1. Stop Relaunching Your Math Initiative — Start Compounding.

One of my first calls was a brand-new partnership, and I opened it the way I open most of them — with the math improvement flywheel. The work of improving math outcomes isn’t a program you launch. It’s a heavy wheel you push in one direction, turn after turn, until the momentum starts carrying the work for you. The alternative is what I call the doom cycle: launch something with fanfare, hit a hard first year, get disappointing early data, react by changing direction, and launch something new next fall. Same effort every year, and it never adds up, because each push points a different way.

The move here is quieter than it sounds. It’s not “launch something great.” It’s “keep pushing the same thing long enough that it becomes real and just part of how math improves here.” Before you add this year’s focus, ask whether it builds on last year’s or replaces it. Replacements feel like progress and cost you momentum. If your teachers can’t name the one thing your district has been getting better at for more than two years, you may be relaunching when you think you’re improving.

2. Name Your Big Rocks and Let Math Teams Protect Them Their Own Way

With a couple of math teams this week, the real problem wasn’t too little planning. It was too much. One team in particular kept routing every decision to the group, refining every plan one more time, waiting for consensus before anyone moved. From the outside it looks like diligence. From the inside it’s paralysis, and it was generating anxiety and killing momentum.

The move is the big-rocks discipline: name the two or three priorities that would make this quarter or term a success even if nothing else got done, put those in first, and let everything else be sand that settles around them. Change itself is non-negotiable — you don’t get to keep planning forever — but the perfect plan is fully negotiable. Ship a rough version, learn, improve.

The nuance I kept adding: the rocks are shared, but the system for protecting them shouldn’t be identical for everyone. A single standardized planning template quietly assumes every brain works the same way. One person needs a calendar with the rocks blocked in; another needs a single index card. Judge the system by one thing only — does it keep your big rocks from getting buried — and let people build the version that fits how they actually manage attention.

3. Get Role Clarity Before a Growing Math Team Creates More Work

Several of these teams have grown — a second coordinator, a coach, a grant-funded specialist, new teacher leaders. On paper that’s exactly what a sustainable system needs. In practice, more than one leader told me the bigger team somehow feels like more work, not less. That’s not a people problem. It’s that the roles grew faster than the clarity about them.

The move is unglamorous and it works: name, out loud and specifically, who owns what. Define complementary roles, not duplicate ones — for any given piece of work, one person should clearly be the owner, not two and not none. When two capable people have similar titles and similar instincts, they’ll both reach for the same high-value work and neglect the invisible stuff. Draw the boundary before it gets personal.

And name what’s not yours, too. That was the relief for one coordinator this week who was quietly carrying pilot logistics, publisher-run PD, and higher-level decisions that were never hers to hold. Say clearly, “I support teachers to implement; I don’t own the pilot logistics or the publisher training” — and then actually put it down. A lot of the overwhelm on a growing team isn’t volume. It’s people carrying things that were always someone else’s.

4. Change teacher math beliefs through experiences, not directives.

One administrator is planning a district math kickoff, and the temptation with a kickoff is always to lead with the plan — here’s the initiative, here’s what we need you to do. I pushed the other direction. If you want teachers to change practice, you have to change beliefs first, and you don’t change beliefs by announcing them. You change them through experiences.

So the move is to open the year with an experience and a story rather than a directive. Let teachers do the math the way you want their students doing it. Tell the story that reframes what they think is true — we spent time this week on a simple fluency story about counting sticks of gum that does more to shift how a teacher sees fluency than any slide of research would. Lead with the experience, and the buy-in for the plan comes almost for free. Lead with the plan, and you spend the year pushing against beliefs you never surfaced.

5. Pick evidence that builds trust instead of spending it.

A few of these conversations were about a pilot, and the instinct with a pilot is always to go look — schedule observations, send someone in with a form. I get it, but external observation raises defenses and gives you a thin slice of watched performance. There’s a better move for a pilot focused on engagement and discourse: have teachers record their own lessons and analyze their own footage.

The camera isn’t an authority figure, so the teaching relaxes toward normal. And the person watching was actually in the room, so they read the moments an outsider would misread. The one rule that makes it work: the footage belongs to the teacher. You collect the reflection — what they noticed, what they’ll try next — not the video. The moment it starts feeling like surveillance, every advantage disappears.

One expectation I set every time: engagement and teacher comfort will move before deep instructional change does, and that’s the normal order, not a disappointment. If you treat the early, visible wins as real, you keep teachers motivated through the slower stretch where the harder shifts are quietly forming.

If there’s a thread running through all five sessions with math leaders, it’s this: the districts that improve aren’t the ones that work harder in September. They’re the ones that pick a direction, protect it, and keep turning the same wheel long enough for the momentum to take over. Everything above is just a way of protecting the wheel — from the doom cycle, from over-planning, from role confusion, from a kickoff that skips belief, from evidence that costs you trust.

If any of this landed, our free Math Improvement Assessment is a good way to see which of these moves your own district most needs right now. It’s on our site whenever you want a clearer read on where your year is really headed.