People & HR

How to run a performance review cycle as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

People & HRFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You run a cohort-based course or coaching practice with somewhere between 50 and 500 students, and 'performance review' for your team means a Google Form you built in 2023, a spreadsheet you dread opening, and a Calendly link you send to your one part-time ops contractor hoping they actually book the call. There's no HR system — you're not paying for Lattice or Culture Amp for a two-person team. So reviews happen late, the feedback lives in a shared Doc nobody revisits, and any coaching you promised your team or your teaching assistants gets buried under the next cohort launch. You end up managing people reactively, not intentionally.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A recurring performance review workflow that pulls context from actual work data — Notion docs, Slack threads, calendar history — so you're not starting every review from a blank page

A structured feedback tracker built inside Starch that logs review outcomes, agreed goals, and follow-up tasks in one place instead of scattered Google Docs

Automated reminders and a meeting notes system so every 1-on-1 review gets captured, action items get assigned, and nothing slips between cohort launches

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Meeting Notes Knowledge Management Task Manager Project Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Google Calendar data on a schedule so it knows when cohort cycles end and can trigger review reminders at the right time. Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule to pull in docs, meeting notes, and any existing team wiki content as context for reviews. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live to surface relevant threads when you're prepping for a specific team member's review. Calendly is connected from Starch's integration catalog so scheduled 1-on-1 review calls appear automatically in your workflow.

Prompts to copy

Build me a performance review tracker for my teaching assistants. Each entry should have: team member name, review date, cohort they supported, top three wins, one growth area, agreed action items with due dates, and my overall rating out of 5. I want a kanban view that shows reviews in Draft, Scheduled, Completed, and Follow-up stages.

Every time I finish a 1-on-1 review call, summarize the transcript, extract all action items with owners and due dates, and save everything to the team member's record in my review tracker.

Create a knowledge base section called 'Team Standards' where I can document expectations for TAs and contractors — response time to student questions, how to handle refund requests, grading rubrics. Flag any doc that hasn't been updated in 90 days.

Two weeks before each cohort ends, create a task for me called 'Schedule TA reviews' and a subtask for each active team member. Mark them P2 priority with a due date of five days before cohort wrap.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Calendar and Notion as scheduled-sync providers so Starch has a live picture of your cohort schedule, your team's working docs, and any notes already written about each person.

2 Connect Slack and Calendly from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can pull conversation history and booked review calls into context when you need them.

3 Install the Project Management app from the Starch App Store and describe your review tracker: team member names, cohort association, rating scale, and the stages you want (Draft → Scheduled → Completed → Follow-up).

4 Install the Task Manager app and tell Starch to create recurring pre-cohort-end reminders — P2 tasks that fire two weeks before each cohort wraps, one per active TA or contractor.

5 Set up a Knowledge Management section called 'Team Standards' and paste or describe the expectations you currently keep in your head: response time SLAs, grading rubrics, escalation paths for student complaints.

6 Before each review call, ask Starch to pull a summary brief for the team member: Notion docs they've contributed to, Slack threads where their name appears, Calendly sessions they've run, and any open tasks in the tracker.

7 Run the 1-on-1 via Zoom or Google Meet with Meeting Notes active — it transcribes the conversation in real time so you can stay present instead of typing.

8 After the call ends, Meeting Notes generates a summary with key decisions and extracted action items; tell Starch to push those action items directly into the team member's record in your Project Management tracker with assigned due dates.

9 Close the review by updating the kanban card to 'Completed' and logging your rating and a one-paragraph written summary — this becomes the permanent record, not a Doc that floats away.

10 Task Manager fires a follow-up reminder 30 days out so you actually check whether the agreed action items got done before the next cohort starts.

