Stop Trying to Move Everyone: Why Bright Spots Win
Where should a math instructional coach focus when some teachers won't budge? One K-8 district's answer: build your bright spots instead of pushing harder.
Our monthly check-in with a K-8 district's curriculum director and instructional coach started with the coach rethinking the plan - again.
Over the summer, we'd agreed she would focus her energy on second grade, but a month into the year she wasn't convinced that would work.
Some of the second grade teachers have been teaching for 30 years, and as she put it, "They are not going to change their ways."
At the same time, she'd heard two very different things from fourth grade that week.
One teacher asked how long they'd been doing problem strings, because she wasn't seeing any difference.
Another told her she could see a difference in the students who came from one particular third grade classroom, where she knew the teacher had been using problem strings all year.
The director had a list of new ideas of her own.
One teacher had told her she'd tried everything and her students just couldn't do it, yet a month into school, that teacher hadn't used a single problem string.
Some seventh grade classes were still on the second lesson of the integers unit on October 1st.
Meanwhile, the director's own days were being swallowed by band schedules, recess, food service numbers, and a sixth version of the master schedule.
It would have been easy to respond with a bigger push: more PD, more walkthroughs, more follow-up for the teachers who weren't moving.
Instead, we spent most of our planning and strategy session thinking about that second fourth grade teacher, and what might happen if we put our energy into the classrooms where the difference was already showing.
Key Takeaways
A math instructional coach makes the most progress by focusing on bright spots: a few willing teachers whose students are already showing growth. Support those teachers until the practice is routine, monitor progress aggressively, and let the results persuade colleagues, instead of spending most of your energy on the teachers who are resisting.
- Find your bright spots as your priority.
- Don't move on from your champions too soon.
- Let the data and the curriculum choose the strategy.
- Protect the leader's time.
Listening Before Pushing: Why Teacher Buy-In Was Stuck
What we heard was not a district short on educator effort.
These are two leaders who care deeply about kids and math, and who are stretched very thin.
Several things were true at once.
Half the administrative team had turned over, one school had a brand-new principal and was still hiring an assistant principal, and a small number of students with severe behaviors were taking up most of the adults' time in one building.
All that instability had taken a toll, and the director was honest about it: right now, many teachers don't trust the people above them.
The initiatives had their own history, too.
For years, new practices were shared as suggestions that teachers could take or leave.
It was only last year that problem strings became a required routine, with administrators looking for them on learning walks. That means the district has really had one year of implementation, and yet some teachers expected results almost immediately, as if one problem string should fix everything.
Then there's the question of time.
Another district partner of ours recently described all the initiatives flowing into their schools all at once, from number talks to a new instructional framework to data cycles to a new attendance platform. (We dig into this pattern in our episode on why initiative fatigue is real and how to avoid it.)
It made me wonder how many minutes in a typical week teachers actually get to think deeply about any one of those changes.
Probably next to none, because everything they've always done still has to get done.
Above the Line vs. Below the Line
This summer I read Change the Culture, Change the Game by Roger Connors and Tom Smith (2011), and one idea from it kept coming up on this call.
They describe people working below the line, where the problem always belongs to someone else: last year's teacher, the parents, the kids. "I tried everything" is a below-the-line sentence.
Above the line, people get curious and start looking for solutions.
It's important to say that a system full of resisters isn't a collection of bad teachers.
People are a product of the system they work in, and you can't lecture anyone above or below the line. (If trust is the bigger barrier in your building, our guide on how to coach math teachers who are resistant starts there.)
What does move people is evidence: students like theirs, doing better, in a classroom down the hall.
From there, we named four shifts that would help this team build that evidence instead of trying to move everyone at once.
Shift 1: Find Your Bright Spots
The first shift is focus, and the director had already arrived there on her own. "If we're just spreading ourselves all over the place all the time, nothing's changing," she told us. She'd been saying the same thing to her administrative colleagues: the way forward is to build up the bright spots. (We've written more about the hidden cost of spreading support too thin.)
Why Bright Spots Spread: Switch and the Diffusion of Innovations
Chip and Dan Heath (2010) make this case in Switch. When change is hard, most of us study what's broken, when it's often more useful to study what's already working and find ways to spread it.
Everett Rogers (2003) found something similar decades earlier in Diffusion of Innovations. Most people don't adopt a new practice because someone tells them to. They adopt it after they see a respected colleague succeed with it.
That's exactly what the fourth grade teacher was describing when she noticed that students from one classroom arrived better prepared. Imagine her telling her colleagues that this year's class started stronger than any she's had before. The practice begins to spread on its own, because the proof is in the students.
