You already have a vision statement. It sits at the front of your multi-year math improvement plan — on a slide, maybe on the wall, maybe in a binder that goes to the board. And if you’re honest, it has almost no effect on what actually happens on a Tuesday in October when three competing demands land on your desk and you have to choose one. That gap — between the vision you can recite and the decisions you actually make under pressure — is the single most common reason multi-year math plans drift. The vision isn’t wrong. It just isn’t built to do the one job you most need it to do, which is help you decide.
A Coherence Compass is a vision built for that job. Instead of a statement you admire, it’s a decision filter you use. It holds four things together — a shared picture of where you’re going, a small set of multi-year objectives, the core values that constrain how you’ll get there, and the strategic supports you’re committing to — in a form compact and clear enough that you can hold a new opportunity up against it and get an answer. Not “is this a nice idea.” Almost everything is a nice idea. The answer you need is “does this belong to our direction, or is it pulling us off it.” That’s what a compass is for. It doesn’t tell you the terrain is pretty. It tells you which way is north.
Why a Math Vision Statement Can’t Guide District Decisions
The reason most math visions fail to guide decisions is that they were written to be agreeable, and agreeable statements can’t exclude anything. “We believe all students can achieve at high levels in mathematics” is true and worth believing, but it cannot help you choose between two proposals, because both of them will claim to serve it. A filter that admits everything isn’t a filter. And a district whose vision admits everything ends up doing everything, which is another way of describing the overloaded, incoherent year that math coordinators know too well.
Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn, studying what separates districts that improve from districts that merely stay busy, found that coherence comes from focusing on a small number of ambitious goals and pursuing them relentlessly, while incoherence comes from too many disconnected initiatives competing for the same finite attention (Fullan & Quinn, 2016). The key word is relentlessly, and relentless focus is impossible without a mechanism for declining the things that would dilute it. A Coherence Compass is that mechanism. Its real value isn’t the inspiring language at the top. It’s the capacity, built into its structure, to look at a genuinely good opportunity and say “not this, because it isn’t our direction” — and to be able to explain why in a way your team finds legitimate rather than arbitrary.
The 4 Parts of a Coherence Compass for Your Multi-Year Math Improvement Plan
1. A Shared Picture of Where You’re Going
The first part is a shared picture of where you’re going — concrete enough that two people reading it would picture the same classrooms. Not “student-centered mathematics” but a described scene: what students are doing, what teachers are doing, what you’d see and hear if you walked in. Vagueness here is where drift begins, because a fuzzy destination can be claimed by any initiative that shows up.
2. Three Multi-Year Objectives — Never More Than Five
The second part is a small set of multi-year objectives — ideally three, never more than five. These are the things that have to become true over three to five years for the picture to be real. NCTM’s Principles to Actions makes the case that access, curriculum, teaching, and assessment have to be pursued as a coherent set of guiding structures rather than as isolated programs, and that leadership’s role is to hold them together (NCTM, 2014). Your objectives are how you make that coherence specific to your district. Keeping the list to three is not a formatting preference. It’s the discipline Fullan and Quinn identified — the small number is what makes relentless pursuit possible. One district we worked with went from three broad objectives to one clear priority and finally started seeing movement.
3. Core Values That Constrain How You Work
The third part is your core values — the constraints on how you’ll pursue the objectives. These matter because two districts can share an objective and pursue it in ways that are worlds apart. “We build capacity in our own people rather than depending on outside experts indefinitely” is a value that will kill certain proposals no matter how good their results look, because the proposal violates how you’ve decided to work. Values are what let the compass say no to a shortcut, not just to an off-topic idea.
4. The Strategic Supports You’ll Actually Use
The fourth part is the strategic support you’re committing to — the coaching, the collaborative time, the assessment structure that the objectives depend on. Naming these turns the compass from aspiration into commitment, because it forces you to say what you’ll actually resource. An objective with no named support behind it is a wish, and wishes don’t survive a hard budget conversation.
How to Use Your Decision Filter When a New Math Initiative Lands
The compass earns its name the moment a decision arrives. Suppose a well-regarded program is offered to your district midyear, with funding attached and an enthusiastic principal championing it. In a district without a compass, this gets adopted, because it’s good and it’s free and someone wants it — and it quietly becomes the fourth priority competing with the three you already have. In a district with a compass, you hold it up against the filter and ask three questions:
- Does it serve one of our three objectives, or does it add a fourth?
