Slow Down to Speed Up: 7 Coaching Tips from Graham Fletcher
Graham Fletcher is a well-known math instructional coach — something I probably don’t need to tell you if you’re familiar with the world of math.
But what about us non-math folks? That’s what I wondered when I found out that a big-deal math guy was going to keynote the 2025 Coaching for Change Conference. Sure, that’s great if you want to learn math, but what could he teach the rest of us?
Turns out, the answer is, “A lot!”
Yes, Fletcher filled his address with math examples and anecdotes — he is a math guy, after all. But each example was:
- Easy to understand, even for the most math-illiterate among us.
- Packed with lessons that apply across all subjects.
In other words, Fletcher might be a mathematician, but his words added up to powerful insights for everyone in the room.
This post is the first in a series about the lessons I learned at the 2025 Coaching for Change Conference. And it makes sense to start at the beginning — a very good place to start — with the opening address.
Here are the seven lessons I learned from Graham Fletcher’s session, “Teaching on the Edge of Understanding and at the Speed of Lightning,” and how you can use those lessons in any classroom.
Lesson 1: Slow Down to Speed Up
Here are two things you should know about me before I get into this lesson:
- My sister had a pet turtle growing up. That thing was super slow, but once you put it on a path, it wasn’t going to waste time making a turn. It was going straight down that path.
- I currently have two rabbits, Audrey Hopbun and Fredra Asthare. They are so fast that when I try to catch them to take them to the vet, it’s like comedy hour with me chasing tiny bucking broncos. And also, they are going to run around and do whatever they want no matter what direction I want them to go.
“Speeding doesn’t get us where we want to go faster.”
Why do these things matter? In his speech, Fletcher showed a video of a real-life tortoise and hare race, and the tortoise won, which Fletcher said almost always was the result of these races. And I mentioned the above facts so that you would know I can firmly state as an expert on the topic that, yes, the tortoise will always beat the hare, whether that’s a Bugs Bunny reference or a real-life race.
So, now let’s talk about what this has to do with the world of instructional coaching: Learning isn’t a race. And even if it was, pushing students to move as fast as possible wouldn’t actually get them to the finish line — actual understanding of the material.
It would just have them running around in circles during lessons, finishing assignments without truly grasping the concepts.
As Fletcher put it, “Speeding doesn’t get us where we want to go faster.”
So, in your classroom, slow down and focus more on building understanding than on getting through as many lessons as possible. You may end up with a class full of turtles, but at least those turtles are all moving in the right direction.
Lesson 2: Embrace Productive Struggle
In the 2024-2025 season finale episode of the Class-Act Coaching Podcast, we talked a bit about the importance of giving students work that actually makes them use their brains and challenges them. In the episode, SREB’s Jason Adair mentioned that it is possible to over-teach kids by giving them too much information and not enough time to problem-solve and figure it out on their own. This is a sign of a lack of trust in the students, and it is not what anyone looking to practice good teacher efficacy wants to be doing.
This point was further highlighted in Fletcher’s speech.
He mentioned that teachers often put the difficult tasks, or what he referred to as “the really good tasks” until the end of the unit to use as a summative assessment of what they learned. But Fletcher suggested moving those same problems to the beginning of the unit. This allows students to demonstrate what they already know and where they need help. It also gives the instructor a barometer of student levels, which helps them to know where to differentiate the lessons.
Fletcher showed videos of a classroom filled with young students doing a fun but complex math problem – watching a speed jump roper for a short time, such as seven seconds, and figuring out how many jumps she did in a longer time, such as 35 seconds. Because the problem was interesting but challenging, the students got really into the assignment.
“When we come in with a really rich task and students build this intellectual need, and then we can differentiate back and get students caught back up to speed, that’s how we level the playing field and give access to really good tasks,” Fletcher said.
In other words, let the students (and teachers) struggle some. Let them use their intellect and figure out problem-solving methods. Then, once you see their thinking and problem-solving methods, you can help them grow in their understanding without doing the thinking for them.
Lesson 3: Use Complex Problems…and Make Them Engaging
From estimating the number of Skittles in a jar to counting speed jumps to figuring out where a billion goes on a number line of zero to a trillion (spoiler alert: it goes really close to the zero), Fletcher encouraged tasks that weren’t just about adding and subtracting, but focused more on thinking and problem solving. “So often what we do is we use narrow closed tasks that have convergent thinking,” he said. ”Really good tasks allow us to see where student thinking is so that we can differentiate and meet them as needed.”
