When teachers resist math professional development, it’s rarely about the content. Here’s what five discouraging exit tickets from a high school math department taught us about trust, structure, purpose, and ownership, and the plan we built from them.
Every month, our leadership team meets with a small system’s site leaders and coaches, and we always start with wins. This month there were plenty. Elementary teachers went back to their campuses to lead the “Try It” portion of the lesson with their colleagues. A veteran teacher who rarely stands up to lead PD asked to share with her team. A group of middle school teachers chose Building Thinking Classrooms (Liljedahl, 2020) for their own book study. Two seventh grade teachers looked at their results, saw a concept their students weren’t getting, and asked for help.
Then we got to the high school team, and the room got quieter.
After a recent virtual session with their secondary math department, most of the exit tickets said some version of the same thing: This did not impact my thinking. Nothing was valuable today. Five of the roughly seven teachers in the room said it.
It would have been easy to call that resistance and plan a stronger session. Instead, we spent most of the hour trying to understand what those teachers were telling us. I want to walk through what we heard and the plan we built from it, because I think the path matters as much as the plan.
Key Takeaways: Why Teachers Resist Professional Development
Teachers rarely resist PD because of the content. Resistance shows up when they don’t trust the messenger, weren’t part of shaping the work, can’t see its purpose, or haven’t seen the problem for themselves. Four conditions address that:
- Trust: the work is led by someone teachers already trust.
- Structure: the plan is built with teachers, with a system under their commitment.
- Purpose: start with what teachers already believe, not a new strategy.
- Ownership: teachers see the problem in classrooms before they’re asked to solve it.
Listening Before Pushing: Why This Team Said Math PD Wasn’t Valuable
What we heard was not that these teachers dislike good math teaching. They did the math in the session and enjoyed it. What they couldn’t find was the point.
Several things were true at once. Last spring, their district math task force looked closely at the data, wrote a problem statement together, and reached a shared conviction that the current state wasn’t working. No teachers from this department were in that room. They were invited, and leadership pushed hard for someone to join, but no one did. So when the work reached them, it came as a conclusion someone else had already drawn.
The department also felt singled out as the only team receiving this PD. Many were simply overwhelmed. A previous coaching push toward student discovery had felt like it took too much class time, and teachers had gone back to notes and practice. Several already had their own plans for improvement and felt the new work implied those plans wouldn’t succeed before they’d been tried.
The Results Pyramid: Why Changing Actions Isn’t Enough
There is a framework we lean on heavily that explains this well. In Change the Culture, Change the Game, Roger Connors and Tom Smith (2011) describe the Results Pyramid. Results sit at the top. Results come from actions, actions come from beliefs, and beliefs are shaped by experiences.
Most change efforts start at the actions layer: try this routine, use this task, add this strategy to your plan. Without new beliefs beneath those actions, what you get is compliance at best, resistance at worst.
One leader described the compliance version exactly. The team agrees on paper, the strategy becomes one more thing to fit somewhere in the lesson plan, and it turns into “I’m doing it because you told me to.”
Our session was meant to be the kind of experience that shifts beliefs. But an experience can’t shift beliefs when the people having it don’t trust where it came from or see why it matters. The math landed. The purpose didn’t. From there, we named four conditions we think this team needs before anything else will stick.
Condition 1: Math PD Has to Be Led by Someone Teachers Trust
The first condition is trust, and the site leaders were honest about it. Right now, this department trusts very few people. Outside coaches aren’t on that list yet, and one leader even named herself as someone who isn’t there yet either. What the team did identify was one respected leader on site who believes in this work and already has these teachers’ confidence.
In Trust in Schools, Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider (2002) found that relational trust is one of the strongest predictors of whether a school’s improvement efforts take hold. When trust is low, even good ideas get treated as outside demands. When it’s high, people are more willing to take the risks that real change requires.
