If you’re a math coach, an assistant principal, or an instructional leader who has poured yourself into professional development, left encouraging notes on desks, shared data, modeled lessons, and still walked away feeling like nothing has landed — this post is for you.

You’re not failing. But you just might be solving the wrong problem.

Here’s what I’ve found working with leaders across North America: when we talk about “resistant teachers,” we tend to frame the conversation around what the teacher isn’t doing. They’re not engaging in PD. They’re not implementing the curriculum. They’re not trying new strategies. The question we ask is, “How do I get them to do the thing?” And that framing, while understandable, almost always leads us down the wrong path.

Let me walk you through what has worked for us — and more importantly, why it works.

What “Resistant Teachers” Are Actually Thinking (It’s Not What You Think)

Here’s the question I ask every leader I work with when they bring up resistant teachers: If you put yourself in that teacher’s shoes — not your shoes, their shoes — what are they actually worried about?

The answers are always illuminating.

One administrator I spoke with recently had been frustrated for almost a full year. Her math team had essentially shut her out from the beginning. She had the data. She had seen the results herself — when she implemented her curriculum with full fidelity in her own classroom the year before, the growth she saw in students was the best in her entire fifteen-year career. She had modeled lessons. She had shared her scores. And still, nothing moved.

When I pushed her on what she believed was underneath the resistance, she said something really honest: “I think if they try something different, they’re worried they’re going to fail. But they don’t realize they’re already failing.”

That’s a fascinating and important thing to notice. But the follow-up question matters just as much: what does failure mean to them?

When we sat with that for a moment, a different picture started to emerge. Teachers who’ve been in the same building for years, doing things a certain way, have built their whole professional identity around what they do. If they try something new, put real effort into it, and it doesn’t produce instant results — what does that mean about them? In their mind, it could mean the experiment failed and they wasted time. Now they’re behind. Now they look incompetent. And in a district or school culture where there’s already an “us versus them” dynamic between teachers and admin, the cost of looking incompetent in front of a new leader is even higher.

So they don’t try. Not because they’re lazy or don’t care about kids — but because the risk calculation in their heads just doesn’t pencil out.

Understanding this changes everything about how you approach the coaching relationship.

The Elephant, the Rider, and the Path: A Better Model for Instructional Coaching

There’s a framework from the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath that I find myself returning to constantly when working with leaders around resistant teachers. They use the image of an elephant, a rider, and a pathway through a jungle.

The rider sits on top of the elephant. The rider represents the rational, logical, slow-thinking part of our brain — the part that responds to data, research, and reasoned arguments. The elephant is our emotional brain: fast, instinctive, and enormously powerful. The pathway is the environment around both of them — the structure, the systems, the ease or difficulty of the journey itself.

Here’s the problem most coaches and administrators run into: we spend almost all of our energy talking to the rider.

We put together a compelling PD session. We share student achievement data. We reference research about instructional practices. We explain the framework. We demonstrate. We describe best practice. All of that speaks to the rider. And the rider often gets it! The rider can look at the data, nod along, and genuinely understand that what’s being proposed is probably right.

But if the elephant doesn’t want to go down that path, you’re not going anywhere.

The elephant is carrying fifteen years of professional identity, anxiety about change, fear of looking incompetent in front of peers, skepticism built up through watching initiative after initiative come and go in the district, and a hundred other emotional concerns that never get addressed in PD sessions. The elephant has been burned before. The elephant is enormous.

And if the elephant decides to go sideways, the rider is completely powerless.

So the question shifts from “How do I present this information better?” to “How do I speak to the elephant?”

Why Data, PD, and Demonstration Lessons Don’t Change Teaching Practice

One of the most common things I hear from instructional leaders is some version of: “I showed them my results. I had them come into my classroom. I shared the scores. They were even in awe when they watched. And then they went back to their rooms and did exactly what they were doing before.”

This is such a painful experience to coaches because it feels like the evidence was right there. It feels like the case was made. And it was — to the rider.

But here’s what was happening in the elephant’s head during that classroom visit: Okay, but she’s different. She’s from Texas. She’s got a certain personality. That works for her classroom, her kids. That’s not me. I’d try that and it would fall apart. And then what?

The teacher is not being irrational. They’re actually protecting themselves in a way that feels entirely reasonable to them. The research on instructional change is sobering on this front — it takes somewhere in the range of 49 hours of focused professional development, practice, and support for a teacher to genuinely shift an instructional practice in a way that shows up consistently in their classroom. That’s an enormous investment. And if a teacher has watched three or four major district initiatives rise and fall over their career, why would they bet 49 hours on this one?

