When district leaders first look at their math data, the picture often feels daunting. Proficiency levels can be stagnant, teachers overwhelmed by competing initiatives, and principals unsure how to support mathematics beyond scheduling extra intervention blocks. Faced with this, many leaders feel pressure to design a sweeping improvement plan that addresses everything at once.

But lasting traction rarely comes from tackling everything everywhere. Instead, the most effective leaders go looking for bright spots.

Across every system, there are classrooms where the vision is already alive. In these rooms, students aren’t passively filling out worksheets — they’re standing at vertical whiteboards, reasoning through problems together, and debating strategies. Math talk fills the air. Teachers act less like “sages on the stage” and more like facilitators of student thinking. For coordinators and principals, these teachers are the bright spots — and they represent the greatest opportunity for scaling traction.

How Bright Spots Spread Vision

Rather than designing brand-new initiatives, leaders who gain traction amplify what bright spot teachers are already doing: showcasing practice by inviting colleagues to see the energy and talk with students about their learning; centering PD around authentic local examples such as video clips, artifacts, and co-planned lessons; and building influence by elevating bright spot teachers as trusted peer models. What begins in a handful of classrooms can quickly become a cluster, then a network.

Traction scales not by adding more initiatives, but by multiplying the reach of practices already thriving in your schools.

Why Bright Spots Scale Faster

Traditional PD often tries to push vision from the top down a few times a year — expensive, infrequent, and too often disconnected from the daily realities of classrooms. Bright spots, by contrast, pull the vision across the system every day. They make change visible, local, and continuous. A single visit to a bright spot classroom can spark more belief and motivation than a full day of workshops, because teachers witness the impact on real students in real time.

Research reinforces this. Chip and Dan Heath (2010), in Switch, highlight the power of “bright spot thinking” or “positive deviance.” Lasting change often takes hold when we study what is already working under the same conditions others find challenging. Bright spots succeed in the same constraints as their peers, which makes their practices credible, replicable, and highly persuasive.

What Bright Spots Achieve

Focusing on bright spots accomplishes three powerful things.

First, they provide a living model: instead of relying on an abstract slide deck, teachers can see what the vision looks like with real students.

Second, they build belief and trust: educators are far more likely to shift practice when they see a colleague down the hall already making it work.

Finally, they create leverage: coordinators don’t have to invent from scratch — they can amplify what is already thriving.

This also ties directly to the four conditions teachers need before adopting new practices: alignment with a shared vision, opportunities to observe, belief in their ability to implement, and ongoing support. Bright spots accelerate all four at once.

From Inspiration to Systemwide Adoption

Spotlighting bright spots is only the beginning. To truly scale traction, leaders must design structures that make those practices portable and sustainable. Consider these approaches:

• Release teachers to observe: Even a single classroom visit per semester can inspire teachers to try new strategies. No substitute budget? Leaders can step in to cover classes themselves.
• Anchor collaborative work: Bright spots make powerful anchors for lesson study or PLC cycles. Teams can co-plan with a bright spot teacher, observe them teach, and then debrief together.
• Codify practices: Capture short video clips, routines, or student work so bright spot practices extend beyond one classroom. These artifacts become portable models for all teachers.
• Build leadership structures: Bright spot teachers can serve on councils or task forces. Their voices, rooted in daily classroom practice, influence district decisions and embed the vision into the system’s DNA.

Teacher Induction Programs

Ontario’s New Teacher Induction Program (NTIP) pairs new teachers with a mentor during their first year. While designed to provide guidance and support, NTIP also creates a direct pathway for spreading a district’s vision, but currently may not be optimized.

Imagine intentionally pairing novice teachers with bright spots. Instead of mentorship happening only in after-school meetings, it would include opportunities to observe live classrooms where students are problem solving, engaging in discourse, and using models authentically. This ensures that from the very start of their careers, new teachers experience the district’s vision alive in practice — accelerating their own adoption of those practices and reducing the barrier to change.

Why Bright Spots Sustain Traction

Scaling traction requires not only amplification but sustainability. Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan (2012), in Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School, argue that sustainable improvement depends on building human, social, and decisional capital. Bright spot teachers already demonstrate high decisional capital — the ability to make sound judgments in complex situations. Inviting them into councils and planning sessions develops this professional capital at scale, turning them into leaders who can carry the work forward through turnover, competing initiatives, and shifting policies.

James Spillane’s (2005) research on distributed leadership reinforces this. Change anchored only in central offices rarely lasts. By embedding bright spot teachers into leadership networks, districts distribute authority and create resilience. Bright spots are trusted nodes in this network, spreading influence laterally as well as upward.

Finally, codification ensures sustainability. Capturing artifacts, routines, and strategies from bright spots prevents practices from remaining locked in one room. Documented examples become part of the system’s knowledge base, ensuring the vision continues to spread even when teachers move on.

The Flywheel of Traction

This is the essence of scaling traction: not a burst of enthusiasm that fades, but a flywheel effect. Bright spots ignite belief. Observation and codification multiply their reach. Leadership structures embed their influence. And programs like NTIP ensure that the next generation begins their careers immersed in the vision.

Traction isn’t designed at the top — it grows, spreads, and lasts when the teachers already living the change become the ones leading it.