Where This Math Instructional Coach Will Focus: K-2 Partners
So instead of trying to win over an entire resistant grade level, the coach will partner with willing teachers in kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2, ideally two at each grade, or one if that's what her time realistically allows. Working across K-2 gives the district a progression, where students meet the same strategies year after year, and it gives other teachers classrooms they can visit next year.
Progress Monitoring Makes the Case
The piece that makes the evidence hard to argue with is progress monitoring, and we talked about doing it aggressively. It's no different than reading. If we want our reading screeners to go up, we monitor progress all year and adjust along the way. If those K-2 classrooms show more growth than the rest, that becomes the case for everyone else.
We have a shorthand for this: go with your goers. Find your bright spots, pour into them, and let the results speak for themselves.
Shift 2: Don't Move On From Your Math Champions Too Soon
The second shift is staying power. Last year, the coach worked hard to build champions in grades 3 to 5, and while there are only a few of them so far, they matter a great deal. When you're stretched thin, it's tempting to check those teachers off and move on to the next group.
But those champions are your influencers. They're the ones sitting in collaboration time with their grade-level colleagues and at the in-service, talking about what they're seeing in their students and how their own practice has changed. The coach knows this. "I'm not by any means saying, 'I did that, it's done,'" she told us.
Levels of Use: From Mechanical to Routine
Gene Hall and Shirley Hord (2015) help explain why that instinct is right. Their Levels of Use, part of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, describe how a teacher's practice grows over time. At first, use is mechanical, with the teacher following the steps and focused on getting through them. Only later does it become routine, a stable part of how they teach. A practice at the mechanical stage is still fragile, and if support is pulled too early, it can quietly slip away. (It's one of the lessons leaders need to learn about math coaching: ongoing coaching is what keeps teachers from drifting back.)
That gives the coach a clear key result for every teacher she supports: by the end of the year, has this teacher moved from mechanical to routine use, and are they seeing the difference in their students?
Build Capacity That Doesn't Depend on the Coach
There's a bigger reason to invest here, too. If the coach walked away tomorrow, the director should know exactly who could step into the work. That only happens when there are teachers across K-5 who understand it, are doing it, and share a common vision for math in the district. In that sense, their success is the coach's success.
Not sure where your coaching energy should go first? The free Math Improvement Plan Assessment takes about 12 minutes and gives you a custom report showing where to focus.
Shift 3: Let the Data and the Curriculum Choose the Coaching Focus
The third shift is precision, because bright spots grow faster when the work is aimed at a specific student need.
That's harder than it sounds in this district. Fewer than half of students in the state pass the math test at every grade, and when scores are low across the board, the data alone can't tell you where to start. So the director is pairing the data with what's coming next in the curriculum. In grades 3 to 5, the year moves from addition and subtraction in the first marking period to multiplication and division, then fractions, and that sequence gives teachers a natural place to focus.
Middle School: Computational Fluency Before Everything Else
In middle school, she sees one gap underneath almost everything: computational fluency, especially with fractions and negative numbers. "It's not the expressions and the equations," she said. The real struggle is that students are so unfamiliar with the computation. Her goals are modest and powerful:
- Can students get to a friendly number?
- Do they know their partners of 10 and 100?
- In seventh grade, do they even know their partners of 1?
She had nearly given up on her monthly meeting with the three seventh grade teachers. When one of them said she was "even singing the song" for integer rules, the director's response was, "Well, maybe that's your first problem." Rather than memorizing songs, she wants students to have an experience first, make sense of it together, and then build notes or an anchor chart from what they figured out. By the end of our call, she had decided to keep those meetings.
Planning Math Professional Development Teachers Can Repeat
The same thinking is shaping the district's October in-service. The director will have one hour with each room of third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers, and she wants to cover state test results, screener data, and what's coming up in the curriculum while still doing math. That's a lot for an hour, so the plan is to share the data with teachers ahead of time rather than showing it to them for the first time in the session. Then the hour can be spent connecting one clear student need to the upcoming unit, choosing a problem string from their resource that addresses it, and doing the math together so teachers leave with something they can use the next day.
"Could you look at the data, look at what's coming up, and look at a problem string, and tell a story that connects it all?" I asked. "That's my dream," the director said.
We hold every PD experience to one test: could teachers repeat it in their own planning time, without the coach in the room? If not, it probably won't outlast the session.