Their cynicism is often the most rational response in the room.

How to Build Trust With Resistant Teachers (The Marble Jar Approach)

So what do you do? You build the marble jar.

Brené Brown tells a story about her daughter coming home crying one day because a secret she’d told a friend had gotten out. Brown asked her something like, “Did that person have a full marble jar?” Her daughter looked confused. Brown explained: every time you interact with someone and they honor what you shared, they listen to you, they show up for you — they put a marble in the jar. The jar starts empty when you first meet someone. Over time, marble by marble, it fills up. When someone has a full jar, you know they’re not going to betray your confidence — not because you’ve checked their credentials, but because they’ve proven it to you in a hundred small moments over time.

The same thing is true of trust between coaches, administrators, and teachers.

Right now, many resistant teachers have an essentially empty jar when it comes to their leaders. And nothing you say about math instruction is going to land until you’ve put some marbles in that jar. Not math marbles — just marbles. Regular everyday marbles.

One assistant principal I worked with had been getting major pushback from her math team. But she noticed something: the same teachers who wouldn’t let her near their instructional practice actually thanked her repeatedly for the way she handled discipline. When she took kids who’d been sent out of classrooms, she worked with them restoratively. She helped them actually change their behavior, and they came back to class ready to engage. Teachers noticed. That was a marble. That was real trust being built in an area that didn’t feel like a threat.

She hadn’t planned it that way. But she stumbled onto something important: you build trust by solving the problems teachers actually have, not the problems you wish they had.

What are the pebbles in your teachers’ shoes right now? Not the pebbles you think should be bothering them — what’s actually rubbing? Is it classroom management? Behavioral issues that drain energy and make every lesson feel impossible? Is it the overwhelming number of competing demands on their time? Is it a feeling that they’ve never really been supported, only evaluated and criticized?

If you can show up consistently as someone who helps remove those pebbles, you are filling the marble jar. And when the jar is full enough, conversations about math instruction have a completely different texture.

How to Coach Resistant Teachers Using Small, Actionable Steps

The third piece of the elephant-rider-pathway framework is often the most overlooked: you have to make the path easy to walk.

Think about what we typically ask of resistant teachers when we talk about instructional change. We paint a picture of full transformation. Student-led learning. Rich discourse. Collaborative problem solving. Deep conceptual understanding. And then we wonder why they feel overwhelmed.

It’s like standing at the base of a mountain with someone who’s afraid of heights and saying, “Look at the summit — doesn’t that look amazing? Let’s go.”

What a good coach does instead is clear the path one stone at a time. They break the journey into steps so small that it would be embarrassing not to try them. They don’t ask for transformation — they ask for one lesson. One routine. One small tweak that doesn’t require the teacher to abandon everything they know.

One math coach I spoke with was working with a first-year teacher who was genuinely excited about collaborative learning and building thinking classrooms. She’d done a lot of learning about it in her teacher education program. But when things didn’t go perfectly in the classroom, she would ruminate on the one group that was struggling rather than seeing the overall picture of what was working. And the weeks when her coach wasn’t physically at the school, she would default back to safer, more traditional approaches.

The solution wasn’t to work harder on convincing her of the value of the approach. She already believed in it. The solution was to narrow the goal down to something so specific and achievable that she couldn’t get lost in the gap between where she was and where she was trying to go.

What does “success” look like for you by the end of this year — not by the end of your career, not by the end of a five-year improvement plan, but by June? If you can answer that question specifically enough to write it on a card, you have something to work with. Maybe it’s: “By June, when I’m circulating during group work, I’m spending roughly equal time at each group instead of camping at the struggling one.” That’s it. That specific. That small.

Then you make a commit card — literally a physical card — with that one commitment on it. The teacher keeps a copy, you keep a copy, and that card becomes the anchor for every coaching conversation over the rest of the year. When you check in, you’re not checking in about math in general. You’re checking in about the card. Did you try it? What happened? What do you want to adjust?

This is the pathway work. You’re not pointing at the summit anymore. You’re clearing the next ten feet of trail.

Why Instructional Change Takes Years (Not Months)

Here’s something I tell leaders regularly, and it’s hard to hear the first time: the change you want probably isn’t a one-year goal. It’s a five-year goal that you’ve been treating as if it should happen by next September.

There’s a phrase we use a lot: we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in one year, but we wildly underestimate what we can accomplish in five. The vision you have for your school — engaged students, teachers who think deeply about their practice, classrooms humming with genuine mathematical thinking — that’s achievable. But it’s not achievable because you pushed hard enough this year. It’s achievable because you laid the groundwork patiently and consistently for years.

