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Do you ever feel torn between staying laser-focused on your math goals and chasing all the new opportunities that come your way?

Whether it’s a conference, a webinar, or a brand-new resource, unexpected opportunities can be energizing—but without a clear filter, they can also overwhelm teachers and derail your district’s math improvement plan.

Listeners will:

• Learn how to avoid “spaghetti at the wall” professional learning.
• Discover how to filter opportunities through your math objectives so they strengthen—not compete with—your goals.
• See how narrowing focus actually creates space for deeper, more meaningful growth in math teaching and learning.

Tune in now to discover how math leaders can strike the right balance—seizing new opportunities while keeping the whole system aligned.

Attention District Math Leaders:

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jon Orr: How do we look at unexpected events, unexpected opportunities, unexpected resources when they fall in our laps or when we weren’t expecting them but then all of sudden they show up? It could be a conference that you all of a sudden realize that we have funds to or it could be a webinar event that you’re like, I didn’t see this until just now and I should register, I should share this to my teachers that I’m supporting as a math coordinator or a math coach or an administrator. And how do we, how do we,

take advantage of this. was like, oh, I’ve got all of a sudden this toolkit that I didn’t realize was there. Now I realize because I went to a conference and I want to bring it home. Like, how do I take all these things and continually stop throwing spaghetti at the wall, but also capitalize on great tools? Because if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while now, you’ve probably heard us talk about getting narrow, getting very focused.

deciding on what your objectives are, how does it support your vision, what are you measuring this year, getting really narrow to hit and create change. Well, how do you take that and then also go, what about all this other stuff that I don’t wanna miss out on? And I think the miss out is sometimes deep rooted in us, and especially when we’re supporting so many teachers. But we’ve got these teachers who keep saying that, I don’t know what else I can put on my plate, and I don’t want you to miss out on this if.

you could use it. So how do I battle my focus and also these so many opportunities that I haven’t yet planned for and they just occur. So that’s what we’re going to talk about here today and how to how handle that and what we should really be thinking about.

Yvette Lehman: I think what you’re basically asking is we want our teachers to take advantage of opportunities for new learning. We don’t want to gatekeep information. Sometimes we attend a webinar or a conference and it’s like, I learned something that I didn’t even know I needed to learn. And like, that’s the value of getting outside of our organization and hearing from other experts. But I guess what you’re saying is what, how do we avoid overwhelm?

Like how do we avoid the initiative fatigue? Like so people are not coming back and now they have 20 new ideas that are pulling us in a different direction than the objective that we set, the key result that we’ve identified for this year.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, well, and I think like I always like to think of like how why does this end up happening? And I think what ends up happening is someone a leader, math leader in the building, in the district or whatever comes across some great resources and they’re like, wow, there’s a lot of good stuff here and they want to be helpful. Right. So they do want to provide those opportunities for educators and they do want to give people the autonomy to kind of select what they’re after.

However, what I’m hearing you say Yvette, which sometimes can create a little bit of friction is the person who’s sharing these resources, if they’re able to at least kind of think through what caught their attention, at least it gives some starting point because what we often see if we leave it wide open and you know, for example, our academy is a great example of that. If you just go into our academy, having never come across any of the material before, there’s a lot going on there.

And while we try to organize it based on different parts of the math classroom tree and all of these aspects, the reality is you can get lost very quickly. And sometimes that can actually lead to shutdown, right? So people actually walk away and go, I’m stressed, I’m anxious, I’m not sure, am I gonna do the right thing or the wrong thing? So what I’m hearing you say is just by spending that little bit of extra time just to think about…

Like what intrigued me about why I want to share this particular resource, not to say that everyone has to follow that path, but it at least gives everyone a consistent or a coherent starting point that they can use. And it ultimately gives people a little bit of direction. And hopefully if they start to see what you saw as valuable, that might lead them to get to the same result of, finding something else along that path, right? So we’re not.

necessarily being those gatekeepers. But to me, it sounds like it doesn’t have to be very, it doesn’t have to be a prescriptive. It doesn’t have to be, you know, planned out to the T. It just really has to give a little bit of direction so that people have some sort of common understanding as to why we’re sharing what we’re sharing and sort of where we saw that initial value so that hopefully we can get everyone to take at least a toe and dip a toe in.

And hopefully we’ll get a lot of people that are ready to do the big cannonball after they do a little bit of learning along that very specific sort of directed PD program or resource or tool that might’ve been shared.

Jon Orr: Right, yeah, like you run into the spaghetti at the wall when, and it’s just truly spaghetti at the wall if you don’t have your main focus zone mapped out or your objective, focus zone objective, sometimes I interchange those terms, but what is that change we’re looking to achieve this year? What is the main, like all my resources are going towards this. I’m structuring and supporting PLCs. The pull day pull outs this year are gonna be supporting this idea.

this group of teachers, like, we do want to get narrow that way, but when you get narrow that way, what happens is you create that filter. Like you create the filter of like, this is where we’re trying to go, and then when these opportunities arise, I think what you two are saying is like, what you wanna do is go, well, how can I take the opportunity? How can I take, if I can send teachers to NCTM, can I almost like preempt them to say,

Here’s where we’re all trying to go and here are some suggestions to help you get there or get closer or strengthen the things we’re really focused on if you went to this session or this session or this session. Like I’m thinking about like we have our summit coming up, the seventh annual virtual summit this November, which we, know, the theme of our summit has always just been making math moments that matter, which is what we’re trying to do in our classrooms.

