Beyond SMART: COACH Goals for Instructional Coaches

coaching cycles coaching role general coaching sustainable change Oct 13, 2025

Ah, SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. It’s a classic for a reason, but let's be honest, it's not always the most inspiring tool. What if we told you there’s something a little more tailored to the unique and complex world of instructional coaching?

This is where COACH goals come in, offering a more comprehensive and meaningful approach.

What SMART Goals Miss

Coaching is all about building relationships and fostering sustainable, long-term change. We want to help teachers grow in a way that sticks, not just for one lesson, but for their entire career – we want sustainable change in teacher practice. The SMART framework, while useful for many things, can feel a bit restrictive when we're trying to capture that bigger picture.

Breaking Down COACH Goals

The COACH framework is designed to address these coaching nuances head-on. It focuses on five key components:

Clear: Your goals should be easy to understand with no room for confusion about what you are trying to achieve. For example, instead of a vague goal like "improve math instruction," a clearer goal would be "increase the number of math teachers implementing differentiated instruction in their classrooms."
Obtainable: This is the reality check – your goals need to be realistic and achievable. We're not trying to boil the ocean here. We're trying to make incremental but tangible changes. So a goal might be "increase the number of teachers effectively implementing at least two differentiation strategies in their classrooms by 10% by the end of the semester." This is ambitious but also quantifiable and within reach.
Action-Oriented: This is where we get to the good stuff – the "how." What are you actually going to do? What steps are involved in meeting this goal? This could be anything from conducting one-on-one coaching sessions to modeling new strategies in a classroom or hosting a professional development workshop.
Connected: Here’s the real magic of the COACH goals – aligning your goals with the big-picture priorities of the school and district, like the district's equity initiative or a school-wide focus on student engagement. This connection ensures your work is not only impactful but also supports a larger vision.
High Impact: Ultimately, our work is about making a positive difference in the lives of teachers and students. A COACH goal should have a significant, high-impact outcome that you can actually measure. This means tying your goal to real improvements in student learning, engagement, and motivation. We can track this not just through traditional test scores, but through student surveys, classroom observations, and teacher reflection journals. It's about moving beyond the superficial and creating a lasting effect.

Putting It All Together: Sample COACH Goals

Let's bring it all together with some comprehensive examples and break it down.

Instructional Coaching

Goal: By the end of the semester, I will conduct 10 one-on-one coaching sessions with teachers, focusing on implementing differentiated instruction strategies for at least two diverse learners in each teacher's classroom, aligning with the district's equity initiative.

Here's how this goal hits every point in the framework:

Clear & Obtainable: The goal specifies what will be done (10 coaching sessions), with whom (teachers), and by when (the end of the semester).
Action-Oriented: The goal outlines specific actions to take: "conduct 10 one-on-one coaching sessions" and "focus on implementing differentiated instruction strategies."
Connected: The goal explicitly states its alignment with broader school and district goals: "aligning with the district's equity initiative."
High Impact: The goal is designed to have a significant impact on both teacher practice ("implementing... strategies") and student learning ("for at least two diverse learners in each teacher's classroom").

Elementary School: 2nd Grade Literacy

Goal: Over the next eight weeks, I will collaborate (action-oriented) with the second-grade team to implement three new whole-class reading fluency strategies (clear & obtainable), with a focus on improving students' rhythm and expression (high-impact), in line with the school's literacy improvement plan (connected).

High School: 10th Grade Biology

Goal: Throughout the semester, I will coach (action-oriented) two biology teachers in redesigning their ecology unit (clear & obtainable) to incorporate more inquiry-based lab activities, with the aim of increasing student collaboration and hands-on scientific practice (high-impact) as a part of the science department's initiative to boost lab skills (connected).

Setting COACH Goals with Your Teachers

While we as coaches can set our own goals for our practice, we can also co-create COACH goals with the teachers we work with. This framework isn't just for us; it's a powerful tool to empower teachers to take ownership of their own growth. It helps them move past feeling overwhelmed and instead focus on meaningful, attainable steps that align with their own classroom needs and the bigger picture of the school. It’s a great way to start a new coaching cycle and ensure everyone is on the same page and working toward a common vision.

Here’s an example of how you can frame a COACH goal directly with an individual teacher: Over the next quarter, I will collaborate with my coach to implement one new formative assessment strategy per week in my 8th-grade science class to increase my ability to gather real-time student data, thereby strengthening our department's focus on data-driven instruction.

Ultimately, this is why COACH goals are so effective: they push us beyond setting a simple to-do list and challenge us to think about the bigger picture. When we focus on the Connected and High-Impact components, we ensure our coaching efforts are not just isolated victories but are a part of a larger, systemic change. It’s about aligning our daily work with the goals of our school and district, and most importantly, it’s about making a tangible, meaningful difference in the lives of both teachers and students. That’s the real goal of coaching, and the COACH framework helps us get there.

What’s the first COACH goal you’re going to tackle?

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