All a closed task tells you is that a student can parrot (see Lesson 4 for more on this), but an open task shows you that a student can think and reflect.
Lesson 4: Prioritize Understanding Over Procedures
Have you ever seen a young child pretend to read before they actually know how to read? They have heard a book read to them so many times that they basically have it memorized.
It’s adorable to hear them “read” each page as if they are grown, seasoned readers. However, if you took that book from them and handed them another or tore out a page or two just to throw them off their game, they wouldn’t know what to do or they’d just keep on “reading” that first story even though it no longer applied.
This same thing can be applied to students. When you focus too much on procedures and steps, the student may memorize those steps and be able to repeat them back to you. When it comes to solving a math problem they’ve seen you solve already or reading a book they’ve heard before, students can parrot it back and perform the task .
However, switch up the assignment for something new but similar, and they just don’t get it.
Why?
Well, you focused on procedure over understanding. Students don’t need to memorize a bunch of formulas. They need to understand how the formula works and how they can transfer that knowledge to different problems.
“ Most of the time, students will mimic what we’ve taught them, and so we get a false positive that they have an understanding that they might not have,” Fletcher said. “It’s quickly learnt, it’s quickly forgotten.”
Putting more of a focus on the whys and asking students to explain their thinking and how they came to their conclusions can help students move from memorization to understanding and transfer.
Lesson 5: Reframe the Student Categorization Method
It is human nature to put things into categories in order to understand the world and how it works. We group without intentionally doing so, and the way we sometimes think of students is no different.
I remember being in school with the gifted kids, who were separated from the average kids, who were themselves classified differently than the below-average kids.
But as Fletcher said, who would want to have a meeting with a parent to discuss their low-level child?
Instead, Fletcher encouraged the room to shake up their classification system. There aren’t high and low students. There are students who are just a little bit farther along in their thinking process than others. Or, as Fletcher put it, “Every student is on the same progression. It’s just a matter of identifying and locating where their thinking is.”
They are all going down the same problem-solving path, and they are all going to get to the finish line, but some of them are just currently a little bit ahead.
As the teacher it is your job to make sure you help students progress in their thinking processes, whether they are still in the early stages of the process or they are already at the finish line. As an instructional coach, you can help support your teachers as they work through this new way of teaching.
Some of your teachers will grasp this concept quickly (advanced-stage thinkers) and some of them will struggle (early-stage thinkers), but with your support, they will get there in their own time.
Lesson 6: Be a Supportive Coach
Most of the lessons I pulled above could be directed at teachers instead of instructional coaches. However, this was a coaching conference, and at the heart of all these lessons are the instructional coaches who will bring those lessons back to their teachers and help them start developing this new way of teaching.
So it is fitting that I pull a lesson from Fletcher that goes directly to the coaches the lessons were meant to support. It can be hard for teachers to move away from process-based teaching to teaching in a way that uses true differentiation and moves students towards actual understanding at their own pace.
As an instructional coach, they need you there to support them through this process.
Here are two ways for you to do that:
- Have empathy for them: In the lesson, we did a series of problem-solving activities that Fletcher recommends using in the classroom. We struggled! He reminded us that just like we struggled through difficult tasks, so will students and so will the teachers moving towards that style of teaching. He encouraged coaches to keep that in perspective, telling us that “the next time that you get frustrated with a teacher that you’re supporting or serving…remember how much you sucked at putting a red ball on another one.”
- Help your teachers find ways to differentiate their teaching: Fletcher said that as instructional coaches, “We want to really push really good tasks and supporting teachers to use more formative instruction.” Help your teachers find ways to start moving their teaching towards the lessons stated above. Work with them to find good tasks and use those tasks to conduct formative assessments that can guide their differentiation methods.
Lesson 7: Have a Little Fun
I saved the most fun lesson for last: Have fun. School doesn’t need to be a party, but by creating engaging tasks that allow students to really think and explore, they will have more fun and grasp the material more.
As a coach, help your teachers find tasks that meet these goals.
Final Thoughts: More to Come
If the coaching conference had ended after Fletcher’s speech, I would have left having learned a lot. However, instead, it kept going for the two full days it was scheduled to run, which meant I got to go to a lot more sessions and learn even more about instructional coaching.
Follow along with me as I explore all of the lessons I learned at the conference, and sign up for our Promising Practices Newsletter and subscribe to our Class-Act Coaching podcast to to keep up with all of the teaching and instructional coaching insights from around SREB.