By: Shantay Mobley

One of the most common challenges in instructional coaching is translating a thoughtful conversation into a next step that actually moves practice forward. Coaching conversations often surface multiple ideas about how instruction could improve, and coaches are often trying to balance honoring teacher ownership with providing clear guidance. As a result, action steps can easily become too broad (“increase student discussion”) or too vague (“try asking more questions”). Teachers then leave the meeting with good intentions but little clarity about exactly what to try next.

In our Momentum Schools Initiative (MSI)—a multi-year partnership with schools focused on increasing cognitive lift in the classroom through coaching—we’ve been using a simple framework to help coaches craft action steps that are clear, manageable, and motivating: BOAT.

BOAT stands for:

• Bite-sized – If a teacher can’t implement it in the next lesson or two, the step is probably too big.
• Observable – The step is specific enough that a coach can clearly see whether it happened.
• Aligned to shared “Look-Fors” – The action step connects to a shared vision of strong instruction. In MSI, we define this through a set of classroom “look-fors”—observable practices that signal students are doing the thinking, such as explaining their reasoning, discussing ideas with peers, and working through challenging problems.
• Transferable – The goal isn’t just improving one lesson. The action step should help teachers build habits they can use across future lessons.

What does this look like in practice? 

Instead of:

“Increase student discussion during problem solving.”

Try:

“During whole-class discussion, invite two students to explain their strategy and ask one peer to respond with a question or connection.”

Or instead of:

“Try asking more questions.”

Try:

“When students share an answer, follow up with prompts like ‘How do you know?’ or ‘Can someone build on that idea?’ to press for explanation and reasoning.”

Action steps like these make the next move visible and manageable. Teachers leave the conversation knowing exactly what instructional move they are practicing, which helps translate coaching conversations into concrete shifts in classroom practice.

What we’ve noticed is that when action steps meet these criteria, coaching gets more useful. Teachers can try the move quickly, coaches can see what happened, and the next conversation has something concrete to build from.

Instructional growth usually happens this way: try something, pay attention to what students do, reflect on what happened, and decide what to try next. A strong action step doesn’t need to solve everything. It just needs to move practice forward.