Two Components You’re Missing For Consistent Math Teaching Strategy Adoption

Ever found yourself facing a room full of teachers, armed with a new curriculum, some shiny new resources, and a big mission, only to realize… this is gonna be harder than we thought?

That’s exactly what Jill, a math coordinator from here in Ontario and her team experienced as they rolled out a workshop to help teachers rethink their approach to teaching math. 

There were successes—teachers were engaged, they saw sparks fly, they were engaged in great discussions, and you could even see that high school educators were rethinking their game plans. 

But with success came new challenges, like keeping that momentum going and making those changes stick.

It turns out, giving educators the tools, ideas and motivation is only half the battle; helping them adapt and actually use them effectively is a whole different ball game. 

And the secret that nobody told them was that for consistent implementation, follow up support makes up 90% of a successful adoption. 

Most of us in education are juggling the balance between too many new things at once and not enough structure to make them all work. 

Teachers want guidance, but they also want the freedom to adapt to their own classrooms. That’s the fine line we’re walking here.

That’s why you have to be committed to building a support system that isn’t just another list of tools but a roadmap to lasting change. 

Here’s what we did to help this district: 

We took a hard look at how they were using their time and their structuring support. We asked tough questions. 

What did we find? 

Two important changes needed to be implemented: 

 More Follow Up

This team knew that focusing on helping their teachers build their own mathematical proficiency was important. 

Good for them! They were dedicating regular workshops during the year to support this. 

They were under the assumption that sharing, demonstrating, and modeling effective strategies with teachers once in a workshop was enough. 

We helped them restructure their workshop model to target less teachers per session and implement a consistent coaching cycle for those teachers. Then repeat. 

 Too Many Meetings

While they had a small team of coaches they were spending too much time meeting as a team each week. 

The root cause of too many meetings is a lack of an aligned vision with clear, limited objectives. This team was spending too much time during the school year trying to decide what to work on, why it was important, and then how to get it done. 

When a team has clear objectives with achievable measurable key results in place for the year and EVERYONE knows how they can impact those results then you don’t need to spend your valuable time trying to re-align and decide what’s important each week! 

By helping this team shape and share their vision, objectives, and results we saved this time 12 hours x 3 coaches per week during the school year that can now be spent on the most important aspect of supporting consistent implementation in the classroom. 

If you’re looking for consistent adoption and implementation of effective strategies ensure you have these 2 pieces in place:

1. An aligned vision with clear objectives and measurable key results.

2. Optimized structures and channels for support. It is absolutely essential to routinely audit the structure and channels you provide support to your educators. 

Resources Related To The Video

• If you’d like to have the roadmap and playbooks to create, coordinate, and implement aligned school and district math action plans so that you can create long term sustainable student success in mathematics and proficiently & pedagogically strong educators then book a call with our team. We will share and help you implement our 4-stage process that guarantees growth!
• Visit Make Math Moments Problem Based Math Lessons page for other useful problem based units.

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