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Are your district’s math improvement plans stuck in “waiting for perfect”? What if aiming for B+ work could unlock real progress—right now?

Too often in education, big ideas stall while we chase flawless execution. As a K–12 math coordinator, coach, or administrator, you’re likely juggling district mandates, teacher support, and the pressure of results. The temptation to wait until every plan is “A+” perfect can delay change indefinitely. This episode challenges that mindset and reframes progress through a powerful question: What does B+ work look like—and how can we build momentum with it? Discover how defining realistic, actionable goals can create alignment, clarity, and sustainable growth across schools.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why B+ work is more effective—and more achievable—than chasing perfection.

• How to build clear, actionable continuums for school improvement goals, teacher teams, and measurable outcomes.

• A practical framework to help every school team know where they are, where they’re going, and what steps to take next.

Stop waiting for A+ perfection. Press play and learn how B+ clarity can move your math program forward today.

Attention District Math Leaders:

Not sure what matters most when designing math improvement plans? Take this assessment and get a free customized report: https://makemathmoments.com/grow/ 

Ready to design your math improvement plan with guidance, support and using structure? Learn how to follow our 4 stage process. https://growyourmathprogram.com 

Looking to supplement your curriculum with problem based lessons and units? Make Math Moments Problem Based Lessons & Units

FULL TRANSCRIPT

We’ve got a saying here at MakeMathMoments and it’s gonna sound, I guess, harsh. I guess not harsh, it’s gonna sound like, hmm, they don’t care that much. So I don’t want you to take it that way, because we do care. And the saying is, let’s achieve B plus work. And let me unpack this, because that’s the part, why not shoot for A plus? Why aren’t we shooting for A plus, especially in education? Why aren’t we gunning for being amazing?

And now I wanna explain this specifically in the context of being a K-12 math coordinator, an administrator, and I’m supporting math improvement across my school or my collection of schools. And what we mean by B plus work is how can we get B plus work done going and not wait for A plus type work. And this comes from, say,

different businesses that say like B plus work gets done, whereas A plus work maybe never see the light of day. And that’s the part that we kind of take seriously here, is that we would rather see work get started and it not be perfect than continually try to make perfect work and then it never actually rolls out, and especially in terms of professional development, especially in terms of supporting our teachers, it could be.

you know, the PLC, that structure that you’re trying to implement but you just haven’t tweaked it just yet so then another year goes by where we didn’t implement it or we didn’t try this thing or maybe there’s a PD session coming up and instead of going, I just needed two more days to work on this structure, we’re gonna do this instead and you do something completely different. We’d rather see B plus and get B plus work done and started with teachers on the right things versus

versus always continually waiting to see if A plus, because A plus sometimes never just happens, it just never shows up. And when I think about this, it’s like a lot of times what’s really happening behind the scenes between B plus and A plus is when you say those two things, what you’re doing is you’re really describing that there is a continuum of progression from.

you know, level zero all the way to level four or from an F all the way to an A plus. Like just using that language tells you that there’s this continuum around what good solid blank and I use blank because it could be a good solid pedagogical routine. It could be a good solid goal. It could be a good solid team aspect. It could be a good solid structure. It could be a good solid proficiencies around mathematics. Like whatever that is, there is always that progression of implementation and progression of

of assessment of the thing. And a lot of times is when we shoot for A plus work or B plus work, what we haven’t really done is define the progression. So we don’t know what the difference is between B plus and A plus. So, and when I speak to that about goal setting, we seek that about like setting our goals for the beginning of the year. Like what are we trying to do this year in terms of math improvement? lot of schools right now are setting goals and they’re probably setting goals like.

Or the district has said, here’s your mandated set goal where you’re supposed to be setting, you know, increasing student scores on your standardized assessments by blank percent, like 4%. And then you’re saying, now go make it happen. So somebody has set this goal, now we have to figure out how to make it happen. And we’re going like, okay, well, we’re gonna implement this routine and we’re gonna maybe we’re gonna put this pedagogical routine on these PD days. And we’re going to have some coaching maybe in between that and.

