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Is your math team using the same words—but interpreting them in totally different ways?

In schools and districts across the country, math leaders are working hard—but progress still feels fragile. Despite shared goals and common language, initiatives stall, teachers burn out, and PD efforts don’t translate into classrooms. Why? Because shared language doesn’t mean shared understanding. And without clarity, systems crumble under the weight of well-intentioned effort.

That’s where the Math Coherence Compass comes in—a shared decision-making framework that gives every stakeholder the same lens for math improvement.

Listeners Will Learn:

• Why alignment in language doesn’t equal alignment in practice

• What the Math Coherence Compass is—and why it changes everything

• How to use the compass to evaluate PD, PLCs, curriculum, and classroom moves

• The 4 compass points: long-term objective, student vision, beliefs about learning, and support capacity

• How to co-create the compass with your leadership team

• When and how to use it with coaches, principals, and teacher leaders

• What to do when your flywheel keeps restarting year after year

• Why 49 hours of support is the tipping point for sustainable instructional change

Whether you’re a district coordinator, math coach, or school leader, this episode gives you the clarity and tools to stop throwing spaghetti at the wall—and start building a math system that gains momentum year after year. Download your blank Math Coherence Compass template and start using it today.

Attention District Math Leaders:

Download the Math Coherence Compass here.

Not sure what matters most when designing math improvement plans? Take this assessment and get a free customized report: https://makemathmoments.com/grow/ 

Ready to design your math improvement plan with guidance, support and using structure? Learn how to follow our 4 stage process. https://growyourmathprogram.com 

Looking to supplement your curriculum with problem based lessons and units? Make Math Moments Problem Based Lessons & Units

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Let start with a question I ask almost every district math leader we work with. When you say fluency, are you sure everyone else means the same thing as you do? Because here’s what we’ve learned over and over again from meetings, supporting and consulting with over 250 math leaders, school leaders, district leaders, state leaders every single year. Most math improvement efforts don’t stall because people aren’t trying. They are trying. One way they stall is because leaders

think they’re aligned when in reality, they’re speaking the same words, but holding different pictures and understandings in each of their heads. And that gap, the gap between shared language and shared meaning and understanding is where implementation and consistent, tractionable, effective teaching practice quietly falls apart and breaks down in systems. Today, I want to introduce you to a tool that helps solve that exact

problem. It’s called the math coherence compass. And it might be the missing piece and it has been the missing piece for many of our teams that finally gets your math improvement flywheel moving without burning people out or starting over a year over a year causing initiative fatigue. If you’re a K to 12 math coordinator, a district leader, a coach or principal who feels like everyone is working hard, but improvement still feels fragile, or it’s not getting the traction you thought it was getting or you’re spinning your wheels.

Here’s what you’ll learn by the end of this video. You’re gonna learn how the Math Coherence Compass works as a shared decision-making framework across a district or school in the classroom level. You’re gonna use the four anchors of that compass to evaluate any math-related decision which unifies all teams across a system. You’re gonna see how the compass keeps your math improvement flywheel moving instead of resetting year over year over year. You’re gonna also know exactly how to introduce this framework.

principals, coaches, teacher leaders, your colleagues. So decisions don’t depend on you being everywhere at once in your system, math improvement plan resting on just your shoulders, which is where we’re seeing super fragile systems. So to understand why this matters so much, let me start with a story, one that might feel uncomfortably familiar. In one large district,

that we’ve worked with in the Southwest. Leaders agreed that fluency was the priority. Everyone nodded when they talked about it. Everyone supported it. Everyone was like, that’s the right thing to do right now. Everyone used that word fluency consistently. But when we looked a little closer, when we got to the work, when we went to see that work and truly understand what was under the hood with the individuals in the classroom, with the individuals at the leadership level, principals were observing for speed and accuracy. Coaches were modeling strategy-based routines.

Teachers were defaulting to what they’d always done and PLCs were planning fluency six different ways, sometimes in the same building. It was the same word. Everyone thought they were working on the right things. No one was disengaged. Everyone thought that they were aligned, but alignment in language is not really alignment. It’s not alignment in practice and what we’re all trying to move towards. And so basically their math improvement flywheel was stalling and it was stalling because we just didn’t have the coherence around fluency.

And they didn’t know that that was happening. These just was unaware. We all thought we were working towards the same things. So when the years came to the end, they’re still asking the same questions. Why isn’t this sticking? Why are we not seeing traction and the PDF that we’re making? What are we going to try next? They kept throwing that spaghetti at the wall. And this wasn’t a failure of the effort that everyone’s putting in, as I said before, this is good people doing good work. It just was a failure of coherence. And that’s

That’s, that’s the hard truth. That’s, that’s the root cause here. Cause that hard truth is system wide math improvement stalls when leaders, coaches, coordinators, teachers don’t share the same vision or effective math instruction and what that looks like and sounds like. And this matters when the same people make decisions at the district or school or classroom level. And that’s what most districts never explicitly design. They don’t design for coherence. We assume principals, coaches, teachers all interpret the work the same way and they don’t.