There are many sessions there that cover a variety of different things and it’s like, oh, I wanna share that with teachers, but I don’t just wanna dump it on them because it’s a free for all. It’s can we strategically recommend sessions? Can we strategically point them to the filter that we already have to help us get closer to our goals instead of just say, here’s what it’s done. Because what you’re doing, right, if you’ve clearly articulated your vision and your objectives to your teachers throughout the year,

then it now makes sense to them. Like, this isn’t something just being added to my plate. This is supporting the thing that’s on my plate already. This is supporting what, you know, so and so has been talking about or sharing with me. It’s just like, we’ve been talking about this and this and this in terms of these different resources this year and these different sessions this year and the support I’ve been getting as a teacher. Here’s another thing to help me strengthen that thing.

If you can point that out, you can make it clear that there’s a connection between the goals you’ve set and the resources that you’re collecting, that can actually strengthen the work and not make it feel like spaghetti.

Yvette Lehman: Okay, so let’s get specific. So let’s share an example with the listeners of what this would look like if we wanted to approach an opportunity in that way. So imagine that you have an objective around fluency and you have been working on one of the things that are just many of our districts are doing is even just getting a common definition of what is fluency. How do we define fluency? Are we all looking for the same behaviors in students when we say a student is fluent with their math facts or their automaticity?

So imagine the virtual summits coming up. Maybe what I do as a leader is I look through these session offerings and I identify one or two sessions that are focused around fluency. Then I reach out to my community and I say, there’s this upcoming opportunity. I’ve already flagged these two sessions that are being offered at these two times on these two dates by these two presenters. These two sessions are directly connected to the work that we’re doing around fluency.

you know, I would highly recommend them if you want to dig deeper. But that doesn’t mean that that teacher isn’t then going to sign up for five other sessions. Like that, and that’s wonderful, right? Like again, sometimes we don’t even know what learning we need until we have that learning. But I think that the way we pitch the summit is by identifying particular sessions.

that are going to help us get closer to our objective in our district. And maybe it’s like if those are the only sessions people attend because right now there’s cognitive overload and there are competing priorities and other subjects and we’re trying not to overwhelm, that’s great. We’re all gonna have a shared experience and hear an expert in the field talk about their work and fluency and how it might relate to what we’re doing. And…

If those other teachers are like, you know, they’re hungry for more and they see that there’s a session on universal design and that’s another area that they’re personally trying to strengthen within their own practice, they of course have the option to attend other sessions.

Kyle Pearce: I love that. I think too, while of course not intentional, but if I just do a share of, a whole weekend of summit sessions, which is what you get when you join the virtual summit, some people, whether they are thinking explicitly, I think sometimes implicitly, they sort of interpret that as like, is the expectation that I actually go to all these sessions? And in reality, what I’m hearing you say is it might just be like a huge win.

for a district leader, a math district leader or school leader is if you get a good chunk of your educators to attend one session. One one hour session is a massive win. And by being more specific about which session sort of caught your eye, right? We have so many districts that, you know, they’re focusing on building thinking classrooms. So, you know, they might be saying, hey, we want to get in on Peter’s session or, you know, Peter, we’ve read the book, we did a

a book study on Peter’s work and now you get to actually hear the author, you know, speak to some of that work. Or if you’re working on differentiation, there’s this session on differentiation. It really allows people to kind of like keep the bar really low so that the expectation people sort of implicitly place on themselves is low enough that it doesn’t feel overwhelming and it doesn’t feel scary. And like anything, you know, if they do opt in,

and they do plan to attend one session, you know what often happens, right? They go, wow, they feel energized. They feel excited. They feel, you know, like it was worth their time to spend a little bit of time on their weekend or in the evening in order to do some learning that they’re like, I want to do this again. And like tomorrow I see Kathy Fosnows presenting and my gosh, I’ve always wondered how do you do number talks or what she would call mini lessons?

How do I do that effectively in my classroom? And I have the opportunity to jump into that or to check out the actual recording of that session. According to my timeline, you know, it just seems like it’s that example of bread crumbing with these opportunities that we often share, right? So like starting really small, giving people a little tiny bit of bit of bread crumbs. And once you’ve eaten one, you know, you tend to kind of go for the next one. And I think it’s a great way to make sure that, you know, we value these opportunities and we get the most out of them without causing any undue stress or anxiety.