- Does it fit our values, or does it ask us to work in a way we’ve decided against?
- Does it deepen a support we’ve committed to, or does it split our attention?
Most good opportunities fail at least one of those questions, and the compass lets you see the failure clearly and name it out loud. It’s also what makes an honest adopt, adapt, or abandon conversation possible, because you’re measuring the proposal against something fixed rather than against how everyone feels that week. That’s the part that changes the culture around decisions. When you decline something, you’re not declining it because you don’t like it or don’t have energy for it. You’re declining it because it doesn’t point north, and you can show exactly which part of the compass it violates. Fullan and Quinn are clear that coherence is a “shared depth of understanding” — it lives in people’s minds, not in documents (Fullan & Quinn, 2016). Using the compass out loud, visibly, in real decisions is how that shared understanding actually forms. Every time your team watches a good idea get declined for a legible reason, the direction gets a little more real to them.
How to Build a Coherence Compass With Your District Math Team
There’s a temptation to treat the Coherence Compass as something a leader writes and then presents. Resist it. The document produced by one person in an office has no shared understanding behind it, which means it can’t function as a shared filter — the moment a decision gets hard, everyone reverts to their own private compass. The value comes from building it together, over a few working sessions, with the people who will have to use it. One session to draft the picture of where you’re going. Another to look hard at student indicators and pressure-test whether the objectives are the right three. Another to name the values and the supports and to fight, productively, about what you’re willing to resource and what you’re not.
That process is slower than writing a statement, and it is entirely the point. The arguments you have while building the compass are the arguments you’d otherwise have — less productively and under more pressure — in the middle of every future decision. Having them once, on purpose, in a room built for it, is what turns four nice ideas into a filter your whole team will actually reach for when October gets loud.
Why Multi-Year Math Plans Drift — and What Holds Them Together
At Make Math Moments, we believe a math plan drifts not because leaders lack vision but because their vision was never built to make decisions. A picture you admire and a filter you use are different tools, and only one of them protects a multi-year math improvement plan from the steady erosion of good ideas pulling in different directions. The hardest, most valuable thing a math vision can do is help you decline something worthwhile — and a vision that can’t do that isn’t finished yet.
This is the Design and Align disciplines of the Math Improvement Flywheel working together. You define where you’re going clearly enough to measure it, and then you build the coherent system that keeps every decision pointed the same way. A Coherence Compass is how those two disciplines become one usable tool — a north that holds for three to five years, so that the daily flood of choices adds up to a direction instead of canceling itself out.
Multi-Year Math Improvement Plan FAQs
What is a multi-year math improvement plan?
A multi-year math improvement plan is a district’s three-to-five-year commitment to a small set of mathematics objectives, along with the values and strategic supports that will carry them. Unlike an annual school improvement goal, it’s designed to hold direction across budget cycles, staff turnover, and competing initiatives.
How many goals should a multi-year math improvement plan have?
Three is ideal; five is the ceiling. Fullan and Quinn found that coherence comes from pursuing a small number of ambitious goals relentlessly (Fullan & Quinn, 2016). Every objective past the third dilutes the attention available to the first three.
How is a Coherence Compass different from a math vision statement?
A vision statement describes what you want. A Coherence Compass is built to decide — it pairs the picture with objectives, values, and named supports so you can hold any new opportunity against it and get a clear yes or no, with a reason your team finds legitimate.
How often should we revisit the compass?
The compass itself should hold for three to five years — that stability is what makes it useful. Revisit the strategic supports annually during budget planning, but changing the objectives more than once every few years means you’ve built a calendar, not a compass.
Your Next Step
If your district’s vision lives on a slide but not in your decisions, our free Math Improvement Assessment can help you see where the gaps are. It walks through whether your goals are specific enough to decide with and whether your system is coherent enough to hold a direction over multiple years. It’s on our site whenever you’re ready to turn a statement you admire into a compass you’ll actually use.
References:
- Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems. Corwin. https://michaelfullan.ca/books/coherence-right-drivers-action-schools-districts-systems/
- National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (2014). Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. NCTM. https://www.nctm.org/PtA/
