Name It Before You Fix It
Insights on math literacy, instruction, and leadership for educators and school leaders.
As a field, we’ve gotten good at talking about the asset-based approach to teaching — grounding instruction in what students can do rather than what they can’t, and building from there. It’s become a hallmark of good classroom practice.
But what about coaching our teachers the same way?
During the busyness of a school year, it’s far too easy to drift into “fix-it” mode. Leaders are under enormous pressure — to raise outcomes, to be responsive to every stakeholder, to coach teachers to be at their best. Under that weight, feedback slowly narrows to a single channel: how to close this gap, how to improve that strategy. And somewhere in the rush, we lose sight of the excellence our teachers already embody and the expertise they bring to class every single day.
The way out is to turn that same asset-based lens on our coaching. That doesn’t mean abandoning direct, necessary, worthwhile feedback. It means balancing that feedback with genuine affirmation of what our teachers do well — and making sure they see it and feel it, so they know to keep doing it even as they adapt the things we’re coaching them to change.
With that in mind, I want to offer six areas to think about when coaching the teachers in your math department. Any given teacher might be excellent in some and developing in others, and that mix of strengths is exactly why it’s worth stepping back this way.
The Mario Kart Lens
I didn’t play many video games growing up, but I played enough Mario Kart to carry one idea into my teaching. In the game, every character has a different mix of attributes — speed, agility, weight — that roughly balance out. As a teacher, I kept a similar mental tracker for every student: curiosity, motivation, calculations, problem-solving, collaboration. Class after class, I updated those ratings in my head, hunting for the one area where each student needed the most growth and figuring out how to bring it out.
Coaching our mathletes team taught me how precise that move has to be. My students earned their spots by crushing a qualifying written test, and then during practices I drilled them on all sorts of random and esoteric topics to broaden their scope leading up to the competition. We felt ready. Then the team round began, where four students would need to agree upon a single answer to submit, and I watched from the sideline as my elite cadre of math students argued, lost track of time, and fell apart on coordination. They weren't weak at math. They were weak at collaboration — a category I hadn't coached at all. This sent me back to the drawing board in terms of practice design. Once I named the real gap for them and built drills and simulations to close it, while leaning on the math strength they already had, we became a force to be reckoned with, and students began to love the team competition.
The lesson stuck with me: affirm what’s strong, find the precise gap, design the intervention that fits it. The same is true for developing teachers. Every teacher walks in with a profile — real strengths, real growth areas — and our job is to see it clearly enough to coach it well. The six strengths below are the attribute categories I use for math teachers. They’re the lens that tells you what to affirm and where to aim.
Six Strengths Worth Naming
These six things, when present, consistently lead to stronger math instruction. They're not a checklist to grade teachers against — they're a set of lenses to view instruction through while observing. And just like a Mario Kart character, no teacher maxes out all six at once. A real strength in one area often counterbalances a developing one somewhere else. Your job isn't to find the teacher who has everything. It's to find which strengths each teacher already owns — and tell them.
1. Rigorous Content
Standards set the floor; great teachers aim higher. Content balances conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and real-world application. Students solve multi-step problems and can explain their reasoning, not just produce an answer. Name it: “The way you pushed students to explain why it worked — not just whether it worked — is exactly the rigor I want other teachers to see.”
2. Math Program Vision
What makes math class, math class. The instruction reflects your campus's shared curriculum and vision — the right balance of direct instruction and representations, the strategies your program is built around, used consistently. Name it: “You're running our discussion routine the way it was designed. That consistency is what lets students move between classrooms without relearning how math works here.”
3. Content Expert Every Day
Make the complex simple and the simple compelling. The teacher breaks hard ideas into accessible pieces and can tell the “story of the math” — how today connects to last week and what's coming — responding to misconceptions with depth, on the spot. Name it: “When that student got stuck, you had three different ways to explain it ready to go. That fluency is a real strength.”
4. Checks for Understanding
Who knows what, at every moment. The teacher is genuinely curious about where students are right now, not at the end of the unit — and can tell you who’s mastering a concept and who’s struggling at any given moment. Name it: “You could tell me exactly which four students hadn’t gotten it yet. Most teachers can’t do that mid-lesson.”
5. Academic Monitoring
Paper = performance, to a point. The teacher circulates during independent practice, reviews work in real time, and gives immediate, targeted feedback — with materials formatted to read at a glance and an “if this, then that” plan for common errors. Name it: “Your monitoring laps were tight. You caught that error pattern across the room and addressed it before it set in. That’s the move.”
6. Engaging
Do kids want to learn from this person? The hardest one to teach and the easiest to feel. Students participate, they lean in, they leave still talking about the lesson. The teacher brings energy, real-life connection, and obvious passion for math. Name it: “Your students wanted to be there. That’s not a small thing — it’s the foundation everything else gets built on.” (I wrote more about hiring for this kind of passion in a recent essay.)
Name It Before You Fix It
My challenge to you is to reframe how you approach your next round of observations. Bring the six strengths in with you. Your first job isn’t to make a list of what’s missing — it’s to catch the teacher doing something right, name which strength it is, and let the teacher know why it’s effective so they continue to do it. Then build upon it and amplify it: make the teacher with the tightest monitoring systems model it at the next department meeting; send a struggling colleague to watch the dynamic, math-loving teacher introduce the hook for the day to study for their own class.
Leaders will always address what needs to change, because that’s what we do. But with this shift, we do it from a foundation of strengths that we’ve named, affirmed, and built on first — the same way I learned to coach a mathletes team, one precise gap at a time. That’s asset-based leadership, and in a math classroom it starts with knowing what to look for.
My new book, Empowering All Leaders to be Math Leaders is available for pre-order and goes deep on exactly how to make this happen — with tools you can put to work immediately in order to be “Monday Ready.” Subscribe here for more or find me at thomasobrien.xyz.
Great insights.