A teacher leaves a conference with a notebook full of great ideas, research-proven practices, and every intention of using them. Within a week, however, those intentions are competing with lesson plans, student needs, emails, and everything else the school day requires.
The practices didn’t become less proven. The teacher hasn’t become less committed. What’s missing is a way to turn new knowledge and commitment into daily practice.
Bob Slavin once compared changing teaching to changing deeply established habits, like how we eat or parent. As he wrote in What Works in Professional Development, “no matter how motivated you are to improve, over time you’re likely to fall back on well-established routines, or even bad habits.”
Bob wasn’t arguing against professional development. He was naming one of its limits: learning about a better approach doesn’t turn it into practice.
A conference can introduce a powerful idea. It can’t create time to rehearse it, align it with curriculum and assessment, arrange useful feedback, or provide support when the first or second or third attempt to use it doesn’t go as planned.
That’s the difference between knowing what works and making it work.
The second season of Sold a Story widened its focus from science of reading to teaching itself, answering the question: What happened to teaching? It’s an important moment to ask what good teaching looks like, what helps an entire school keep doing it, and what happens when they don’t.
Good ideas don’t implement themselves
Educational research helps us identify practices and programs likely to improve learning. It can’t automatically turn that evidence into a coherent reading block, or math class, in a third-grade classroom. Someone still has to decide what a practice looks like in action. Teachers need materials, examples, shared language, time to learn, and feedback precise enough to be useful. Leaders need to know what to look for and what to do when implementation begins to weaken. Assessments need to trigger a pretty immediate response.
Without those connections, even strong practices remain separate pieces. One training introduces questioning techniques. Another focuses on student engagement. A new curriculum brings one set of routines while an intervention program brings another. Each decision is defensible on its own. Together, they can still produce a fragmented experience for teachers and students.
In Programs and Practices, Slavin made this point with another plainspoken analogy. Asking teachers to assemble isolated practices into major improvement, he said, was like handing someone the parts of a lawnmower and expecting that person to put it together and mow the lawn.
Some people can. But why make every teacher invent the mechanism?
A system doesn’t replace strong teaching practices. It’s what allows strong practices to become normal practice.
Coaching closes the gap between knowing and doing
Training can explain and demonstrate a practice. Coaching supports teachers to use it with their students.
In SFA, coaches know the model and the research on which is was built, observe what’s happening in classrooms, and review student and implementation data with the leadership team. Together, they determine whether the next area of focus involves instruction, pacing, regrouping, tutoring, or another part of the system, like team structures. The coach’s feedback is specific and actionable and helps the school follow through.
That kind of support has been part of SFA from its earliest design. Co-founders Bob Slavin and Nancy Madden understood that training alone wasn’t enough to change daily practice and that meaningful changes in teaching required ongoing, classroom-based support.
Principal Jenell Bear saw the difference at her school in New Town, North Dakota. Her Success for All coach took her into classrooms at Edwin Loe Elementary, a school that had been on the state improvement list for 15 years, and showed her what she should see when SFA was working. Once Principal Bear knew what to look for, she was able to give teachers more specific feedback herself. Her SFA coach helped improve instruction while also building the school’s capacity to sustain it.
Independent research reinforces this approach. In a meta-analysis of 60 causal studies, Matthew Kraft, David Blazar, and Dylan Hogan found meaningful effects of coaching on both instruction and student achievement. They also found smaller effects when coaching was taken to scale, a reminder that it’s not the title coach that produces results, but he focused, sustained, and actionable support connected to what teachers are being asked to do.
That’s a significant differentiator of SFA. Schools don’t receive a curriculum and then hope the strongest practices take hold. Or, to use Bob’s analogy, they aren’t give the parts of the lawnmower and expected to put it together in order to mow. Leaders and educators receive the support they need to make those practices consistent in classrooms and across the entire school consistently and reliably.
A system connects decisions that schools often make separately
As Nancy Madden has said, “Success doesn’t come from purchasing the right curriculum or technology, or identifying the right assessments or objectives.”
Those things matter. But none of them works in isolation. Schools create lasting improvement by connecting them around a shared goal.
A coherent system establishes what strong instruction looks like. Professional development introduces it. Coaching helps teachers refine it. Assessment shows whether students are learning. Regrouping and tutoring provide additional help before students fall further behind. Leaders protect the time, staffing, and follow-through that keep the pieces working together.
Consider what happens when an assessment shows that a child is not progressing. In a fragmented school, the result may be recorded, discussed, or handed to someone else. In a coherent system, the result sets a series of actions in motion. Someone notices. Instruction changes. Additional support begins. Classroom teaching and tutoring reinforce one another. The team looks again to see whether the response worked.
A reliable system doesn’t require every teacher to sound alike or abandon professional judgment. It turns research into consistent daily practice and gives teachers the freedom to respond to the children in front of them.
Without a common instructional foundation, “teacher autonomy” can become wide variation in what students experience. A child’s access to strong teaching shouldn’t depend on which classroom that child is assigned.
Shared routines, aligned materials, coaching, and collective attention to data establish a dependable floor. Teachers can then use their expertise where it matters most: noticing students, interpreting their responses, and adjusting instruction without having to build the entire structure alone.
The next questions for school leaders
School leaders should continue asking whether a practice is supported by evidence. But that cannot be the final question.
They should also ask:
- What must students be able to count on in every classroom?
- How will teachers see those practices modeled and have opportunities to rehearse them?
- Who will observe instruction and provide useful, timely feedback?
- What happens when the data show that a student is not learning?
- Are core instruction, intervention, assessment, and coaching reinforcing the same approach?
- Could a new teacher enter the school and understand how the pieces fit together?
These are implementation questions. Ultimately, they are also equity questions.
Good teaching takes more takes more than proven practices and strong intentions. It takes a system.