One administrator I worked with was near the point of calling her assistant superintendent in tears, asking whether she should just go back to the classroom. She felt like she was making zero progress. Her superintendent sent her a message that said, essentially: “Real change takes ten years.” And then again: “Ten years.”

That sounds discouraging. But flip it around and it’s actually liberating. If you don’t have to do everything this year, what do you actually need to do this year? You need to put marbles in jars. You need to clear a few pebbles from the path. You need to build one genuinely trusting relationship with one teacher you’ve been struggling to reach. You need to ask good questions instead of delivering answers. You need to protect your energy and your optimism for the long game.

The leaders who change schools don’t usually do it by forcing change. They do it by earning trust, staying curious, and being so reliably helpful that over time, even the most resistant teachers start wondering if they might actually benefit from working with them.

Six Practical Strategies to Coach Resistant Teachers Starting This Week

Given everything above, here are concrete starting points — the kinds of marbles you can actually drop in the jar this week.

Find the pebbles in their shoes. Not the ones you think should bother them. Ask. Have a real conversation where you’re genuinely curious about what’s hard for them right now. Teachers can tell the difference between someone who’s asking to gather ammunition and someone who’s asking to help. Be the second kind.

Address the elephant before the rider. Before you explain the framework or share the data or describe best practice, acknowledge the emotional reality of what you’re asking. Something like: “I know this is one more thing being asked of you, and I know you’ve watched a lot of things come and go in this district. That skepticism makes total sense to me.” When people feel understood, their defenses drop just enough to let something in.

Celebrate what already exists. Even the most resistant teacher is doing something worth naming. This isn’t flattery — it’s genuine observation. If a teacher has real relational warmth with her students, name it. Tell her specifically what you noticed. Then, much later, after trust has been built, you can start connecting those strengths to the instructional moves you’re hoping to see.

Make the goal smaller than seems necessary. The goal that seems too small to matter is usually about the right size. One routine. One section of a lesson. One specific behavior during one part of the class period. Write it down. Make it mutual. Come back to it.

Reframe your own success criteria. If you’re measuring your effectiveness by whether teachers have transformed their instruction in year one, you will feel like a failure even when you’re succeeding. Redefine success as: Did I build trust with at least one more teacher this month? Did I help someone solve a problem that was genuinely bothering them? Did I have a conversation that opened a door even slightly? Those are wins. Track them.Play the long game out loud. Tell teachers that real instructional change takes time. Tell them that good coaching isn’t about pressure — it’s about partnership. This alone can be a form of trust-building, because most teachers have only experienced the evaluation side of administrative attention, not the coaching side. When you distinguish yourself from that, it matters.

The Truth About Coaching Resistant Teachers: Trust Changes Everything

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud in most PD sessions: you can’t coach someone who doesn’t trust you. It sounds obvious when you say it. But we act like it’s optional, like we can establish the instructional expectation first and build the relationship later. It doesn’t work that way.

You can’t shift instruction without trust. You can’t build trust without showing up for people in the ways they actually need, not just the ways that are convenient for your agenda. And you can’t show up that way if you haven’t genuinely tried to understand what their experience of teaching feels like from the inside.

The teachers who feel resistant aren’t mostly stubborn or lazy or selfish. Most of them are protecting something: a sense of competence, a fragile professional identity, years of hard-won experience they’re afraid to throw away, a history of being asked to change and then abandoned halfway through. They’ve learned not to invest too much in initiatives that might disappear. That’s self-preservation, not obstinance.

When you approach resistant teachers as people with legitimate concerns worth understanding — rather than as obstacles to be overcome — something shifts. Not always immediately. Not always visibly. But marble by marble, the jar fills.

And one day, usually when you’re not watching for it, you’ll walk into a classroom and see something different happening. You’ll see a teacher trying something new. You’ll see kids engaged in a way they weren’t before. And you’ll realize that all those months of quiet, patient marble-dropping were building toward exactly this moment — a moment you couldn’t have forced, but one you made possible.

That’s the work. It’s slower than we want. It’s less dramatic than we imagine. And it’s the only thing that actually lasts.

Want to Learn More?

Want to design math professional development that actually leads to classroom change?Use the Math Coherence Compass Template to align your PD sessions with a clear improvement focus at makemathmoments.com/coherence, or take our free assessment to identify the highest-leverage next step in your math improvement plan at makemathmoments.com/grow.