters enormously. When nobody is filing a report, teachers stop performing and start experimenting. They will try the risky lesson, admit the thing that is not working, ask the question they would never raise in front of a principal holding a clipboard. EdConnective's model treats teachers the way good coaches treat athletes - as professionals who want to get better, not as employees who need to be caught.
A teacher is paired with a coach through data-driven matching - the "eharmony" step.
The coach reviews real classroom video, not a hypothetical.
Specific, non-evaluative notes land within roughly 48 hours.
The teacher reps the move 10-15 times until it sticks - about 95% make it to class.
EdConnective reports gains in the 35-40% range on measures like student engagement, rigor, and content mastery. In one district case study tracking nine teachers, the numbers moved like this:
Before there was a platform, there were 30 teenagers. As an Urban Prep Fellow, Morris spent a year working with a cohort of African American freshmen at a Chicago charter school. It is one thing to read about the achievement gap; it is another to stand in front of it every morning. That year did something specific to him - it convinced him that helping one room at a time would never be enough.
Around the same time he became a StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellow, sitting inside a social-entrepreneurship institute that gave a name to the itch he already had: systemic impact. Not 30 students. Not 300. A whole system.
He took that question to the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, where he earned his master's and researched instructional coaching as a promising lever of teacher quality. The research pointed somewhere uncomfortable and obvious at once - the best way to help students at scale is to help the adults in front of them get better at their craft. EdConnective is what happens when you stop writing about that finding and start building on it.
The undergraduate degree came from the College of William & Mary. The through-line from Williamsburg to Chicago to Philadelphia to Richmond is a single, stubborn conviction: teachers are the leverage point, and they have been coaching themselves for far too long.
EdConnective was not born out of a market gap on a whiteboard. It was born out of a year in Chicago and a conviction that the students who most need a great teacher are too often the ones least likely to get sustained support for the adults in their building. Morris has been candid that the company exists to make an impact on some of the country's neediest and historically disadvantaged populations. That is the engine, and the business model is the vehicle.
It also informs how he talks about being an underrepresented founder. He has pointed to the uneven distribution of household wealth and relational access - who you happen to know, whose calls get returned - as real barriers, and argued that the antidotes are unglamorous and practical: get honest feedback from operators who have done it before, and stay close to the customer. EdConnective's own trajectory is the proof of concept. The product improved because Morris kept putting it in front of the teachers and districts who would actually use it, then listened.
The result is a company that sells to districts but answers to classrooms. Its frameworks lean toward equity-centered instruction designed to work whether students are remote or in person - a flexibility that turned from a nice-to-have into a necessity when schools scrambled online and the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced districts widened overnight. The pitch to a superintendent is measurable outcomes. The point, for Morris, has always been the kid in the back row who finally gets a teacher with someone in their corner.
Morris ran EdConnective through a gauntlet of programs before the money followed - the kind of unglamorous, room-by-room work that turns a thesis into a company.
A seed round of roughly $1.1M in 2019 went toward product, nationwide growth, and hiring.
"We have tremendous confidence in the management team with the experience in high-quality instructional coaching as well as the depth of knowledge in UI/UX platform integration."
The pitch in five words: the "eharmony" of teacher coaching.
Becoming an EdConnective coach is statistically harder than getting into many top colleges.
He researched the science of coaching at Penn first, then built the company - thesis before startup.
The coaching is non-evaluative by design: no grade, no file note, no gotcha.
One year mentoring 30 freshmen in Chicago is the seed of the whole enterprise.
Richmond HQ, national reach - EdConnective scaled from 45 schools to more than a dozen states.
Profile compiled from public sources. Figures reflect company-reported and press-reported data at time of writing.