They can’t, it’s not their fault. That’s why we need a framework. The one that travels with the work. When the leaders at every level can make and use decisions that actually reinforce one another. That’s where this compass comes in. The math coherence compass is in a document. I don’t want you to think of it like that. I want you to think this is a system that lives in breeze. It’s not a checklist. It’s not another planning template. It’s a shared decision-making framework. One that answers basically there’s one essential question. Does this decision, does this initiative?

Does this resource, does this move instruction in the classroom? Is this the right thing for where we’re trying to go? Does it move our math improvement forward or does it pull us off course? Compass gives every leader, every district office personnel, every principal, every coach, every PLC facilitator, the same lens for evaluating decisions and performing work.

So leading instruction in the classroom, leaning PLC work, it’s all through the same lens so that we’re all coherent around what we’re trying to do. It’s because when the compass is shared, your leadership becomes distributed across the system. Decisions become faster and clearer and support systems reinforce each other rather than compete with each other. And the math improvement flywheel, your math improvement flywheel, whether you like it or not, you have a flywheel. It might be stalled, it might be running, but it will accelerate instead of resetting every year.

All right, let’s get into the four points of the math coherence compass. Cause I want you to imagine there is a North, there’s a South, there’s an East, there’s a West. So here’s North. You’re going to write on a piece of paper. You’re going to say North, you’re going to draw an arrow up to North and you’re going to say, this is my five year objective. And the question you write underneath that is, is this getting us closer to our long-term aim? Which now you need to define what is your five year objective? North is like the, the, the goal of where we are trying to go in the.

Five year time period. It’s it could be a 10 period time period. It could be a three year time period. Typically you’re going to want to say is this is where we want to be in five years. And every decision should answer this. Does this accelerate progress towards that one objective? If you’re a partner with us here inside the school and district improvement program at McMath moments, then you know that we strongly encourage you just to choose one main objective. Don’t have five, don’t have three, pick one.

that you won’t deviate for the next five years. Is it number sense fluency across K to six is a productive struggle every day in six to 12. This is your North star that guides your work every day and every decision North protects the flywheel from distraction. So when you have things come across your plate, you say, does it support the five year objective? You just got to get clear on what that five year objective is going to be. And when curriculum comes across your plate,

resources, routines, you just say, does this distract us from this? Or does this enhance this? Okay, so so now in the paper underneath, so you’re going to write your vision for mathematics. And your question here is, does this reinforce the student experience that we believe in your vision defines what math should look like and sound like and feel like in classrooms, you need to make this clear visible across your system. This is part of that coherence.

We have our objective where we’re trying to, what we’re trying to make shifts in, but the vision is the why, like what are we working, like what is that in service of? So your vision, your South to checkpoint is does it pass this? Will this decision increase the likelihood that students experience math in this way? You have to define it. You have to have the vision statement for your school or school district, or does this decision contradict what we value?

for what the students will experience. Vision keeps decisions anchored to instruction. That’s important. All right, east. So on the right side of your page, right east, and this is where you’re gonna write core values and beliefs. And the question you ask yourself here is, does this align with how we believe students learn and how teachers grow? There’s two parts there. Does this align with how we believe students learn and teachers grow? These are your core values and beliefs. This is where your culture lives.

East prevents well intended decisions from quietly being undermined. What are our decisions and values around equity and reasoning and capacity building? How do students learn? How do teachers learn? What experiences do we value in our student classrooms? Yes, the visions was painting the picture, but what do we truly believe about learning mathematics? What do we truly believe about professional development? We have to

We have to state these beliefs because we don’t want to contradict them with decisions. want, when we pass a compass from, let’s say we co-create this compass at the district office, and then we support our principals utilizing this compass to make decisions at the school level. We need them to understand what we fundamentally believe about learning mathematics. That’s a coherence issue.

That’s why we have that here on the East. We have to also have them fundamentally understand what we all need to believe about professional development and how teachers grow. And that’s what you want to define here on the screen here. You can see some examples as I go through this of what schools have utilized have written in these spots. All right, let’s go to West. So West on the far left, your arrow, you’re going to write support systems.

and strategic strengths. Your question here is can our system actually sustain this? This is an important part most people don’t think about. Yes, we have our goals. Yes, we know what we believe about student experience. Yes, we, we know what we’re trying to do professional development wise and, and how students learn. We have these beliefs and sometimes those beliefs just stay within one or two people, but you can have good decision making with those three parts of the compass.

But you might not be in a position to support any of that. That’s what the West is about. Support systems and strategic strengths. Can our system actually sustain this? This is your reality check. Many initiatives will fail here. Many routines and strategies are going to fail here. You have to ask yourself, do we have coaching capacity to sustain sustain the true impact we’re actually after? Remember, it takes 49 hours for teacher implementation to be successful in the classroom and show up in student achievement.