And maybe we’re gonna focus on BTC rollout across the entire district. We’re gonna do a book study on it. And a lot of times what we haven’t done there is defined, like if it is going to be this pedagogical routine or maybe it’s this number sense routine that we wanna roll out across classrooms, a lot of times you’ll say like, we want all classrooms to have blank. And that’s like, in a way that you’re setting yourself up for like, that’s A plus work.

And, but I don’t know exactly what that looks like or sounds like. And so we’d rather you like roll back and go like, can we develop like what B plus work looks like right now so that we can shoot for that and get that started. that’s what happens is when we make blanket statements, it’s like by the end of the year, we’re gonna have done and everyone’s gonna be using some sort of element of BTC or someone’s gonna be, every school classroom is gonna be using this sort of routine at least once in their classrooms is,

is that when we don’t hit it, when we don’t hit that A plus work, is that we tend to go like, that didn’t work, and it didn’t increase our scores, and we need to start again. And the start again actually is like getting the flywheel to strong, you have to move it stronger again, and it takes a lot more effort. So we’d rather see teams develop a continuum.

around something that they know is really important, which comes from the objectives and comes from some of the goals that we want to set. So for example, we’ve just got back from traveling to meet one of our district partners in a district improvement program, and we were working with their principals and their coaches on setting appropriate and realistic school level math goals. And because we want those goals to be owned by the school, the district itself had set the objectives, like these are the three zones we want to see improvement on over the course of five to 10 years. Pick one.

and let’s set a school improvement goal around that one. And let’s use the resources at the schools, the resources at the district to support that one goal. So what we are doing with the coaches is helping them clarify what does B plus work look like? What is it gonna look like? What’s our goal by the end of the year? And the goal that we kind of helped them to set was we would like each school to set an appropriate, realistic, and attainable goal.

That part right there, it sounds like, okay, well, that makes sense, but it’s like, well, what does a good goal look like? And so that’s where the B plus work, in a way, comes in. It’s like, we have to set the continuum of what a good goal could look like, because there’s teams that don’t have goals, and there’s teams that have really great goals. And if we’re going to, if one of our goals at the team aspect of our coaches is to help them create those goals, let’s define what…

the continuum of a good school improvement goal looks like so that the coach knows how to create it or help them create it. The administrator will know when they have a good goal or not. And then that gives us something to shoot for. So what we did with that team is set this continuum so that we know what level zero goal looks like or level four looks like. So now we’re saying, know, like, let’s shoot for the B plus, let’s shoot for level three.

And we did this not just for goals, for this team, we said let’s do this for how to structure the math team at the school. What does that continuum look like? How do we do this with the measures on the goals? What does a good measure look like? Let’s create a continuum for that so that we can know when we don’t have a good measure and when we do and what level we’re looking to achieve so that we can say, hey, let’s get the B plus goal actually happening here. So that’s.

That part of the continuum often is overlooked. We don’t tend to create the look for it. Sit down together with your teams and go, if I’m trying to do this thing, if I’m trying to implement this, and I do want to measure its success by the end of the year, let’s create the continuum, the rubric, the assessment tool to tell us what no implementation looks like or strong implementation or no achievement or A plus achievement.

So like, for example, when we were talking about setting up an appropriate and realistic school math goal, we said, you know, level zero is like, there’s no goal at school. Like if you’re a coach, you know, working with that school and you come out of a coaching session and you’re like, we don’t have a goal yet. We’re gonna score them, you know, we’re scoring them a zero. And our goal is to, our team goal is to get everyone to a level three by the end of the school year. That’s our B plus work. Because I’d rather see us progress.

towards B plus then say like we’re only looking for a plus we want to see movement across the continuum so So for example in terms of school goals with with this continuum and that team we said, you know Zero was was no math goal at school a level one is a math goal exists, but it’s vague It’s or it’s compliance driven. It’s been disset and we haven’t actually had any in any sort of engagement from voices

a level two, we co developed this with them. It wasn’t just us saying, here’s what it looks like. A math goal is defined. It’s aligned to school or to district objectives, because the district said, hey, these are the three things we want to see improvement on. It’s co developed at the school level with the school Mac team. And it’s measure and measurable tools in place, like there is something to measure this with. That’s a level two. And so we’re like, that was not our actual end of year goal is to hit level two is like we need to go to we were looking for B plus we’re looking for the

level three and four. So level three we set with the team was saying like, okay, if that’s a level two, then level three is a math goals realistic. Which means we have to understand like what realistic is and we had to help the coaches understand the difference between realistic goals and non realistic goals thinking about what pre professional development structures we have access to what school resources we have access to. That’s what helps create a realistic goal. It’s got to be aligned to district objectives and the