Trust can’t be borrowed, but it can be built on. (We’ve written before about how teacher buy-in for effective math teaching grows from relational trust and from teachers experiencing their own mathematical “aha” moments. Trust comes first.) So the next session with this department will be facilitated by that trusted leader, with our team supporting from behind rather than leading from the front.
Condition 2: Build the Math PD Structure With Teachers, Not For Them
The second condition is structure. Trust by itself won’t carry the work, because this department’s challenge has never been a lack of ideas. Good intentions have kept dying somewhere between the PD session and the lesson plan. It’s a pattern we described in five barriers that stall math improvement: teachers learn a strategy, try it once or twice, and quietly return to what they did before.
Before the next session, our coaches will meet with the facilitator and site leaders to design it together: the protocol, the structure, and a clear outcome for the end of the time together. Then we’ll help put in place what most teams are missing:
- a shared commitment,
- regular inquiry cycles to test whether it’s working, and
- a manageable way to monitor impact.
The team decides what they’ll commit to. We make sure there’s a system under that commitment.
Part of this is also getting out of the way. What we’re hearing is that this team doesn’t want more ideas. They’ve been exposed to plenty. What they want is to pick one practice and try it together, something they haven’t done before as a department. That’s a real strength, and our job is to help them act on it.
Not sure where your own system’s PD is breaking down? The free Math Improvement Plan Assessment takes about 12 minutes and gives you a custom report on your math program’s strengths and gaps, including professional development planning.
Condition 3: Start With Teacher Beliefs, Not New Strategies
The third condition is purpose. Rather than start with another strategy, we’ll start with what the team already believes.
NCTM’s (2014) Principles to Actions lays out the Eight Effective Mathematics Teaching Practices alongside the beliefs that either support or get in the way of them. A teacher beliefs survey built around those practices gives a department a way to find where it already agrees. That common ground becomes the anchor: We said we believe this. Here is our data. So what do we need to do?
Michael Fullan (2001) writes in Leading in a Culture of Change about moral purpose as the drive to make a meaningful difference in students’ lives. Every teacher in that department has it. They work hard and care deeply. We want them to rally around that shared purpose, not around our initiative.
And we aren’t looking for everyone to agree on every belief. We’re looking for something they can all commit to, report back on, and hold one another accountable for.
Condition 4: Teachers Can’t Own What They Haven’t Seen
The fourth condition is the one we skipped, and we’re going back for it. In The Oz Principle, Connors, Smith, and Hickman (1994) describe accountability as four steps: See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It.
The order matters. You can’t own a problem you haven’t seen, and you won’t solve a problem you don’t own. The task force worked through all four steps together. This department was being asked to jump straight to Do It.
This team does know its test scores. They’re rightly proud that results went up 6% last year. But a score is a product. It tells you where students ended up, not what it was like to get there. Seeing it means seeing what students actually experience as learners, day to day, in their math classrooms:
- Who is doing the thinking?
- Who is doing the talking?
- When a student gets stuck, what happens next?
- Are students positioned as capable problem solvers, or as people waiting to be told the steps?
Using Instructional Rounds to Help Teachers See It
In Instructional Rounds in Education, Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, and their colleagues (2009) make a case we find useful here. The work that matters most happens in the instructional core, the relationship between the teacher, the student, and the task. The clearest way to understand it is to watch closely what students are actually doing. Their observations are descriptive rather than evaluative, focused on evidence instead of judgment.
So one outcome we hope for from the next session is a look-for tool the department builds together. What would we expect to see and hear from students if our math classrooms were working the way we believe they should? Once the team agrees on that, they’ll use it for a round of student-focused observations in each other’s rooms.
This isn’t about evaluating teachers. It’s about noticing, together, what learning looks like from a student’s seat. Student work and data still belong in the conversation, but they tell half the story. When a teacher sits in a colleague’s room and realizes students waited most of the period for the answer, that’s seeing it. No slide deck can produce that moment.