49 professional development hours. That’s a lot, but it’s important to know that number because you’ll probably never hit it. It’s important to know that number so that you can help make these appropriate decisions. Like can we sustain what we need to sustain? Like can we use PLCs and coaching and staff meetings to help obtain those 49 hours? Can we make sure that we don’t deviate from this one objective because we know that it takes 49 hours. Can we align?

our subsystems for professional learning and professional development so that we can achieve our goals. You have to be able to answer that. You have to be able to look at how do we support teachers? How do we support implementation of curriculums? We can’t just stop at like, here we go, and we move on. You have to make sure that we can support those 49 hours if we’re truly looking for impact. And so we have to ask ourselves, can we support this move, this decision?

knowing it takes 49 hours to see that whatever we put into place, whatever routine we want to see in our classrooms, whatever curriculum resource we want to be implementing across the system, can we support it so that actually will get traction West keeps the flywheel from restarting every year. That’s typically what happens is we we try to implement something we realize that it’s not

not being implemented the way we thought, but we didn’t invest in making sure that we had the right subsystems aligned to actually cause the change. And therefore we move on too early. The compass will help you do that. Here’s the power of the compass. It turns vague conversations into clear ones. It’s going to help everyone across the system stop guessing on what makes math improvement shift or what we should be working on or what we’re going to do with this PD day. So principles are going to stop guessing. I’m like, I got a numeracy PD day coming up. What could we do? Coaches are going to feel supported because

The work that they’re doing with teachers are supporting by administrators and say curriculum coordinators. Teachers are going to stop experiencing whiplash back and forth of this initiative and that initiative. And the district office is going to get fewer shoulder taps because the thinking now is embedded at the school system. We’ve got people working at different levels, all in the same things. It makes our job easier as system coordinators or coaches at the district level. And that’s important to create system wide traction, system wide movement.

A math improvement flywheel doesn’t just turn on effort alone, it turns when objectives are clear, definitions are shared, support systems are aligned, and leaders make decisions again and again that reinforce those things. The coherence compass keeps that flywheel from restarting. That’s what that’s the main message here. It ensures momentum will continue and it compounds. All right, here’s how you introduce the math coherence compass with leaders. You’re going to use it when you’re reviewing campus improvement plans, you’re going to use it when evaluating PD agendas, you’re going to

choose PLC priorities, you’re going to redesign coaching cycles, you’re going to use it for that, you’re to use it for responding to parent and teacher requests, these things like any decision like this, you’re making new budget decisions, you run that decision, go does it pass north? Does it pass to south? Does it pass east? Does it pass west? Your role, if you’re coach, a coordinator, an administrator, is you build a compass with your math leadership team, you don’t build this alone.

You go through the exercises of let’s answer this question. Let’s create our vision. Let’s create our core values. Let’s create our five year objective. Let’s create and define where we’re strengths, our strengths are in our subsystems for professional development. Do we have strengths and PLCs? Can we redesign those? Do we have coaching available? Can we utilize those in a more aligned way? These are your subsystems, you have to make sure that you build this with the team, you’re not just defining all this on your own. That is not how

strong systems make math improvement. That’s fragile systems, then you and your leadership team. You’re going to help other leaders interpret and use this compass with fidelity and integrity at every interaction. You can’t just build this and hand it to someone say, Hey, here’s our compass. Make sure you make decisions following this. We have to we have to help everyone utilize that we have to practice it. We have to show them how to was a pass check, check, check does it pass all four different areas of that compass.

We have to use it at all these interactions, we have to show others how to use that you can’t just say, here you go as leaders to bring your their compass to every math meeting of PLC or implementation discussion. You know, imagine for a moment if leaders had true coherence around the math objective, the vision, the core values for math success and how to structure their support that they can decide on that they own that work, because they now have the right framework and the right thinking and the right coherence to make those powerful decisions.

your flywheel is going to turn and that is really your mission is to translate that compass to cross all leadership positions, coaches, principals, assistant principals, classroom teacher leaders on mathematics, teachers themselves have to know about the compass. Your job is to make every decision for every school. Your job is to build the sandbox system that allows leaders to make those decisions that strengthen the flywheel decisions that

advance the objective and body the vision and reflect the values and use your supports. Your job is to keep asking yourself, do our principles have coherence across all four areas? Do our leaders? If not yet, when I have time with them, that’s my move. Help them develop that and your system will succeed. That’s what the math coherence compass does. It turns scattered effort into a line momentum. So here’s your reflection. When you say fluency,

show up. You’re just going to say, we’re not seeing the traction we thought we were going to get. So your job isn’t again.

not to make every decision. Your job is to build the system to help other people make decisions so that you’re on the same page. And when you do that, your flywheel is not just going to move, it’s going to accelerate. If you would like a blank copy of the math coherence compass, you can click below or around this video, download a copy. You can see an example so that you can create this compass at your school or your school district and start utilizing and making sure that you’re creating coherence across your school or school system.

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