Jon Orr: Now, I know another pro move and you’ve talked about this in past summits, Kyle, is some of our schools that we support and districts we support have taken us up on this recommendation is to go a little deeper in terms of you may have, say, selected different sessions from the schedule to support you on your objectives and some of the key results you’re striving for, like you’re saying, maybe this in-depth session

on fluency from like Jennifer Bay Williams is gonna help you reach a goal or reach you faster than a goal, then some of our leaders are actually dedicating and putting more resources behind sessions like that by all of a sudden now embedding that in some of the PLC processes or bringing it to a staff meeting and sharing it to principals and writing the email that would go out to the staff, a particular staff for a staff meeting to say, this is what it’s gonna look like when we come to the staff meeting.

Here’s what we’re going to dig into because it actually helps us reach our school level key result or our school level goal. Setting aside resources to support that after the weekend has been a go-to move for many of the teams that we support.

Kyle Pearce: Hmm. I love that. And you know, when you really think about it, if you were to, you know, had the option to have educators participate in one session and then use that session as a jumping off point, as you mentioned in PLCs or in staff meetings, or to really hone in over the next handful of months, maybe the entire school year, you’re probably going to get a better long-term outcome than say having all your teachers watch 20 sessions.

It’s like you get a bunch of great ideas. get a, but you know, maybe this teacher does that. There’s a pocket of success over there. Maybe this teacher does that and you know, pocket of success there, but actually looking at the impact that you can have systemically or across all of your grades is likely going to be more due to going deeper with something than trying to, you know, look at everything and then trying to figure out from there, like what’s our next step, right? Cause I mean, all of them are going to be great next steps.

The key is that narrow focus, which again, we always come back to. And that I think would be a big takeaway for me if I’m a district leader right now or a school leader and I’m going, I’m about to share out about the summit or any of these opportunities that are out there. It doesn’t have to be the summit. How can I be more intentional, more narrow so that we can go deeper and bring more and more people along the way? also just thinking about reiterating the messaging.

Right? If we’re constantly just skimming the surface, some people aren’t going to hear it the first time and you’re going to get a handful that do, but the others who don’t, it’s like you’re onto the next thing. And then who’s here in that message and then who’s here in that message. Let’s go deeper so that everyone’s going to be at a slightly different place at a slightly different depth on the chart. But ultimately at the end of the day, people are all talking the same language and they’re all working together to get to a desired outcome.

Jon Orr: I think it’s the clarity you get when you have your objectives, your vision, your focus zones that you’re trying to strengthen. It becomes, like I said before, the compass or the filter for opportunity and how do I steer it. think that’s where the pro move is, is because you are going to always have, like this is the nature of our work, is we always are going to be the, and we should be, the first line of defense when these.

resources or opportunities come to our schools or our school districts, how do I position that to support what we’re trying to do and not just say welcome everything, it’s how do I steer it and position it to do the great work we’re trying to do. If you have not yet jumped over to the summit, the summit is coming up soon, registration is currently open at summit.makemathmoments.com. We have a full weekend of lineup ready to go.

You can choose your sessions. Again, the ticket is free for the weekend if you need certificates or if you need to extend your time, you can choose a ticket that allows you to do so. Other opportunities, just to point out is Yvette is holding monthly building your capacity sessions. Every single month, we did it last year. This year we’re doing it again. We’re doing two back to back sessions once a month on different topics, different, you know,

ideas around our own math learning and our own building capacity and that’s happening every time. So knowing about those also is like, can I filter that? Can I steer that? Can I harness that to do our work already and support the great work we’re doing? This is what we do. We have to kind of be that filter, but we have to know what we were looking for to filter.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah. And other things outside of the math moments community coming up in October. I know we’re recording this in September, so it may have already happened by the time you’re tuning into this, but we have the annual conference coming up for NCSM. So supervisors of mathematics. know a lot of people know NCTM over time. And then, you know, as you move into more of a leadership like role, even if you’re still in the classroom, but you’re sort of taking on some of these leadership responsibilities, NCSM is a great organization.

I am a regional director for Canada. So, you know, trying to make sure that we shine some light on some of these great organizations that are out there to support us. In-person conferences are great, but one nuance to them is, you know, you don’t necessarily get the same opportunity to sort of go deep in one specific area, right? So you are going to be checking out different conference or different sessions and so on. But the growth that you can get by just being connected to others who are

doing some of the same work that you’re doing in person can be massively helpful. And of course, cost money to attend in person, but memberships for these organizations can be fairly affordable. definitely check out NCSM. If you’re a leader, if you’re a teacher, NCTM is probably gonna be where you wanna check out and definitely take a look there because there’s a ton of great resources available on their websites as well to help guide you in this journey.

Jon Orr: And if you’re a leader, math coordinator, if you need some focused time to talk about your program, talk about your choices of what you’re trying to do this year, head on over to makemathmoments.com for us discovery. Book a call with us and we can be that sounding board. We can be that thoughtful partner to work out some of those plans that you’re having and steer you in a direction that maybe you’ve overlooked. That is MakeMathMoments.com forward slash discovery.

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