We’ll then connect what they see back to the vision the task force built, so the department knows where everyone is headed and where their own choices fit. (If that vision isn’t clear in your own district, that’s often why a K-12 math improvement plan isn’t working in the first place.)
What This Taught Us About Teacher Resistance to Professional Development
None of this required a new program. It required slowing down. Five discouraging exit tickets became the most useful feedback we got all month, because they showed us which step we had skipped.
When we’re on site next month, we’ll spend an afternoon with this department and their leadership team. The goal for that afternoon is simple: the key result is to get a key result. By the end, we want one commitment the whole team can stand behind, a plan to monitor it, and a date to come back together. We also want a shared look-for tool the team built themselves, so the next round of evidence comes from what students are experiencing, not just what they produce.
Resistance is rarely about the content or individual personalities. It’s usually about trust, purpose, and ownership. (For the longer view of how resistance shows up at each stage of a rollout, see our five phases of implementation for overcoming resistance.)
Your Next Step
If your own secondary team is hearing new ideas and handing back “nothing was valuable today,” the free Math Improvement Plan Assessment is a quick way to see which step your system may need to go back for.
Frequently Asked Questions About Teacher Resistance to PD
Why do teachers resist math professional development?
Teachers usually resist professional development when it arrives as someone else’s conclusion. If they don’t trust the messenger, weren’t involved in shaping the work, can’t see its purpose, or haven’t seen the problem firsthand, even strong PD feels like an outside demand. The content is rarely the real issue.
What should you do when teachers say math PD was a waste of time?
Treat it as data, not defiance. Ask what teachers couldn’t connect to, then look for the missing step: trust in who’s leading, a voice in the design, a shared purpose, or firsthand evidence of the problem. Often the fix is slowing down and going back for the step that was skipped.
What is the Results Pyramid in education?
The Results Pyramid, from Connors and Smith’s Change the Culture, Change the Game, says results come from actions, actions come from beliefs, and beliefs come from experiences. In education, it explains why PD that jumps straight to new strategies often produces compliance: the beliefs underneath those actions haven’t changed.
How do you get high school math teachers on board with change?
Start with who leads the work. A trusted colleague on site usually lands ideas an outside coach can’t yet. Then co-design the plan with the department, anchor it in beliefs the team already shares, and let teachers see what students experience in each other’s classrooms before asking them to commit to a new practice.
What’s the difference between compliance and commitment in PD?
Compliance is agreement on paper: a strategy gets squeezed into the lesson plan because someone asked for it, and it fades once the pressure lifts. Commitment is a practice the team chose together, with a way to monitor whether it’s working and a date to report back to one another.
What are instructional rounds?
Instructional rounds are structured classroom observations where educators watch what students are actually doing and describe it without judging the teacher. Developed by Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, and colleagues, the practice focuses on the instructional core (teacher, student, and task) and helps teams see a problem together before trying to solve it.
References
Bryk, A. S., & Schneider, B. (2002). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. Russell Sage Foundation.
City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education: A network approach to improving teaching and learning. Harvard Education Press.
Connors, R., & Smith, T. (2011). Change the culture, change the game: The breakthrough strategy for energizing your organization and creating accountability for results. Portfolio/Penguin.
Connors, R., Smith, T., & Hickman, C. (1994). The Oz principle: Getting results through individual and organizational accountability. Prentice Hall. (Current edition: Portfolio/Penguin.)
Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change. Jossey-Bass. (Link is to the 2nd edition.)
Liljedahl, P. (2020). Building thinking classrooms in mathematics, grades K-12: 14 teaching practices for enhancing learning. Corwin.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (2014). Principles to actions: Ensuring mathematical success for all. NCTM.
About the Author
Yvette Lehman is the chief academic officer with the Make Math Moments team, where she partners with K-12 district math leaders, site leaders, and coaches on their math improvement work. A former struggling math student herself, she learned that math can be seen, and she’s passionate about building conceptual understanding through models and visual thinking.