Progress has to be reviewed periodically. We’ve got that measurable in place, so it’s hitting everything on two already, but we’re now using that measure to review the realisticness of the goal as the year goes on. Level four though, that’s in a way, that’s what our B plus work is for the year, is to go like let’s get each school, each principal, each math team at a school to set goals that are realistic, they’re aligned to the district objectives.

and we’re reviewing the progress using the measurement tool periodically. That was our B plus aim. Four plus here, or four, level four, eight plus work is doing all those things plus it drives instructional decisions across the school. We’re using the results to actually make good decisions for what we’re doing next year, where we’re developing, supporting resources. That’s to come. We wanna get there, but this year’s B plus work is at that level.

So we’re doing that with a bunch of things. Like we do that, this is the standard operating procedure at Make Math Moments when we partner with schools and school districts is can we do this at the fractal level? We do this at the district level to set goals. We do this at each school to set school level goals and how do we do this? And that saying is B plus work. Can we achieve B plus work? But I wanted to set the context here because it means that we have to develop the continuum of progress.

So we know what B plus is versus A plus versus C plus versus nothing. And that part is the part that I think we need more schools, more districts, more teams to map out because it will, it will create clarity. creates alignment. creates like progressions. It creates like the answers questions. Like what do we do next? Because we now have a clear picture of what it looks like or what the thing that we’re trying to shift or change or implement looks like at different levels.

and it creates that, that knows next step pieces. So we did that with about math goals with that team. we did that about how the, what the measures look like. So we developed a continuum, like what a good measure looks like versus a measure that, that isn’t, isn’t going to be great. It scores a zero versus scores of four. And we’re again, we’re shooting for level three, this year to help a team structure the right measure for their school goal. We also helped them develop that continuum, but like, how do you choose the math team out of school?

Like who should be on that team? Like what’s the team comprised of? And B plus work is part of that too. It’s still say like, well, we need to define what’s a good team, what’s a team that maybe isn’t say the right team to get the traction that we’re looking to get out of school. Which no team at all was a zero. And then we’ve got definitions for all the pieces up to that. We also had a section that we helped develop on ownership.

of the work, you who owns the work? Is it the principal that owns the work? Is it the school that owns the work? Is it the math coach that’s only worked? We developed a continuum so that we know what B plus looked like there. And so those are some of the four pieces we helped in particular. In a way, it’s a fractal approach because this isn’t the only thing we’re trying to do with this school district over the course of a number of years. This is the B plus. This is like helping each school develop appropriate goals.

and structure around those goals is kind of the B plus work at this point. is another soul stage of like, what are we doing next so that we can get to A plus work with those schools eventually. So there are more pieces. We’ve got another section that we’re gonna be helping them with down the road about structure and setting leadership up at school sites. So in a way, this fractal approach of setting your continuums help you define goals. And again,

where we started today was thinking about B plus work. I’m gonna leave you with that thought is where are we doing B plus work and are we sure we know what B plus looks like versus A plus versus C plus versus F. We encourage you to get clear around that and then help develop what those continuums look like for the shifts, the changes, the implementations, the improvement you’re actually looking for. You can’t create improvement unless you know what the continuum looks like. So remember, B plus.

and that can help drive that change. If you’re looking to dig a little deeper on say the continuums, the structures, what the pieces look like, then we encourage you to do two things. One is you could reach out to us and talk to us specifically about what your program looks like. We can help steer some of those discussions. You can book a meeting with us over at makemathmoments.com forward slash district. Makemathmoments.com forward slash district.

a meeting and we can talk soon. Or you can dig into the pieces of our programming, pieces of your programming, and what moves the needle and how to move those needles. So you can head on over to makemathmoments.com forward slash report, get that report that can pinpoint your next move. Makemathmoments.com forward slash report. soon.

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