Shift 4: Protect the Math Leader's Time
The fourth shift is about the leaders themselves. The director taught sixth, seventh, and eighth grade math, and she knows what needs to happen in those classrooms. Yet most of her days go to "fire fighting" and admin problems, attendance, and food service. "Why am I wasting my time on all of this?" she asked. "This is the work that I need to do." Then she said the line I keep coming back to: "Every time we say yes to something, we're saying no to something else." (If that sounds familiar, read how this math leader stopped firefighting and started leading.)
Weigh Time Against Impact
I think about this as a balance between time and impact.
If something takes a lot of our time and energy but has very little impact on the system, it's a poor use of that time.
The trouble is that most systems aren't making decisions based on impact. Without clear goals, clear measures, and a plan to monitor them, we end up throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn (2016) describe the same problem in Coherence: most systems don't suffer from a lack of initiatives, they suffer from fragmentation and overload.
There will always be more things a leader could support. The better question is which work is most likely to produce evidence of impact and build capacity that doesn't depend entirely on you. Bright spots do both, and the evidence they produce also strengthens the director's case for more help. Budget planning starts at the end of November, and she'd like at least two more coaches, which is a much easier ask when you can point to classrooms where the work is already paying off.
What Made the Difference for This Math Instructional Coach
We left the call with a smaller plan than we started with, and a better one. Over the next few weeks, the coach will choose her K-2 partners and begin progress monitoring with them, while continuing to support her 3 to 5 champions until their practice is routine. The director will keep meeting with the seventh grade team, starting with experiences, and teachers will get their data before the in-service so the hour can be spent on math.
By the end of the year, the goal isn't every teacher on board. It's a handful of classrooms where the results are hard to argue with, and a fourth grade teacher who's no longer the only one noticing.
You don't win over a resistant staff by spending more time with the teachers who are resisting. You do it by making your bright spots impossible to miss.
Your Next Step
If your own team is trying to move everyone at once and feeling stuck, the free Math Improvement Plan Assessment is a quick way to see where to focus first.
Take the Free Math Improvement Plan Assessment
Frequently Asked Questions About Teacher Resistance to PD
What should a math instructional coach focus on first?
Start with bright spots: a few willing teachers whose students are already showing growth. In this K-8 district, the coach chose one or two partners per grade in K-2 and kept supporting her grade 3 to 5 champions, rather than spreading herself across every classroom or the teachers least likely to change.
What are bright spots in school improvement?
Bright spots are classrooms where something is already working. Chip and Dan Heath argue in Switch that when change is hard, studying what works and spreading it is often more useful than studying what's broken. For a math leader, a bright spot is a teacher whose students arrive noticeably stronger.
How do you get teacher buy-in for a new math practice?
Evidence moves people more than mandates do. Everett Rogers found that most people adopt a new practice after seeing a respected colleague succeed with it. Build a few classrooms with clear results, monitor progress, and let teachers see students like theirs doing better down the hall.
What are the Levels of Use in the Concerns-Based Adoption Model?
Levels of Use, from Gene Hall and Shirley Hord, describe how a teacher's use of a new practice grows over time. Early use is mechanical: following the steps and getting through them. Later, use becomes routine and stable. Practices at the mechanical stage are fragile, so coaching support shouldn't be pulled too early.
How long does it take to see results from problem strings?
Longer than many teachers expect. This district had only one year of required implementation, yet some teachers expected results almost immediately. One fourth grade teacher did notice that students from a third grade classroom using problem strings all year arrived better prepared. Aggressive progress monitoring helps show the growth.
How should a math leader decide what to say yes to?
Weigh time against impact. If work takes a lot of time but has little impact on the system, it's a poor use of that time. Prioritize work that produces evidence of impact and builds capacity that doesn't depend on you. Fullan and Quinn note that most systems suffer from fragmentation, not too few initiatives.
References
Connors, R., & Smith, T. (2011). Change the culture, change the game: The breakthrough strategy for energizing your organization and creating accountability for results. Portfolio/Penguin.
Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts, and systems. Corwin.
Hall, G. E., & Hord, S. M. (2015). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes (4th ed.). Pearson. (Link goes to Pearson's page for the 5th edition, 2019. The 4th edition is out of print.)
Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2010). Switch: How to change things when change is hard. Broadway Books.
Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.
About the Author
Yvette Lehman partners with district math leaders through Make Math Moments. She is co-author, with Jon Orr, of Make Math Moments' upcoming book on the Math Improvement Flywheel. As a former struggling math student, she is passionate about helping students understand elementary math concepts through models, and learning about the five mathematical proficiencies helped her see that math can be seen.