11 At the end of a full year or after three cohort cycles, ask Starch to pull all completed reviews and generate a summary report: average ratings by team member, recurring growth themes across the team, and open action items that never got closed.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Spring 2026 Cohort — TA Review Cycle (May 2026)

Sample numbers from a real run

Active teaching assistants reviewed	3
Action items extracted from 3 review calls	11
Action items that would have been lost without capture	7
Hours spent on review admin (vs. prior cohort)	2
Hours spent on review admin prior cohort (manual process)	6

After the Spring 2026 cohort closed, you had three TAs to review — Maya (live session facilitation), Priya (community moderation), and Dan (grading). In prior cohorts, you'd email them a Google Form, schedule a call a week later, take rough notes in a Doc, and forget to follow up on half of what you discussed. This time: two weeks before cohort end, Task Manager fired P2 reminders for each review. You opened each team member's project card, asked Starch to pull a context brief — it surfaced a Slack thread where Maya had handled a difficult student complaint well, a Notion doc Priya had updated three times, and an open task Dan still hadn't closed from the previous review. The 45-minute calls each generated a Meeting Notes summary. Starch extracted 11 action items total and pushed them into the tracker with due dates. Priya's card moved to Follow-up because she has an agreed goal to build a new student FAQ doc by June 15. You spent about 2 hours on the whole cycle instead of the 6 it took last cohort, and for the first time, you have a record you'll actually open before the next review.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Percentage of scheduled reviews completed before the next cohort launch date

Action item close rate: how many agreed follow-ups from the last review are actually done by the next review

Time from cohort end to all reviews marked 'Completed' in the tracker

Number of knowledge base docs flagged stale (proxy for whether team standards are actually being maintained)

TA retention rate across cohorts — whether people come back to work with you again

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Forms + Sheets + Docs (current default)

Free and familiar, but review data lives in three disconnected places, there's no automatic reminders tied to cohort schedules, and follow-ups depend entirely on you remembering to check a spreadsheet.

Lattice or 15Five

Purpose-built for performance reviews at scale, but priced for teams of 10+ with an HR function — overkill and over-budget for a two-person education business where the 'team' is yourself and two part-time TAs.

Notion standalone

Flexible enough to build a review template, but no automated triggers tied to your calendar or cohort cycle, no meeting transcription, and no task assignment that actually nags anyone.

ClickUp or Asana

Good task tracking, but you'd have to manually bridge it to your calendar, your meeting notes, and your knowledge base — three separate tools, three separate logins, and no AI pulling context across all of them before a review call.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — meeting notes, knowledge management, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

I only have one or two TAs. Is this overkill for a team that small?

Small team is exactly the scenario this is built for. Enterprise HR tools are overkill because they assume an HR manager is running the process. Starch assumes you are the HR manager, the founder, and the person teaching on Monday — so it handles the reminders, the note-taking, and the follow-up tracking that would otherwise fall through because you're too busy launching the next cohort.

My TAs are contractors, not employees. Does a formal review process even make sense?

Yes, arguably more so. Contractors have no annual review structure at all by default, which means feedback is entirely ad hoc and retention is a coin flip. A lightweight documented review — even two times a year — gives you a record of what's working, a place to note scope changes, and a reason to have the conversation before someone quietly stops being available.

Does Starch integrate with Kajabi, Teachable, or Thinkific to pull student completion data into reviews?

Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific are web-based platforms, so Starch can automate interactions with them through your browser — no API required. If you want to pull specific data like which students a TA supported or module completion rates, describe what you want and Starch will build the automation. That said, for the review workflow itself, the most useful context usually comes from Notion, Slack, and your calendar — which sync directly.

What if I don't use Zoom? My review calls happen on Google Meet.

Meeting Notes works with whatever you're using for calls — it captures transcription during the session. Google Meet, Zoom, or any video tool you run through your browser is reachable. The output (summary, action items) is what matters, and that gets pushed into your tracker regardless of which platform you called from.

Is my team's review data stored securely? Starch isn't SOC 2 certified.

Honest answer: Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your school district, university partner, or enterprise client requires SOC 2 compliance from every vendor in your stack, that's a real constraint to name. For most solo coaches and small course businesses, the data involved — TA feedback notes, action items, ratings — doesn't carry the same compliance requirement. But you should make that call with clear information, not assume it's fine.

Can Starch send the review summary to the TA automatically after the call?

Yes. You can tell Starch: 'After I mark a review Completed, email the team member a summary of our discussion and their agreed action items.' Starch connects to Gmail on a schedule and can send from your account. You can review the draft before it goes, or set it to send automatically if you trust the output — your call.